omggggggggggggg i love it when deniro is playing well intentioned and smart. she was a cracked out bitch who did him wrong and he STILL tried to love her. then he was like, you know what, fuck you bitch. lollllllllll.

casino was 1,456,893,556,700 x better than people made it out to be.

im so in love with him in that movie. but its not news that you and i differ on deniro

ginger's arc was.....there was no arc, really.lol. she started out a self obsessed greedy druggie and then...she just got druggier.lol. her character, in storytelling terms (im not talking the real life situation) was simply a test for ace, one of his many obstacles. shit got worse, ginger got worse. the whole question from the VERY beginning of the film is- does ace survive? does he survive the carbomb, the business, his associates and..does he survive ginger? yes to all of the above.

if she had been the character assigned "question", she would have been more interesting, but she wasn't. she was ace's cracked out wife on a direct descending path, i really saw her as nothing else but that. she was never likeable at any point, she hardly showed an true evidence that she was anything but a psychotic hurricane that ace had to get through..

I realize all this but still I like her best-

No one has answered my question yet

SPOILERS AHEAD





ok, so I couldn't take it anymore and I skipped to the last pages and I think I got to the end. Some guy called Georgie was blackmailing the Sprague family because he saw them doing the porn film and demanded a "date" with Betty, that's when he killed her, and he was some sort of freak (predictable and contrived) and obviously the family hid it and somehow buckey finds his place and he attacks him and bucky kills him(double predictable and contrived) and I guess that was it.

Why did I buy this book?? I should've known better. Crime novels are so formulaic, they are ALWAYS the same, hero finds who killed the helpless girl and then killer attacks him and he kills killer. The only thing that changes is the setting and the characters how lame.

I was put off by Ellroy's writing, so it wasn't interesting enough for me to read it just to get to those few facts.

It's weird because I felt really guilty to not read it all but it was so boring and then when I found out the ending, please, it wasn't worth it to put up with the macho testosterone filled xenophobic homophobic and sexist writting. It was the same rehashed ending that appears on 10 million crime novels. Now I don't feel so guilty by not reading it. Fuck that book. All it hurts me is that I spent 7 dollars on it, at least it wasn't so expensive. I don't care for the movie either.

Did I missed something from the ending?? Or that pretty much was it?? if I missed something please tell me.

The problem is something you just don’t get in general – the concept of taste and individual preference. You constantly tell people they’re stupid or whatever if they don’t like the same things you like, and then when you try something you’ve heard good things about but don’t enjoy, you start begging people to tell you what you’re missing, as though you think your copy was minus a page that had The Key to The Greatness on it. What is it you think people are going to tell you that will change your opinion about a book you’re reading? Some background about LA might be helpful for Ellroy, but why should you read Ellroy if you don’t like him? The fact that you don’t like his writing doesn’t mean it’s not any good – it doesn’t even mean you’re dumb for not getting it (it does mean you’re an asshole if you decide to insist that everyone who likes Ellroy is an idiot, which based on your past work, is something you’d say). It just means you don’t like it. Everybody doesn’t like everything. If you could grasp that concept, you’d be a lot less annoying.

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I got it ok?? I was asking about the plot, is there a twist I missed?? I think not.

it's based on a true story, you mule. fucking look it up.

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FUCK YOU BITCH, I know a lot about the real Dahlia case and you see NOTHING of that in Ellroy's novel so fuck you.

simmer down, muchacho.

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It's a novel that really sort of more takes off from the real case than novelizes it, so looking up what happened wouldn't be of any use. Oddly - or not, considering the book is written by an LA native who fixated on the case as an unconscious substitute for dealing with his own mother's murder, back when the Dahlia case wasn't that long ago - the thing that is accurate is the racist/xenophobic/homophobic/ sexist atmosphere. What else would the LAPD have been in the 40s?

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oh i know, i was just egging senor douchebag along.

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well there really isn't anything real about the novel, I mean he portrayed Elizabeth as a complete whore and what can be more predictable than that??? it's his way of telling us she deserved it, when it fact nothing can be further from the truth. She was not a prostitute, she didn't do porn movies, she was a normal girl who suppossedly(because even that is uncertain) wanted to be an actress, I mean c'mon.

I haven't read anything else on Ellroy, so maybe I'd like his other work but this novel doesn't really step away from the same old rehashed crime novel formula of "macho police detective investigates the murder(s) of low life shaddy victim(s), the worst of the worst human beings, finds the killer who must always be a deformed freak, fights with him and then he or someone else kills the killer" and that's it!!! all crime novels are like that, all that changes is the setting and some circumstances. The writing didn't grab me enough for me to read 300 pages just to get to the same old conclusion of almost all crime novels. It has got to be the most boring and contrived literary genre there is.

I enjoyed The Alienist very much because the writinig interesting, it had a huge hook, you get to the first murder on the first chapter, as opposed to the Dhalia where the body is found on chapter 9 or something, and the novel just grabs you. I couldn't put it down, and it's the same formula, deformed freak is killing young prostitute boys(again, victims who are inmoral or "dark" members of society) and when they find the killer the killed him, bla- But at least it was gripping. ugghh I hated the dahlia.

omg I just saw a real picture of the dahlia's face, how horible.

Wouldn't whether she was a whore meant she deserved it depend on how one felt about whores?

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no, I don't think so. My point is that it's a stereotypical thing. I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking in general, about the stereotype. I mean a woman who is a hustler, a liar, a whore, she's just out there prowling the streets for money and food and sex or whatever, who lives in the gutter, a gold digger, is not the most sympathetic human being and doesn't rank way up there in the social rank, and she's making porno films, he's implying that it was just a matter of time before she got killed or something bad happened to her. And since she's such an unsympathetic character, it's not like we are really going to care.

She doesn't portray her as really being a person, she's just a caricature, a corpse if you will, whatever. He makes it a point for us not to like the victim. And it's a constant in crime novels. the victims are the low life people living in the gutter, the queers, the blacks, the loose women and the prostitutes, ugghgh how fucking MACHO and stereotypical alpha white male bullshit. It's some sort of superiority thing. The victim is never the straight white male. It's not even the black male. It's always the floozy or the queer, the "second class citizens".

Its' like the Alienist, the victims were teenage male gay prostitutes. Who cares about them right??


Do you get my point?? I'm not sure if I'm on to something and making it come across.

I'm familiar with the stereotype, but it was already firmly attached to the Dahlia before this book.

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I'm not taking exclusively about elizabeth short, I'm talking about the general formula of crime novels that Ellroy simply tapped into.

I have a cousin who is a writer and he also uses the formula. except his victims are not prostitutes or homsexuales but you can sure bet the "killer meets hero, hero kills killer" ending is there. And I JUST Thoguht to myself, isn't there another way???? and I tried to come up with a different ending to a crime saga, and I really couldn't