James Ellroy: The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction

Filmed on the fly in 1995 -- that is, before the movie version of his L.A. Confidential made him a household name -- James Ellroy: The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction is a chatty, padded, dead-pooch-boring documentary about the former petty-larcenist whose tales of institutional corruption and shaky redemption, with their meticulous, elliptical plots, gave the hardboiled crime genre a new, ahem, orifice. A hand-held camera follows Ellroy through his suburban childhood haunts: El Monte, where he lived with his floozy divorcée mom, and LA, where he went to live with his Hollywood bottom-feeder dad after his mom turned up strangled to death. But Ellroy has less to say about his upbringing -- and says it less eloquently -- than in his critically acclaimed memoir, My Dark Places, or in the interviews he gave thereafter. Next to the jazz-inflected rim-shot rhythms and clipped vernacular of his prose, he comes off here like a wet napkin. It's essentially 45 minutes of subpar interview turned into a 90-minute film. At the Brattle this Friday and Saturday, March 27 and 28.

-- Carly Carioli