Brian De Palma doesn't just know how to make a camera move, he can seduce it to do a sinuous dance. So The Black Dahlia looks and flows great, dripping with the 1940s crime-thriller atmosphere that James Ellroy described in his 1987 novel. On other levels — plot (overstuffed), suspense (muted), acting (Hilary Swank as a femme fatale? Please!), posing (Scarlett Johansson plays dress-up as a mini Lana Turner), sex (it's all before and after) — the movie is a bust. The setup is this: Two cops — Lee Blanchard (a strong Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (a hopeless Josh Hartnett) — become obsessed with the mutilation and murder of a let (Mia Kirshner). De Palma throws everything at the screen, but almost nothing sticks.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.