Attended an advance screening of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City last night & still digesting the two-hour barrage of ultra-violence, hardboiled hokum and vanguard visuals. This flick is so over-the-top in spots that uncalculated humor seems the only natural response. Several of the scenes are categorically guaranteed to elicit the squint-eyed wince or the teeth-gritted cringe in the viewer. The co-directors toss in turgid boilerplate from an impressive array of sources Tarantino-style, fermenting it down to frothy porridge in a cauldron of hi-tech thaumaturgy that is completely unapologetic in its embrace of misogyny, sadism and meretriciousness. A bullet-stopping badge; a conscientious cop’s fateful last day on the force; femme fatales by the flock-ful; archfiend adversaries blessed with above-the-law power and protection; an anti-hero gleefully-engineered to trump all anti-heroes- all are ensconced in a rain soaked cityscape still drowning in moral filth and swill despite the perpetual cleansing downpour from above.
It’s as if the prime directive is to shave both characters and narrative down to the most substratal and single-minded marrow then amplify these core elements in the most caricatural fashions. The women are voluptuous and ineluctable, the men stoic and leather-faced. The stilted metaphor-pregnant dialogue, at times seemingly lifted wholesale form a vintage Paul Cain novel, further pads the surfeit. Then there’s Rodriguez’s signature kinetic directorial style that ramps the action and impact to an even more overblown pitch. The audience barely has a chance to catch their breath before they’re socked in the collective chops by yet another scene of garish brutality. But somehow the majority of it goes down rousingly and the entertainment quotient remains high. Don’t want to divulge too much of the plot (which, if you’ve read the comics sticks to the content of the acid-free pages nearly to the letter and panel), but I am very curious to learn what others think of this most scrupulous transfer of print art to celluloid. The flick opens wide tomorrow, April 1st.
Posted by derek on March 31, 2005 5:31 AMThis is going to be a netflix investment at most and only that because it has the beautiful devin aoki in it. All movies that are terrible should cast nothing but models.
Posted by: salt at March 31, 2005 11:35 AM"All movies that are terrible should cast nothing but models."
I think I'm going to have to take this proclamation with a proverbial grain of salt.
Posted by: Narew Ramsh at March 31, 2005 7:47 PMSaw it at 11 AM EST. Went to one of those digital projection theaters to get the full benefit of the visuals. It was worth it on that score, but as a movie, it should have stayed a comic book.
Mickey Rourke gives a career-resuscitating performance, but shit, he does that every second or third movie he's in these days (he was the best thing about The Pledge and the dogshit Stallone remake of Get Carter), and still nobody cares. Oh, well, at least he's not Eric Roberts, reduced to music videos (he's currently the heavy in clips by the Killers and Mariah Carey, and if you tune into MTV at the right time you can catch 'em back to back). I liked Clive Owen much better last night, when I watched the DVD of Closer. Willis - eh. And Jessica Alba's appeal is totally lost on me - I much prefer Carla Gugino.
The violence was too over-the-top, and I say that as someone who owns the special edition DVD of Day Of The Dead. There's a difference between splatter and snuff, and this movie goes over the line, whether the blood is red, white or yellow.
I guess it's a moderately interesting technical achievement, though there have been two Star Wars movies and Sky Captain before it (not to mention Tron). But at bottom, I think, like every other Rodriguez movie, this is lots of hype and a few nuggets of substance...not enough, though.
Posted by: Phil at April 1, 2005 12:47 PMIf you've read the comic books, and perhaps even if you haven't, there is nothing to be gained from seeing this movie.
It is as if there is some natural hierarchy of media, with film at the top, so that the ultimate justice a person can do to a story is make it into a movie. And that becomes the definitive telling of that story. As if every novel, play, comic book, television show, video game, theme park ride and souvenir snow globe is really a screenplay in disguise. They're just dying to be made into films, and existed in their initial incarnation only because they lacked big Hollywood studio funding.
Sin City is a comic book. That is what it was meant to be. Its appeal cannot translate into film. Looking a beautifully drawn, highly abstracted, still images of extreme violence is different from having to sit and look up at moving images of real people committing the exact same acts. This is, in fact, why no comic book movies work. The illusion of film is that you are watching the recording of an event that actually happened, in reality, in front of this camera. You're looking at real people. While we may buy into the world of the Hulk when we read the comic book, on screen it's just silly.
Also: apparently I read comic books slower that Robert Rodriguez does. The pacing of this film felt way off.
william, your comment on movies as the pinnacle of entertainment is a notion I have often expressed. Nice to see it put so well. I had to bring this up the most during the three years that I refused to see the Jackson LotR. In my mind that story already existed in its ultimate form and any retelling of it would be a lesser form of the story. More on the subject matter at hand, I've often spoken against a Watchman movie, as that story also have been told in its ultimate form. If people don't wish to expend the effort to read, then they just are going to miss some good stuff.
Posted by: hatta at April 3, 2005 2:41 PMI agree. Nothing could be more blasphemous than a film adaptation of Watchmen. It is our masterpiece (--speaking for all comic nerds). More importantly, it is ABOUT comics; that is why it is a comic book. It is still, arguably, the first, and most important revisionist superhero narrative. There isn't a long enough history of superheroes in film for a Watchmen movie to make sense. It'd be more inappropriate than dancing about architecture.
Why can't anyone write an original screenplay anymore? Go see a movie in a theater and count how many of the films advertised beforehand are adapted from some other medium, or are remakes or sequels. It's approaching 100%. We have an epic brawl over the so-called death of jazz, but nobody is worried about the death of film.
Posted by: William Hutson at April 3, 2005 7:12 PMWilliam Hutson: "Why can't anyone write an original screenplay anymore? Go see a movie in a theater and count how many of the films advertised beforehand are adapted from some other medium, or are remakes or sequels. It's approaching 100%. We have an epic brawl over the so-called death of jazz, but nobody is worried about the death of film."
as someone who's had a little experience in the industry, it's pretty easy to determine why this is, and in fact it's been well documented and has even had films made about this problem (ie; Altman's The Player). At some point in the 80's, the studios turned over most their decision making positions to MBAs. If you've ever spent five minutes with one of these people called Creative Executives, you'd know why film is dead.
“There’s a difference between splatter and snuff…”
Curious what the difference is. I’m thankfully pretty naïve when it comes to “snuff”, but don’t think I’d classify SC under that header. The violence is stylized and while gratuitous to the point of self-parody, it’s not nearly as disturbing as say I Spit on Your Grave. or Cannibal Holocaust. Oddly enough, the whole production reminded me a little of Dogville, sans the pedantic subtext and with truckloads of gore piled on. Both films are saddled with wincingly wooden dialogue & a hyperbolic view of Americana, both are over-long, & both take minimalist props/scenery to illogical extremes.
Phil, I’m with you on the Stallone pillaging of Get Carter, a travesty.
“If you've read the comic books, and perhaps even if you haven't, there is nothing to be gained from seeing this movie. [Their] appeal cannot translate to film.”
Count me as a dissenter to these statements. I’ve read the comix and still feel as if I gained something from the movie. It’s flawed in many of the ways mentioned so far, but I still derived entertainment from it. Good point about the jacked-up pacing though & I agree that the graphic novels are far superior to their filmic approximations.
Re: The Watchmen- superb comic book, but if a cinematic adaptation got green-lighted I’d see it, assuming it was done right by my subjective reckoning.
Another interesting (if somewhat simplified) film covering the studio transition Adam speaks of is A Decade Under the Influence, sort of a Cliffs Notes version of the accelerated atrophy of 70s creativity into 80s Blockbuster mania.
Posted by: derek at April 4, 2005 2:52 PMPhil:
"Oh, well, at least he's not Eric Roberts, reduced to music videos (he's currently the heavy in clips by the Killers and Mariah Carey, and if you tune into MTV at the right time you can catch 'em back to back)."
Amazingly, I experienced it for the first time mere hours after reading this. Except that it was on French music channel MCM (but on a show called "Le Hit US") and the two videos were separated by Will Smith's "Switch." But still.
Mariah: good until the piano comes in.
The Killers: not as catchy as "Somebody told me"
Will Smith: gotta love the gratuitous underwear shots in "I, Robot"
Sin City: like the comics, seems like I'll be waiting for the DVD
smirtsol?
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