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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Obligatory Sin City review
You might have noticed the four-way Sin City reviews from the ACAPCWOVCCAOE (Mike and Dorian have posted theirs, Tom's is forthcoming as of this writing). It feels sort of like those promotions where four different comics can have their covers connect into one big picture. Except this picture includes trailers for Revenge of the Who Cares Anymore and a guy loudly snoring behind you.
Sin City is a film that revels in being over-the-top, and in that it certainly has captured the aesthetic Miller likes to bring to his work. Seeing images you've read in a comic book recreated perfectly on a big screen, and knowing they are playing on big screens all over the country, is a really weird feeling. It's as if Robert Rodriguez wanted to tell everybody about these great comics he's read and used his ability as a somewhat-successful filmmaker to do that on a wide scale. With that he created a film that showed us what would happen if you took the films Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep, put them on a ton of steroids and then had them play a billion violent video games. Almost everything is played to “11” here be it the sex, the violence or the visuals. I liked it.
The movie, and the books, get so over-the-top they reach into the bizarre. That's when I felt the movie was at its best. Scenes like Benicio Del Toro's pez dispenser-esque head speaking to Clive Owen or the Yellow Bastard whipping Jessica Alba with his belly showing are incredibly grotesque but in this case they don't feel like they violate what the film is going for but instead are the best representations of what it is about. The resulting effect of watching the whole two hours and six minute film is overwhelming but if you like this kind of thing (and I am one of those people who do) it is pleasing.
Seeing Miller’s beautifully crafted violence on screen was something I found to be a real treat. The gusto that the filmmakers went with images such as Bruce Willis tearing off Nick Stahl’s genitals, Mickey Rourke dragging a person from a car’s driver seat or pretty much all of “The Big Fat Kill” I found to be infectious. They brought many a smile to my face and warmed my black little heart. The scenes of horrific carnage are crammed next to scenes of beautiful movie making. The first one to take my breath away was the shadow hanging over the 11-year-old Nancy. It looked like the film noir scene we were all promised but never got. Seeing Willis walking through that forest on the way to the Roark farm proved to me that digital filmmaking is a worthy enough successor to what has come before. Willis also stars in that wonderful scene of him in that giant cage, something I was very glad to see translated well into the movie.
The film’s hurts the most in the acting department. Rodriguez and Miller cranked everything else to top volume but it seems some of the players didn’t reach as far as they needed to go. Stahl and Powers Boothe were the actors in “That Yellow Bastard” who accomplished the most with the material because really sunk their teeth into it. Unfortunately they were not the stars of the sequence which hurt the last third of the film a lot. Willis had a difficult role because he was meant to be a beaten down, sullen guy and that can’t be easy to go all out with. Unfortunately I don’t feel he quite beat that challenge. I agree with Dorian that Rosario Dawson was great because she was having a lot of fun. The final image of her smiling a wolf’s smile while firing an Uzi was one of the most enjoyable images I’ve seen in the movies all year. The real stand out was Rourke as Marv. The make-up did look a bit odd (the chin in particular first reminded me of a Jay Leno caricature) but between his voice and demeanor he sold it so well it stopped bothering me. By the time he’s in the electric chair and is asking the authorities “is that the best you got?” I believed he was the badass he was playing.
Sin City is a really good film but one not without its flaws. The curse of the anthology strikes again (some parts outshining others), in this case very hard because the last sequence was the weakest. When it comes out on DVD I’ll give it a rent and maybe buy it if I find it real cheap, but that’s about it. I like what Rodriguez and Miller accomplished but let’s hope this doesn’t starts a trend where all comic book adaptations are this faithful. I’ve already scared myself with images of Bob Layton on set for the Iron Man film shouting “he’s got to be drunker, drunker!!”
I do predict a cottage industry of psychological examinations of this film, though. You can’t have a movie where every five seconds you’re either seeing a penis be mutilated, a woman in scantily clad clothing or both at the same time and not except wave after wave of sophomores to come up the same idea of their “Sexual Fears in Popular Culture” essays.
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