DUDE, SIN CITY WAS GREAT!

plus, they thanked all the golden & silver age comic artists at the end of the credits. You don't see "Neal Adams" referenced much anymore...

oh man, now i have even more reason to see this.

I love Brittany Murphy, though.

Probably catch it next weekend here.

Back in early '94 or so, I used a light box and black fabric paint to make a t-shirt of the "when you've got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine" panel. I wore it at the San Diego con that year and it gave Miller a small chuckle. I wonder if I still have it somewhere.

Really, the last third in particular had me questioning my never-walk-out-of-a-movie rule. The whole thing was just draggy, repetitive, interminable nonsense. It wasn't the worst film I've ever seen, but it was not good at all. I wanted to like it so much, too! Stood in line for an hour to see this bitch.

I was very torn by this movie. On the one hand: totally gorgeous looking, fantastically complete and immersive visual world, non-stop action, well edited, thoroughly "entertaining", fun fun fun. So it totally works at being what it's trying to be, which is a film adaptation of a comic book. So it's not as if it's a failure, and the reviews which allege that it is too violent clearly just don't get the horror/comic book context, nor do I buy the idea that it's ultimately "dull" because it's so focused. So on all those fronts, it's a great film as an experience for the eyes and ears. On the other hand: what we have is a film adapatation of a comic book adaptation of noir as a template, so this triple amplified chain of exaggerrating something that was an exaggerration of something that was already very crude becomes very dodgy in relation to gender and how "maleness" and "femaleness" get visually realized and scripted. I found it a kind of embarassing reductio ad absurdum of cartoon lovin' fanboy heterosexual male desire: hookers (with hearts of gold!) innocent wittle schoolgirls (that you get to watch grow up just enough so that you can fuck them! and when you do it's because THEY PUSH THEMSELVES ON YOU! yeah that happens ALL the time!) ie. there's this fucked up centrifugal engine at work in which women are desirable yet continually the objects of extremely sadistic violent energies- the plots try to resolve this thorugh splitting- there is the "evil psychopath" who incarnates the direct sexual sadism (the bad guys) and then there are the good guys who as vigilante figures outside the law etc. just go out and seek to do good in the name of the ladies they love (the absent "good" women who sit on the sidelines and suffer, and look awfully good as they suffer) which makes them laughably improbable and corny, and the whole thing, when viewed coldly and dispassionately, looks pretty sad, a pure distillation of adolescent flight from what sex is like, what interactions between men and women are like, the compromises and shadings of, um, actual human people. So yes the picture succeeds at being a gorgeous comic book, but in the process the intensely adult precision of its art direction and focus reveals very clearly that it was made by people who know that these plotlines and characters are utterly flat and clichéd which means that you have a creeping sensation of void or flight that washes over you.

To put it another way: The question for Rosario isn't "omg, you played a prostitute, that must have been hard, eh?" but "geeze isn't it corny that somebody is so out of touch with what an actual prostitute's life is like that they when they stage a gang of prostitutes they basically look like Tekken fighters as dressed by Hot Topic?". I know the knee jerk response is Dude, it's a comic book what do you expect? to which I would reply "the plot of your comic book makes the way you think about women and the way you think about yourself extremely obvious, and the relentless violence of that vision and the virgin/whore clichés that drive your fantasies seem really obvious and worn-out".

Everybody BUT me seemed to love it, and I was kind of sad that I couldn't feel the same way. When you take away the movie's relation/debt to its source material, it seemed like so much wank-fodder for the CRWs of this world. It was just adolescent in a really terrible way, and I say this as a married man in his mid-to-late 20s who has a stack of comic books on his nightstand and has spent most of the morning falling off of a skateboard.

I totally give credit for the film for getting that comic book interior monologue thing down, but yet this also made for an incredibly dull film. I just failed to find entertainment in being treated to image after image of ACTION paired with that utterly relentless voiceover. Any drama/tension in the film just seemed to come from the voiceover or occasionally an ironic interplay between voiceover and image that seemed very one-note after half an hour. I have just never felt so passive and fidgety while watching an action film, couldn't engage with it at all.

Well, to be fair it IS an incredibly dull comicbook. Airtube's criticisms upthread are exactly why I think Miller shouldn't be a writer at all. I love the way he draws, especially in Sin City, but that's all the goddamn thing has going for it. I won't be seing this movie.

anyway yeah, i think porn really is the standard of comparison here. and i have kind of glaring incomprehension/complex about porn, so it makes sense that i didn't get into this movie too much.

i haven't read this particular set of miller comics so i don't know if it's sort of self-parodic itself.... "dark knight" is certainly, despite some satire and moments of mordant humor, pretty self-serious and "intense."

what's up with the IRAesque terrorists in this movie? they should have thrown in some digs at the italians and the poles too, just to round out the whole anti-catholic theme.

... the story was just a skeleton on which to hang the visuals and the sex and inventive violence.

xpost

all of which suggests that she is on a level with the men in the movie.

it's never clear whether this is actually true or whether she's lying to rosario to make her choices seem more defensible.

it was good when it was funny, ie when it was auto-parodic. but it didn't feel that 'strange': all the digital jiggery-pokery went to far towards recreating a fairly conventional film. i wanted something more jagged and comic-booky.

Are people REALLY not seeing the intentional symmetry between Hartigan and Yellow Bastard (esp. wrt to the entire theme of child abuse that the vignette revolves around)?

i'm afraid i'm not. really liked the rourke chapter, was a bit put off by clive and benicio's centre-partings, but the willis/alba thing was a let down.

also: i wish the stories really had intertwined. in fact all you got was brief cameos of characters from one chapter in another.

Except of course no one is saying this.

well, they're saying something like it.

that said the gilmore girls girl is really hot in this

hm...

Anyways from a purely aesthetic point (which is mostly how i watched this, as well as from an action-movie-camp view) it was gorgeous. The music was kind of silly but i love love love the visual style, especially the silhouette scenes. And that bit with the kid with the glasses was spooky, I loved it.

*The first episode: this was the biggest disapppointment. Marv is the most interesting character in the Sin City comics, and the first story probably made the biggest impact on anyone who read it at the time (after that, Sin City has been a case of diminishing returns), so he he should've gotten a better treatment. Mickey Rourke was perfect as Marv, and there's nothing wrong with how the story was presented visually, but it was simply too short! Rodriguez got through the whole intricate plot with a lightning pace, and there was simply no space to breath. For example, the scene where Marv walks through the rain took several pages in the comic, and really worked as a breather between all the action scenes, but in the movie it was over in two minutes. Similarly, much as liked the choice of casting Elijah Wood as the psycho cannibal, the scenes with him were so short his character have the same sort of creepy quality as in the comic. I have no idea why Rodriguez thought he could fit three Sin City stories in a two-hour movie: he should've filmed only two of them, or even better, just make a 90-minute film of the Marv story with significantly slower pace.

*The second episode: this was probably the strongest of the three episodes, which is kinda funny, because in comic form the other two are better. The story in this one was rather simple, which gave Rodriguez more space to focus on individual scenes. Dwight wasn't as memorable a protagonist as Marv or Hartigan, but it was the supporting cast that made the story. Benicio del Toro really shone here: the scene with Jackie-Boy and Dwight in the car was one of the movie's highlights. Miho is kinda irritatingly clichéd character in the comics, but she worked better on film, probably because she was shown less. The scene where Dwight was drowning into the tar pit was extremely effective, I loved the use of invert silhouettes, just like in the comic.

*The third episode: this was kind of a mixed bag. Right until the hanging scene the story worked well, but the final confrontation was kinda flat (this applies to the comic as well). Bruce Willis didn't look like a he was almost 70, as he was supposed to have been (in the beginning his character was "pushing sixty", and the he spent 8 years in prison). The decision to make the Yellow Bastard look exactly like in the comic was a wrong one. In a comic you can accept a "real" person turning into that, but in a film, even a film as stylized as this one, no way. I just kept staring at the guy's make up.

(More general comments to follow...)

*The film had too much inner monologue, even for a hyper-noir it was. Rodriguez seemed to have felt compelled to put every damn line Miller ever wrote on screen, which was a mistake. Inner monologue works better in a comic, because you can follow a comic in your pace - read the text, look at pictures, notice the juxtaposition between the two. Film, by it's very nature, dictates it's pace for the viewer; therefore, too much info in both visual and verbal form at the same time make a movie seem rushed. The monologue definitely added to the feeling of two much speed Sin City had. Again, the second episode was the strongest in this regard, because it had the least monologue.

*The colour schemes were used a bit too randomly. I would've expected them to carry sort of a significance, like with the yellow guy, but Rodriguez seemingly used them whenever he though it would be cool. I loved the idea that Goldie was the only person in the film to be shown in full colour though, and the scene in the prison where Marv mixes Wendy with Goldie was brilliant.

they do:

http://www.animatedbliss.com/images/DVD/Spawn/spawn_season-02.jpg

http://www.glynnis.net/voices/images/maxtalk.gif

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/sroberts/images/spiderfriends.jpg

http://www.100megspop3.com/scottororo/gallery/Scottcartoon/cartoon11.jpg

'Sin City' Sequel Waiting for Jolie

Actress Rosario Dawson has confirmed reports Angelina Jolie will be signing on for the sequel to Sin City and production on the film is on hold while the star is pregnant. Jolie is currently expecting a baby with Brad Pitt, but is eager to co-star with Dawson, who will reprise her part as rogue hooker Gail in the movie. The Mr. And Mrs. Smith star is rumored to be playing the role of "A Dame To Kill For" in the next installment of the film. Dawson says, "The film's kind of been postponed because Robert (Rodriguez, the director) has been interested in Angelina Jolie for the lead. But she's very pregnant right now. So that's putting an understandable hold on the film." The second film will be based on Frank Miller's graphic novel stories "A Dame to Kill For" and "Lost, Lonely and Lethal," according to website, moviehole.net.

Ah, entertainment news; some of the best sourcing of any journalism anywhere.

LOOK OUT, SHE'S GONNA BLOOOOWWWWW!!!

"Rumble Fish" is on and the cinematography is such the better, original version of the adaptation of That Yellow Bastard. Only based on S.E. Hinton young adult book not a Frank Miller graphic novel. EVERYONE was in this movie. Also Klark Kent soundtrack tune.

I loved Robert Rodriguez's movie too.