Sin CityThese days, comic book movies are everywhere. Not surprising, really, since comic books have consistently matured as a storytelling medium, inviting to more and more audiences, a hybrid of visual artistry and engaging narrative when done right. One of that mediums most beloved masters is Frank Miller, a progenitor of the graphic novel as a way to tell mature stories for adults about people facing intense trials and with grit and raw strength and striking presentation. Among his varied and exquisite body of work is Sin City, adapted for the screen alongside Robert Rodriguez and a highly talented accompaniment; the result is arresting.
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Looking through the trade collections of the Sin City series, you're exposed to the shattering brutality and energy of Frank Miller's art, armed with his characters' dialogue and narration that is tough and pulpy, right out of a film noir. So when the series was adapted for the silver screen, it was as though the noir influence was coming full circle. Framed--"shot and cut", as Robert Rogriguez credits--in the same fashion as the graphic novel, the film also shares the kind of intense light and shade of that distinct film style. More than just visual panache, Sin City also is composed of lines which feel at home in a classic tale of betrayal and murder, of cops and crooks, of women of the night and lurking, yellow bastards. Superficially, so many of these lines would elicit chuckles for their ridiculousness and outright hammy-ness; but in Sin City, those lines find a home which makes them come alive like they could not in a movie which had delusions of realism. Sin City has no confusion about being a slice of something outside of reality, because these stories are bigger than our reality would allow; our world just couldn't take larger-than-life characters like Marv (Mickey Rourke), a behemoth who seems to take bullet after bullet, savagely beats up the hitmen and crooked cops without stopping--a maniac, but one on a crusade for justice that no one else could bring for a woman who was nice to him once. Lines like, "she smells how angels oughta smell" and "kill'em for me, Marv...kill'em good" can only succeed here, where the rules don't apply, unless you count the rules the film has made for itself, in which case it's playing them just fine. Sin City has a gutsy, macho kind of glory to its violence, but does so with a self-aware knowledge, as though it liked knowing it's indulging in something rough and dirty. There's that perfect--almost incompatible--combination of the great noir classics by the likes of Billy Wilder and Carol Reed, combined with the wild and furious action of guys like William Friedkin and even the kind of splattery horror-comedy of fellows like John Landis all rolled into the mix. This role call of filmmakers is meant to illustrate that the efforts of film-buff auteurs like Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller--and also guest director Quentin Tarantino--wear their inspiration in Sin City's craft on their sleeve, surely to the appreciation of their fellow film fans in the audience.
As a film that is much like a collage of some of cinema's defining genres, Sin City plays host to a full cast of characters which would not be out of place in a "greatest hits" anthology of film's archetypes. That is not to say that they are not well-defined, but they do feel as though they were plucked or assembled from the classics, superimposed into the story, because "why not"? Sin City is an homage; but not content to simply ape the classics and regurgitate those tropes, the film takes them back, rebuilds them, makes them new and shiny like freshly-polished chrome again. Aside from just Marv, there is "The Salesman/The Man" (Josh Hartnett), a suave and handsome, clean-cut gentleman introducing us to the film, describing a beautiful blonde out on the ledge of some fancy uptown party. His character always seems to remind me of Dana Andrews from Laura, but I'm sure he--like the many other incarnations of some of film's biggest and brightest characters--remind viewers of many different stars of yore. Bruce Willis makes another stunning turn in the film as a tormented hero, Detective John Hartigan, a good cop in a town gone bad. His casting is savvy, since he has a history of exemplifying great action stars, and here he steps into a character which could easily be a two-dimensional "two days from retirement"-type, "going out with a bang", et al--Hartigan actually does say this line, though. But Willis is a smart and highly-skilled actor, who understands the role so well that he balances that tightrope effortlessly between making the character genuinely come alive and being cognizant of the overall tone of the piece; how else can you still take the character seriously after a line like "there's wrong and there's wrong and there's this"? Jessica Alba made waves with her portrayal of Nancy Callahan--the girl who Hartigan protected many years prior from a sex criminal--no doubt due in part to her erotically charged, exotic dancing sequence in the film, but I've always thought that what she brought to Nancy's adoration of Hartigan, which grows from admiration to affection, was something very familiar, like there were real echoes of Barbara Stanwyck, or--even more--Lana Turner in her kind of radiance on the screen. There's more to Sin City than just salvaging the past, but that's also like saying there's more to fajitas than just meat and peppers; these references to the building blocks of the film give it the spice, invoking something both familiar and polished new. The excitement in Sin City is in that combination of the familiar and the exaggerated, like its glorious and rough roots.
Recommended for: Fans of the great, punchy action and loaded, gutsy dialogue of the tough detective serials, film noir, those action gems of yore, but with a cool, sharp look which gives it both a classic and fresh feel all at once.
As a film that is much like a collage of some of cinema's defining genres, Sin City plays host to a full cast of characters which would not be out of place in a "greatest hits" anthology of film's archetypes. That is not to say that they are not well-defined, but they do feel as though they were plucked or assembled from the classics, superimposed into the story, because "why not"? Sin City is an homage; but not content to simply ape the classics and regurgitate those tropes, the film takes them back, rebuilds them, makes them new and shiny like freshly-polished chrome again. Aside from just Marv, there is "The Salesman/The Man" (Josh Hartnett), a suave and handsome, clean-cut gentleman introducing us to the film, describing a beautiful blonde out on the ledge of some fancy uptown party. His character always seems to remind me of Dana Andrews from Laura, but I'm sure he--like the many other incarnations of some of film's biggest and brightest characters--remind viewers of many different stars of yore. Bruce Willis makes another stunning turn in the film as a tormented hero, Detective John Hartigan, a good cop in a town gone bad. His casting is savvy, since he has a history of exemplifying great action stars, and here he steps into a character which could easily be a two-dimensional "two days from retirement"-type, "going out with a bang", et al--Hartigan actually does say this line, though. But Willis is a smart and highly-skilled actor, who understands the role so well that he balances that tightrope effortlessly between making the character genuinely come alive and being cognizant of the overall tone of the piece; how else can you still take the character seriously after a line like "there's wrong and there's wrong and there's this"? Jessica Alba made waves with her portrayal of Nancy Callahan--the girl who Hartigan protected many years prior from a sex criminal--no doubt due in part to her erotically charged, exotic dancing sequence in the film, but I've always thought that what she brought to Nancy's adoration of Hartigan, which grows from admiration to affection, was something very familiar, like there were real echoes of Barbara Stanwyck, or--even more--Lana Turner in her kind of radiance on the screen. There's more to Sin City than just salvaging the past, but that's also like saying there's more to fajitas than just meat and peppers; these references to the building blocks of the film give it the spice, invoking something both familiar and polished new. The excitement in Sin City is in that combination of the familiar and the exaggerated, like its glorious and rough roots.
Recommended for: Fans of the great, punchy action and loaded, gutsy dialogue of the tough detective serials, film noir, those action gems of yore, but with a cool, sharp look which gives it both a classic and fresh feel all at once.