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April 14, 2005

Torture-People-Until-They-Talk City

In which I admit that I'm something of a sucker for revenge fantasies with lots of special effects; that is, I really liked Sin City

Way back when, the first time Hollywood decided that it was a good idea to make big-budget movies based on comic books, the challenge seemed to be translating the universe created within the comic book into a familiar (and filmable) reality. How do we make Superman look like he's flying through a real city? What do the Daily Planet offices look like? (Mostly like a cube farm in a New York office.) The next time through, they riffed on the comic book world a bit more, and allowed it to inspire a creepier take on reality -- and it was cool. Batman's Gotham was the twisted, haunted-house version of New York.

Cheap digital effects and the realization that comic-book stories and themes tend to resonate with the core multiplex customer (teenaged boys) have given us a whole slew of comic-book-inspired movies over the past ten years: some good, some not so good. What most had in common, though, was a license to interpret their setting through the lens of a comic-book. Spiderman, X-Men, Hellboy, Hulk, and Men in Black all gave us worlds that looked roughly like our own, but with riffs and twists that made them just a smidge more fanciful and magical -- a little more comic-y. These films, while certainly true to the themes of their source material (and more than willing to offer a charmingly edited tribute in the opening titles), all still translated the visual components of those sources for the big screen: we got worlds inspired by a comic book.

And then we come full circle with Sin City, which chucks the whole idea of interpretation right out the window in favor of verisimilitude. Why try to translate the comic book look and feel onto the screen when you can just make the screen look pretty much like the original comic? Why interpret when you can import? You take the most distinctive elements of the comic book's visual style and make them really really big and cool-looking.

That plan -- just make the comic book movie look like the comic book -- is, I assume, what the folks who made Sin City were trying to get at. Cool idea. Even cooler to deploy that visual idea in the service of a completely (and gloriously) ridiculous story, one whose morality is every bit as fabricated and imaginary as its setting. Sin City is essentially Pulp Fiction meets Kill Bill meets Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That is, it has three loosely connected stories about revenge (and killing tons of people) that take place in a digitally rendered fantasy world. As you might have guessed, I really enjoyed it. Some thoughts:

If You Had To Pick One: in re: above, the film is divided into three semi-related, chronically jumbled segments a la Pulp Fiction. Though of course I enjoyed how they all fit together as part of a larger post-modern narrative framework, I'm willing to say that the one with Marv (Mickey Rourke) is the best. By a bunch. The one with Clive Owen is the weakest. The one with Bruce Willis is somewhere in the middle. End of conversation.

Thank You For Skipping the Part Where You Explain Everyone's Powers: nothing is more boring in the comic-book movie genre than the obligatory 45 minutes of franchise-launching "And here's how we got our super powers!" (This was essentially the entire point of the first X-Men movie, which was watchable despite it all.) In Sin City, no one seems to have actual super powers, but they seem to be able to do superhuman things. As in, apparently everyone can safely leap from the roofs of buildings to the ground below. Also, you can absorb dozens of bullets without dying. Luckily, we don't have to waste any time explaining all that. We just go with it. And really, if you want to have a comic-book world, why not let everyone be able to survive crazy falls and multiple gunshots?

Was Peter Gunn A TV Show Or Just A Theme Song?: I really wasn't feeling the music as much as I should have. The main theme essentially sounded like a limp rip-off of the Theme from Peter Gunn, give or take a few notes. Which is fine, but when the rest of the film is so different-looking, you'd like the score to follow. Oh well.

Just Because You Gave Them Uzis Doesn't Make It Less Awkward: for the record, I don't think there are any women in this movie who don't walk around in their underwear (or less than their underwear) for most of their time on screen. The majority of the female characters play strippers or prostitutes. Not so polite. Of course, you could defend this by saying that the female characters are actually strong and defend their part of town, yadda yadda yadda. That's all well and good, but they're still half-nekkid hookers up there on the screen. Not that any of the actresses are complaining, as they seemed to have signed up pretty much every young starlet in Hollywood for this thing. Sigh. It's a man's world.

Actually, He Is Too Old: speaking of young starlets, get ready for more Jessica Alba, who's in two more mega-movies this summer! One wouldn't say that she seemed particularly talented in this movie, but at least she was credible when she had to "dance" (at least a lot more credible than Natalie Portman in Closer, which, for the record, is something of a pile of crap -- talkie talkie talkie, too much talkie, though Clive Owen is pretty sweet in it, definitely sweeter than he was in this one). Still, I have to admit that it turned my stomach a little when she made out with Bruce Willis. I mean, I understand that the story actually calls for her to be very young and him to be very old, and that Hollywood trots out far more preposterous couplings, but it was still kind of gross. There. I said it.

Warning: Contains 23% Torture Scenes: so you know, a suprisingly large portion of the film is devoted to characters brutally torturing other people for information. Not once or twice -- like six or seven times. And they play it for laughs. Which is pretty funny in itself. I mean, I don't mind lots of violence (especially when nestled in an extended revenge fantasy), but I could see how some of the scenes might be a bit unsettling. Still, it seems like the only way you can get stuff done in Basin City is by cutting off a few fingers (and possibly feeding them to some dogs). I dunno -- must not be any lawyers there.

[Editor's Note: I wrote this like a week and a half ago, but never finished it, so apologies on the lack of timeliness. Still, it made more money last weekend than that stupid movie about the Red Sox (that it took all of my powers to resist writing about; the subject being how much I'm enjoying watching Boston sports fans have their favorite thing co-opted by the lame-ass national media, but then I thought I'd just come off as the stereotypically bitter Philadelphia supporter), so I figured it was worth publishing.]

Posted by thatkid at April 14, 2005 1:15 PM under Stuff To Buy

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