As mentioned, I saw "
Sin City" last night. It was a kick-ass movie, visually stunning, and definitely not a "chick flick". There isn't a sensitive moment in the whole picture that doesn't have an ulterior motive.
There are many reviews out there for this movie right now, but mine will be relating my own experience and why I particularly enjoyed it.
Way back in high school, I was quite unpopular, and considered rather weird. I didn't really care about popular music, sports, or fashion. However, something I knew like a Harvard scholar was the comics industry. In the mid 80's, the industry underwent a boom when DC revamped it's main characters, the most notable of which was a change in the character of Batman done by a writer/artist named Frank Miller, who had previous revamped "Daredevil" for Marvel comics into a cool character (several famous plotlines from the Miller comics were seen in the recent Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck). The series was called "The Dark Knight Returns" and was the coolest comic I had ever read up to that point. It was finally a superhero comic for adults, told in a film-noir cinematic style.
Miller eventually left DC and went to an independent comic company called Dark Horse, where he created several titles, including "Sin City". If "The Dark Knight Returns" was a superhero story told in a film-noir style, "Sin City" was film-noir, plain and simple.
The movie was essentially a retelling of the Sin City comics, using the panels drawn by Miller as storyboards (which is why Frank Miller gets co-directing credit for the movie). Quentin Tarantino, whose style was influenced by Miller's comics, also directs a segment of the movie. It should be noted that Miller himself has a brief cameo as a priest.
While watching this movie, I felt as if I was in high school reading "The Dark Knight Returns" again. Men are loner tough guys and make no apologies for it, trying to force an immoral world to make sense. Women are tigers who use their sexiness as weapons as much as guns (or swords, or shuriken). The stories are about doing what's right in a corrupt world, a tale that has been retold since Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (definitely a guy thing).
It's appropriate that the movie is in black and white (with some computerized shadings of color), because Sin City's moral center is similarly black and white. Another interesting note that the movie is almost all CGI, similar to "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow". In the case of the latter, the director was trying to recreate the atmosphere of the sci-fi serials of the 30's.
I have read "The Dark Knight Returns" more times than I can count. Two years ago, I got Frank Miller to sign my leatherbound copy of the book. I still remember lines from it:
"I come alive again. The night is mine again."
"Joker, there's nothing wrong with you that I can't fix. With my hands."
They sound silly when said out loud, but damn they get the blood pumping. Similar lines are spoken throughout Sin City. This is why I profoundly enjoyed this movie.
On a separate subject, even if I had never read the series and wasn't a big fan of it and owned a leatherbound edition of it, simply based on the clever trailer I saw before the feature began ("You notice that all movie trailers feature the voice of a man who sounds seven feet tall that has been smoking cigarettes since he was 11 years old"), I would be going to see "
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" at the end of this month.
