*Sin City

Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino (special guest director)
Written by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

The only thing I knew about Sin City going in was that the comic was written by Frank Miller and that an action figure from the series got Todd McFarlane on many a Christian-right shitlist back near the turn of the century (I'm sure Todd was heartbroken about that). You'd have thought that would have been enough to get me excited about this film, and I was at least interested. Until I saw the trailer.

A lot has been made of the visuals in the movie - in fact, I'm hearing a lot of the same people who hated the flat, plastic, alien, frosty look of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (and how quickly have we all forgotten Radioland Murders?) praise how amazing and innovative essentially the exact same look is here. I really don't get the disconnect. (And I really hate it when people use "disconnect" as a noun.)

Sin City is a long-running, and I suspect continuing, series of novels, every one of which director Robert Rodriguez claims to want to bring to screen. For this first go-round, however, we are only given three storylines. In the first (which is split into two segments, which bookend the film), a grizzled cop (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a creepy pedophile, then reunites with her eight years later to protect her again. In the second, creepy Marv (Mickey Rourke) scours the city to violently revenge the death of the woman he loves, a woman he hardly knows. In the third, an argument between two rivals (Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen) circuitously upheaves the shaky truce between the police and the working girls of Old Town. The three stories are not connected, are not quite even related other than by setting or by the odd character from one story making an appearance (if not actually taking part) in one of the others.

Seeing as how Rodriguez tries very hard for and succeeds in delivering what is essentially a direct translation of Miller's graphic novels to the big screen, both in dialogue and in visuals (the countless Web sites and magazine articles devoted to providing frame-by-screen comparisons of any given scene in the film can attest to this), Miller very much deserves the co-directing credit for which Rodriguez had to drop out of the DGA in order to let Miller receive. (That Quentin Tarantino receives an enigmatic "Special Guest Director" credit seems irrelevant, given that Rodriguez and Quentin are the same person anyway.)

So, that's what Rodriguez has done. He has succeeded in projecting a giant, moving comic book onto the big screen. As for whether or not Sin City is a successful, that is, satisfying film hinges on exactly two things: 1) whether the audience realizes that they are not watching a movie so much as they are a giant moving comic book on the big screen, and 2) whether the actors take their performances (and the requisite pulpy, neo-noir dialogue) unironically enough to project that they are in a giant moving comic book rather than, say, an incredibly goofy experiment, or an incredibly bad joke (Brittany Murphy, I'm looking directly at you).

Taking point number 2 first, I have to say that the performances, with few exceptions, are uniformly good. The stories are played out by a sprawling cast of various A- and once-were-A-listers, all (with the possible exceptions of Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis) quite surprising, and all (with the definite exception of Brittany Murphy - how in hell do you keep getting work?) surprisingly effective. Clive Owen, action star? Jessica Alba, fragile? Nick Stahl, creepy badass? Carla Gugino, topless lesbian? Mickey Rourke, still alive, and (most surprising of all) actually good? Josh Hartnett, period?

As for point number 1, I must confess that the enjoyment I got out of the film came from the stories, the performances, and the dialogue, but most definitely NOT from the "look" of the thing. That is to say, I think this film works in spite of the whole green-screen gimmick. As I sat in the theater for the length of the picture (two hours and change, by the way) I kept thinking how much more interesting it would have been had it been given a straightforward noir treatment (serious-mode Coen Brothers?), something that didn't have to scream COMIC BOOK !!! at every possible moment. But, I suspect that I am missing the point.

Like I said, in spite of all this, I found Sin City to be amazingly, almost absolutely absorbing. Just imagine what they could have accomplished had they gone and made an actual movie.

Take a drink every time someone gets it right in the groin.


Trailer watch:

Domino - smear all the action dirt on her you want, Keira Knightley ain't nothing but a skinny, 15 year-old British chick.

The Skeleton Key - which is based on a novel by the same guy who wrote the original Japanese novel Ring, and which has a script written by the same guy who wrote the scripts for the American versions of The Ring and The Ring Two as well as, coincidentally enough, the forthcoming John Carter of Mars, for which Robert Rodriguez had to drop directing duties after leaving the DGA; directing duties for John Carter were eventually handed to...what's the opposite of ironic?...Kerry Conran, director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In any case, The Skeleton Key looks like crap.

Mindhunters - apparently serial killers have become so cliché that now even the profilers are killing each other.

Apropos of nothing, I had jury duty this week.