With so many movies now being made based on comic books, it's inevitable that they start to drift further and further from their source material. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: What makes for a good comic book doesn't always make for a good movie. But for anyone who thinks that comic-book movies have strayed too far, Frank Miller's Sin City solves all those problems. Not only does the film stick strictly to the plots of Miller's series of graphic novels, but it also uses dialogue taken straight from the comics and composition of the shots is rendered to look exactly like certain comic panels. Not since Ang Lee's Hulk has a comic-book movie looked this much like a comic book, and even Lee didn't go nearly as far as director Robert Rodriguez in bringing a comic-book look and feel to the screen.
While it's possible to view Rodriguez's devotion to Miller's work (he resigned from the Director's Guild to allow Miller a credit as co-director, and had Miller's name inserted into the official title) as slavish, Sin City doesn't come off as a carbon copy. If anything, its comic-book approach to filmmaking brands it an entirely unique, distinctive product, neither comic book nor movie but an ingenious hybrid of the two. In Hulk, Lee split his screen into squares that resembled panels; in Sin City, you could break the film into a series of stills and publish them as a graphic novel, that's how close it comes to the print medium.
MOVIE BOX What else to watch |
Frank Miller's Sin City is pulp film noir so over-the-top it nearly falls into parody. But its visual style, plot and dialogue are all in a direct line of descent from these live-action classics.
Before MacMurray became a punch line in a cornucrapia of Disney flicks and the poor man's Ozzie Nelson, he was a tough yet corruptible insurance salesman who plots with the evil, oversexed Stanwyck to kill her husband and cash out. Oddly enough, classic villain Eddie G. is the good guy.
"Film noir" refers to both mood and lighting, and few movies typify both so well as this tale of a man whose criminal past catches up to him, and though it's a uniquely American genre, it was French director Jacques Tourneur who made a toss-away picture a work of art. Hard-boiled dialogue galore, too!
No man is more evil than Welles' Harry Lime and no man more bewildered than Cotten's Holly Martin as he tries to solve the murder of his friend in post-war Vienna, a city filled with corruption. Dramatic cinematography and a zither-laden sound track complete the picture.
Power, brutality and love (or is it more sinister?) swirl in this dark story of a newspaper columnist and his PR lackey. With fantastic dialogue and even better performances by Lancaster and Curtis, you'll need to take a shower after watching this one to get rid of that slimy feeling. Martin Stein |
Rodriguez takes three of Miller's Sin City graphic novels—The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard—and weaves them together in an anthology format resembling Pulp Fiction, whose creator, Quentin Tarantino, is Rodriguez's friend and even turns up in Sin City as a "special guest director" for one short sequence. The best of the stories follows the best-known Sin City character, ugly ex-con Marv (Mickey Rourke, in what ought to be a career-reviving performance), as he avenges the death of a hooker (Jaime King), the only woman who ever showed him tenderness. Rourke at first looks ridiculous in heavy makeup designed to replicate the rough look of Miller's drawings of Marv, but after a while you forget about it and just marvel at how he inhabits the hard-boiled soul of a man who'll slaughter dozens but really just wants a woman's tender touch.
Hard-boiled is how best to describe Miller's world, a noir-inspired fictional town called Basin City that Rodriguez films in lush black and white, punctuated (like Miller's comics) with occasional striking spot colors: red blood, green eyes, golden hair, a blue car. It's a world where men are men and women are dames, and the two heroes who follow Marv's tale are similarly tough figures. In the next story, soft-spoken murderer-on-the-lam Dwight (Clive Owen) reunites with an old flame and prostitute (Rosario Dawson) to help her protect her cadre of hookers after they unknowingly kill a corrupt cop (Benicio del Toro). The third and final tale has ex-police detective Hartigan (Bruce Willis) protecting the grown-up version of a little girl (Jessica Alba) he once saved from a sadist and child-rapist.
Like Pulp Fiction, Sin City tells its tales out of order and features some of the same characters in each. At their core, the vignettes are similar and the film is diluted a bit by cramming so much into its 126-minute running time. But even if the sum total leans toward overkill, in each individual moment the film is supreme entertainment: clever, exciting and darkly comedic, with Miller's impeccably hard-bitten dialogue a feast of quotable lines.
Despite the film hewing so closely to Miller's blueprints, Rodriguez deserves just as much credit, as he's created a visual masterpiece, using green screens and computer-generated scenery (like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) to bring Miller's surreal, fantastic and strangely familiar world to life. The cast of big names is never unwieldy, and Rodriguez knows exactly how to get the right performances out of players (Alba, King, Brittany Murphy, Devon Aoki) who aren't exactly master thespians.
Sin City is so stylized, so over- the-top, so different from anything else at the movies that, again like Sky Captain, it might have trouble finding an audience. But, also like Kerry Conran's underappreciated gem, it'll have no trouble gleaning a rabid cult following, and is a treasure for both cineastes and those looking simply to be dazzled for two hours.