watching movies one cup at a time

I give a lot of points for originality. By 2008, most everything has been done and done to death. I get really bored by a lot of movies, especially just recycled mediocrity that we get pummelled with all the time (Ben Stiller, no more romantic comedies, I beg you). So I was happy to see that Sin City had a truckload of originality to it. I saw a film style I’d never seen before and I liked it. It wouldn’t work for everything, but it worked here.

As most people know, this film is based off of the Sin City graphic novel series by Frank Miller. If you have read the books, you are familiar with the sharp black and white (no grey, no shading) style with the very deliberate and minimal use of color. What Frank Miller does with just black and white is pretty amazing. And the stories are basically Film Noir on crack. Extreme violence, extreme language in an extreme world.

Frank Miller collaborated with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez to make this film, which contains 4 separate stories, and they attempted to get as close as possible to the vibe and feel of the original graphic novels. Robert Rodriguez was one of the first filmmakers to dive in deep with all-digital, heavy CGI film making. His 3 Spy Kids movies are a crazy mish-mash of CGI out of control. If he can do it with CGI, chances are he will. Which is interesting because his first movie, El Mariachi, is a case study on how to make an extremely low-budget, low tech movie. But for Sin City, this heavy-handed flair for CGI is a good thing because it easily recreates the harsh, artificial world of the illustrated stories. There were real actors, but just about everything else was CGI and needed to look in a very particularly stylized way. This differs from other mostly CGI movies in that it’s deliberately not trying to mimic a real world set. It is very consciously attempting to look more like a cartoon than reality.

So does all that CGI really work or is it actually weighing the movie down in arty cyber muck?  It does work to pull the stories from any kind of real context. I never felt I was watching something that was real. It always felt about on the level of a cartoon. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Not having it pretend to be real helped the story, since it’s essentially a crime fantasy. You couldn’t enjoy the crazy stories for what they are if you thought they were trying to pass themselves off as reality. And the CGI is not purple dragon robot monsters like in Spy Kids. It’s done in a very cool artistic way to more create a mood and environment than some robot ninja fight with grizzly bears. You don’t feel overwhelmed like in Star Wars. 

The acting is just okay for the most part. Mickey Rourke is brilliant as Marv and no one else could have played him. Bruce Willis does a great job as Hartigan too. And Nick Stahl did a menacing Yellow Bastard. But I didn’t care for Clive Owen, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, and especially Brittany Murphy. She kinda sucks. And Jessica Alba is not sexy or a good actress. The character she played had a lot more nudity in the book and Alba refused to do it for the movie. I’m not saying she had to, but if she wants the part, she should have committed to it. Or get out of the way for someone who will do it, like Jaime King’s Goldie character. All of those actors just didn’t have any real life to them. Either they were the wrong actor for the wrong part or they just don’t have the skills to pay the bills.

Honorable mentions though to Carla Gugino, Devon Aoki, Elijah Wood, and Josh Hartnett who each had small roles but played them very well. 

Overall this movie is not perfect and I wasn’t as impressed as I wanted to be. But they took a tough job of translating the heavy-stylized books to film and did it in an uncompromising and beautifully faithful way.