Sin City
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario DawsonDirector: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
Year of Release: 2005
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 pummeled 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? The movie is not without it’s faults, but overall it’s a very original and stylish looking flick with some interesting characters and some compelling stories. It’s very cartoonish, but that actually works in this movie since the whole thing is cartoonish. It actually helps make the violence and edginess of the story easier to handle and done with style.
