Corte Madera Chronicles

A group blog; a place to share photos, thoughts, stupid shit we find on the internet, whatever. Hopefully we'll get at least one post per day from someone, and not so many posts that it's too overwhelming. Have fun!

Monday, April 04, 2005

Sin City

I saw Sin City by myself, as I live in Los Angeles and don't have any friends. If I had seen it in the Bay Area with a bunch of friends, I probably would have enjoyed it more than I did.

Which isn't to say I hated it. But I've had a hard time connecting to that geeky gleeful feeling that I used to get from movies like this. So I was a little more sensitive to the problems and a little less excited about the cool stuff.

Summarizing my thoughts:

I loved Mickey Rourke -- he looked perfect and really nailed the part. More than anyone else in the movie and certainly more than the other male narrators, he felt like he belonged in Sin City. Awesome. If the whole movie had been focused around Marv, or if everyone else got it to the extent that he did, it could have been a great film.

Clive Owen didn't do anything for me at all, and Bruce Willis was fine but was much more Bruce Willis than Hartigan. I thought Rosario Dawson was great. Elijah Wood was perfect and an inspired bit of casting. Jessica Alba was totally forgettable and the decision to cast someone who wouldn't take off her top in the strip club was just wrong -- it really changed her character from the graphic novel.

Robert Rodriguez makes a big deal out of editing his own films, and after Once Upon A Time In Mexico and this, I think he's making a big mistake. In several scenes, I felt the rhythm was completely off. Not as bad as in Once Upon A Time In Mexico, but still bad enough to be a problem. His action scenes have cool shots but don't fit together in a way that simultaneously tells the story and gets your blood pumping -- this is a pretty common fault these days, but this guy is supposed to be better than that and he's just not. And it's not just the action scenes. Most of the dialogue scenes are flat, or flatter than they could be, because he's not using rhythm in any kind of purposeful way.

The visual style was cool; in places it was very cool. There was actually far less stylization than I was expecting from all the hype -- for the most part, it's black-and-white with bits of color in almost every shot. Far more color than in the graphic novel, and a hell of a lot more gray than the original solid blacks and solid whites. I thought the occasional dips to pure black and pure white were effective (like at the end of the Hartigan story), and I wish there had been more of that.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. What did you all think?

1 Comments:

At 3:34 PM, Blogger Lorrimer said...

Dude, Jessica Alba is not as hot as Kate Beckinsale.

This is probably what most blog arguments degenerate to eventually. But I'll stand by that. Jessica Alba looks like an Olson twin. Kate Beckinsale is hot.

You've actually read more Sin City than I have. I've only read That Yellow Bastard and Sin City (the one with Marv). I haven't read the one the Clive Owen story is from -- he might be perfect for the role, but he came off very flat for me. Nothing compelling or interesting about him at all. But this could be personal taste. I agree with you that Bruce Willis was definitely way too young for Hartigan. Also not bulky enough.

You're probably right about the amount of high-contrast stylization. It's a good-looking film.

And I'm being picky about the pacing. Probably it's the type of thing that only bothered me because I wasn't as swept up in the whole thing as I would have liked to have been; if I was seeing this a few years back with a big group of geeky friends after a bowl or three in the parking lot, it would have been easier to get into.

 

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