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seraiJust went to see Sin City last night with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rakshi and abandonada. Hm.
You sure you wanna hear this?
Really?
You're sure, now.
Sorry, not impressed.
Maybe it's because I've read a number of Frank Miller comics over the years, ever since the Dark Knight series was first released in the mid-80's, and so I'm used to Miller's oeuvre. Nothing about the darkness, or the grit, or the spasms of ultra-violence, or the half-naked kickass babes surprised me. It's all pretty classic Miller, and I've always found it rather over-the-top and tiring. Ten minutes into the movie I found myself thinking, "Geez, Robert, if you use a crowbar I'm sure you can cram another cliche into this film."
Yes, the style is interesting, but that's all this film is: an exercise in style. Extreme contrast, selective inversion and color spotting can't make up for a lack of personality or sympathy on the part of the characters. There's only so long that "My, it looks just like a comic book!" can hold my attention. After that I'm gonna need something more solid. And this film just didn't provide it. Lantern-jawed violent lugs with gravelly voices, fuckable chicks with big tits, a couple of psychopaths with creepy fetishes and one tearful little girl - that's the entire cast, and none of them equipped with more than 1 1/2 dimensions.
And oh, the pain of those lines! My empathy level went way up with each scene, but the empathy wasn't for any of the characters - it was for the poor actors, saddled with some of the most painfully stilted B-noir dialogue I've ever heard. Just amateurish stuff. The interlinking plots of this episodic film weren't much better. I found myself anticipating practically everything that came along, and I haven't even read Sin City. But as I said above, this may be because I'm used to Frank Miller and how his stories work. There's a line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which aptly describes Miller's plotting: "Things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things are about as bad as they can reasonably get. We aim for the point where everyone who is marked for death, dies: the bad unhappily, the good unluckily."
As for Elijah, I was surprised to find that he wasn't as creepy as I'd expected him to be, given the reviews I've read. He was a little too detached to creep me out, seeming more mechanical than really evil. I didn't feel the presence of a real person there, and so he was more a cypher - The Incomprehensible Evil - than an actual character. But then, everybody's pretty flat in this film, as I've noted. You get sardonic twists and sick jokes standing in for character traits. Thus, Kevin's dark sweater is ostentatiously marked with a zigzag pattern painfully reminiscent of Charlie Brown's trademark shirt. Not the most subtle of cues, that.
Altogether, this film is far more about cool graphics than any actual story, which begs the question of why one would go to all the trouble of making it. What works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen, because events that seems intriguing and enthralling in the imaginal confines of the printed page can become stilted and puerile when played out by flesh-and-blood actors. That's the point to having different media, that each medium conveys different ideas and different experiences. As Frank Zappa said, writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's pointless to force one art form to do the work of another. Either way the piece has to be backed up with a story that is either interesting or plausible (preferably both), else it's just a portfolio. If the whole enterprise is wrapped up in putting a comic book page on the screen, why bother? I can just read the comic book.
rakshi and abandonada. Hm.You sure you wanna hear this?
Really?
You're sure, now.
Sorry, not impressed.
Maybe it's because I've read a number of Frank Miller comics over the years, ever since the Dark Knight series was first released in the mid-80's, and so I'm used to Miller's oeuvre. Nothing about the darkness, or the grit, or the spasms of ultra-violence, or the half-naked kickass babes surprised me. It's all pretty classic Miller, and I've always found it rather over-the-top and tiring. Ten minutes into the movie I found myself thinking, "Geez, Robert, if you use a crowbar I'm sure you can cram another cliche into this film."
Yes, the style is interesting, but that's all this film is: an exercise in style. Extreme contrast, selective inversion and color spotting can't make up for a lack of personality or sympathy on the part of the characters. There's only so long that "My, it looks just like a comic book!" can hold my attention. After that I'm gonna need something more solid. And this film just didn't provide it. Lantern-jawed violent lugs with gravelly voices, fuckable chicks with big tits, a couple of psychopaths with creepy fetishes and one tearful little girl - that's the entire cast, and none of them equipped with more than 1 1/2 dimensions.
And oh, the pain of those lines! My empathy level went way up with each scene, but the empathy wasn't for any of the characters - it was for the poor actors, saddled with some of the most painfully stilted B-noir dialogue I've ever heard. Just amateurish stuff. The interlinking plots of this episodic film weren't much better. I found myself anticipating practically everything that came along, and I haven't even read Sin City. But as I said above, this may be because I'm used to Frank Miller and how his stories work. There's a line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which aptly describes Miller's plotting: "Things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things are about as bad as they can reasonably get. We aim for the point where everyone who is marked for death, dies: the bad unhappily, the good unluckily."
As for Elijah, I was surprised to find that he wasn't as creepy as I'd expected him to be, given the reviews I've read. He was a little too detached to creep me out, seeming more mechanical than really evil. I didn't feel the presence of a real person there, and so he was more a cypher - The Incomprehensible Evil - than an actual character. But then, everybody's pretty flat in this film, as I've noted. You get sardonic twists and sick jokes standing in for character traits. Thus, Kevin's dark sweater is ostentatiously marked with a zigzag pattern painfully reminiscent of Charlie Brown's trademark shirt. Not the most subtle of cues, that.
Altogether, this film is far more about cool graphics than any actual story, which begs the question of why one would go to all the trouble of making it. What works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen, because events that seems intriguing and enthralling in the imaginal confines of the printed page can become stilted and puerile when played out by flesh-and-blood actors. That's the point to having different media, that each medium conveys different ideas and different experiences. As Frank Zappa said, writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's pointless to force one art form to do the work of another. Either way the piece has to be backed up with a story that is either interesting or plausible (preferably both), else it's just a portfolio. If the whole enterprise is wrapped up in putting a comic book page on the screen, why bother? I can just read the comic book.
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Date: Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 03:08 pm (UTC)and the canibal isn't shown doing his thing at all ( I wanted to see an evil grining Kevin licking his chops thank you, and instead we get robot dog chow Kevin ***pouts**
I don't like people walking around with Elijah's head .. so there
I will watch it again, cause I do so love style! and that opening scene with Josh was a keeper for me