Flutterby™! : Sin City The Movie 2005-04-11 21:39:10.5195+00

Sin City The Movie

2005-04-11 21:39:10.5195+00 by ziffle 1 comments

I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't know what to expect about Sin City. It was different.

This dark story had me confused - in some ways I wanted to leave early - in others I was drawn into the reality of it all. Its not P.C. thats for sure, its raw truth. The cops and politicians are crooked, the peace is maintained by hookers with machine guns, and violence is always appropriate because evil and good are never the same.

I was drawn into Marv - I am Marv in a way. He is one tough guy - so maybe I'm not Marv really, but I loved the way he acted sympathetically and would walk through walls when he knew he was right. 'Is that all you got'?

I didn't know about the novels. It has graphics but they seemed integrated not like LOTR.

It really is three novellettes so I got confused but I left - wanting to see it again. This is a real movie. Well done.

I now am a Micky Rourke fan.

Ziffle

#Comment Re: made: 2005-04-11 23:36:33.762653+00 by: Pete [edit history]

Although I found it intriguing as a style excercise, I ultimately felt little human connection to the characters, and therefore little interest in their fates. I was hoping that something structural would redeem it, a la Pulp Fiction, but structure turned out to be another burden on the narrative, instead of the stealthy engine of story progress that good movies can make it.

And not all good movies have interesting structures. Some are completely linear. But Sin City can't be completely linear because it's three(+) unrelated and independent stories. There are times when the movie encourages you think that some interaction will develop between the major plot lines, but disappointment waits for anyone expecting a payoff there. The major stories just don't affect each other, period. We get nudges based on the seeing a character in another line, but these occurences have no impact on the unfolding events. If these happened over a series of months in between comic book issues, maybe it would feel like a knowing wink to the alert reader, but as part of the same 2-hour movie its impact was very different. The "references" are so obvious that there's no sense of reward for getting them, so as a viewer I'm still waiting for that reward, and was ultimately disappointed by Sin City in that regard.

I wonder why you call the movie "raw truth" while also saying that "peace is maintained by hookers with machine guns?" That's not much like the raw truth of my life.

For anyone that hasn't seen it because of concerns over gore, yes, it is very gory and violent, but it's so stylized that it's almost abstracted. For instance, blood is often portrayed as starkly white. And the movie's failure to support an empathic connection with the characters also lessons the impact of the gore.