I'm not a huge fan of Frank Miller. Dark Knight Returns pretty much bored the crap out of me, and Sin City was basically more of the same: gargantuan, hypermasculine men whose identity seems to be based solely on how and how many ways they can commit grevious bodily harm to other people. Sin City's innovation is that it also includes hyperfeminine women, mostly prostitutes, who wear little to nothing most of the time and exist pretty much for the purposes of titilating the (male) reader.
Now, I want to make something clear, here. I like looking at women with little to nothing on. It's a thrill. I am, in fact, titilated by it. That doesn't change the fact that, as someone who knows a thing or two about storytelling, I think it's a cheap trick employed by lazy storytellers. The women of Sin City have almost as little personality as they do clothing, and the lack of the latter doesn't make up for the lack of the former. Every time I see those costumes I am pulled out of the story. My belief is no longer suspended because I know for a fact that those women are only present for the oggling pleasure of the audience. Nudity, eroticism, that's actually located within a plot is fantastic; nudity that is there to cover for a lack of plot just insults my intelligence.
I don't want to sound like I hated the books, or the movie, for that matter. What a good friend of mine calls "the lizard brain" was highly entertained by Marv beating the living shit out of people or by watching Miho wield twin katanas. I absolutely enjoyed the movie. There's no question of that. But I didn't respect it.
What is remarkable about Sin City is how slavishly faithful Robert Rodriguez is to Frank Miller's original material. The framing of shots is almost identical to the framing of panels in the books. The dialogue is almost directly from the book, with very little alteration, although there is a great deal removed for the sake of time. This is the second most direct translation from comics to film I've ever seen (the first is The Maxx, an animated series that actually used the original art and reproduced every issue of the comic series, word for word, shot for shot).
However, there are certain very real logistical differences between cinema and sequential art. The pacing of the film constantly ruins suspension of disbelief. A comic panel captures a single moment of time, in its visuals, but can span minutes in terms of text. A fleating thought that requires hundreds of words to express can happen in a fraction of a second of internal narrative time. In a film, time always flows. Unless the director uses slow motion or stills, we can't always sit and listen to "hard boiled" voice overs that explain every nuance of a situation.
Rodriguez and Miller utterly failed to pace this movie like a movie. Instead, what we have is a live-action comicbook, an adaptation so direct that it adds almost nothing to our experience of the original, except for the fact that we get to oggle "real" breasts (the reality of cinematic reproduction is a tricky proposition, so I'm not sure how "real" we can actually say those breasts are, and that doesn't even enter into the question of whether or not they were actually "real" at all, even if you're in the room with them).
The same problem comes through in the dialogue. There are words that are meant for the page, and there are words meant for the stage, and they're distinctly different. Using Miller's textual dialogue in a performative medium was a bad choice. I'd have no problem with the hard-boiled tradition of using 40s slang in an-almost-but-not-quite parodic way, but that's different than bad dialogue. I actually laughed out loud and some of the lines, and I'm not sure I was supposed to. I suspect that Rodriguez told his actors to be a little stiff, and little stilted, a little contrived in their performances. The opening scene feels like Bruce Willis is making fun of 40s detective films, but as the movie continues, the parody just becomes annoying.
The one performance that really works is Mickey Rourke as Marv, the man-mountain who gets hit by a car four times in less than a minute and gets up again. With his face covered in several layers of rubber-cement, Rourke manages to look cartoony enough that we don't mind his character being flat and parodic. The Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) has the same release from good acting due to a full-body suit that makes him look like a hobbit that fell in a vat of toxic waste (which is ironic with Elijah Wood in the cast!). If only the whole cast were a little less than human, they might be more believable. Or, if only it were a comic book, in which the cast was actually drawings, then we wouldn't have the problem of suspension of disbelief at all.
Sin City, the movie, doesn't need to exist. There's already a series of comics that do the job better. There seems to be a wierd cultural assumption that any time we read a good book that the natural progression is for it to be made into a movie, as if movies are our highest form of expression. Why isn't the book enough? Why can't we just enjoy it for what it is, instead of insisting that it turn into something else that can't possibly capture that experience?
PS: is it really necessary that the Sin City logo on the screen had a little (R) next to it? Fuck. Ruined that cool-ass title sequence, for me.
Posted by orion at April 2, 2005 4:21 PM