Sin City


An IMDb Top 250 movie

3 out of 5 snowstones

While I will admit to reading comics, I had never seen Frank Miller's work when I sat down to watch 'Sin City'. There are basically two ways of looking at this movie. One, you can try to figure out what this movie is about, and find out that it's nothing much. It's about tough guys, hot dames, rainy streets, and lots and lots of extreme violence. And unlike in a Raymond Chandler screenplay, there's close to no witty dialogue or inventive plot twists to hold things together. There's only a few loosely connected stories, barely worthy of that name. In short, a crap movie for the popcorn crowd.
Two, Sin City is a dazzling reinvention of cinema, using digital wizardry not so much to show what can't exist (space battles or dinosaurs), but to show what does exist in an exaggerated way (film noir was never this noir). Call me pretentious, but Sin City does to movies what impressionism did to realist painting: it redefines what a movie can look like, and foregoes the notion that a movie should, at some level, look real. Sin City doesn't look real, nor does it want to, and your response to that fact will determine to a large degree whether you will like the movie or not. On a visual level, I love this movie: it's a shame that there is not enough story to back it up.

Posted by cronopio at 01:18 PM, November 22, 2005