Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
The answer to the question, "what if Robert Rodriguez turned his hand to film noir?" Sin City has the dark shadows and bright lights; it has the violence, the crime and the femmes fatale. There are voice-overs.
But the violence doesn't consist of trench-coated criminals falling over, clutching at their strangely bloodless chests. A rapist has his equipment shot off; a crooked cop is decapitated by a ninja hooker. "Bloodless" is not an appropriate adjective.
The film's four stories -- based on the Frank Miller graphic novels The Customer is Always Right, The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard -- are interesting, though the dialogue, straddling the border between noir and making-fun-of-noir, is sometimes painful if you are taking it seriously. The acting is unremarkable.
Where Sin City shines is its design. The visual style of Miller's books is notable for two things: the first is in taking high-contrast cinematography to its logical extreme: panels are laid out with absolute contrast, literally nothing but black and white. The second is the rare splash of bright colour -- red lips, a blue dress, or a lemon-yellow bastard, impossible to miss.
Rodriguez brought the comics' visual style to the film, and it's gorgeous. As in Schindler's List, the use of colour in a nominally black-and-white production adds additional oomph to already powerful scenes. Subtle special effects are used to darken shadows, or invert them to white instead of black. For once, at least, CGI is put to the use of art -- and that is something worth seeing.
The answer to the question, "what if Robert Rodriguez turned his hand to film noir?" Sin City has the dark shadows and bright lights; it has the violence, the crime and the femmes fatale. There are voice-overs.
But the violence doesn't consist of trench-coated criminals falling over, clutching at their strangely bloodless chests. A rapist has his equipment shot off; a crooked cop is decapitated by a ninja hooker. "Bloodless" is not an appropriate adjective.
The film's four stories -- based on the Frank Miller graphic novels The Customer is Always Right, The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard -- are interesting, though the dialogue, straddling the border between noir and making-fun-of-noir, is sometimes painful if you are taking it seriously. The acting is unremarkable.
Where Sin City shines is its design. The visual style of Miller's books is notable for two things: the first is in taking high-contrast cinematography to its logical extreme: panels are laid out with absolute contrast, literally nothing but black and white. The second is the rare splash of bright colour -- red lips, a blue dress, or a lemon-yellow bastard, impossible to miss.
Rodriguez brought the comics' visual style to the film, and it's gorgeous. As in Schindler's List, the use of colour in a nominally black-and-white production adds additional oomph to already powerful scenes. Subtle special effects are used to darken shadows, or invert them to white instead of black. For once, at least, CGI is put to the use of art -- and that is something worth seeing.