Sin City

I had been mean­ing to see Sin City since I first watched a trail­er for it back in 2004, and last week I got the DVD from the library. I sure wait­ed long enough, did­n’t I? The movie is a series of char­ac­ter vignettes and the char­ac­ters tend to cross each oth­ers’ paths pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly. All are from Frank Miller’s Sin City graph­ic nov­els. You’ve got your basic aging but hon­est cop, your basic vig­i­lante tough guy, your basic hit man, your basic katana-wield­ing pros­ti­tute and your basic yel­low smelly ser­i­al killer. No one real­ly has super pow­ers, although some of their skill lev­els and sheer tough­ness approach that lev­el. All in all, it is very vio­lent and beau coup noir.

I know vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing about Frank Miller’s style, but from what I’ve seen and what I felt in watch­ing Sin City, I believe Robert Rodriguez did a great job in the trans­fer. There is a heavy dose of celebri­ty in the film, with Bruce Willis, Mick­ey Rourke, Clive Owen, Beni­cio del Toro, Brit­tany Mur­phy, Jes­si­ca Alba, Rosario Daw­son and a few more girls who can’t act but are easy on the eyes. Mick­ey Rourke’s char­ac­ter, Marv, stole the show for me. He’s the tough guy vig­i­lante. His vignette was third in the movie, after the hit man [Josh Hart­nett] and the cop [Willis] and once his sto­ry got going I real­ly got immersed in what Sin City is like, and real­ly start­ed to notice the excel­lent cin­e­matog­ra­phy and dig­i­tal mas­ter­ing that gave the film its well-known styl­iza­tion and tone. So many of the shots looked like stills from a com­ic book [see links at the end of this post] that I became seri­ous­ly impressed with the amount of plan­ning that must have gone into it. Quentin Taran­ti­no appar­ent­ly guest direct­ed at one point [I think I know which one] but the kind of grace­ful­ly sud­den vio­lence that I’ve known from Rodriguez in El Mari­achi and Des­per­a­do works great in this for­mat.

The word you are look­ing for is chiaroscuro. Vir­tu­al­ly the entire film is desat­u­rat­ed, with key bits of vibrant col­or tossed in to accen­tu­ate and insin­u­ate cer­tain scenes and themes. It should also be men­tioned that Rodriguez did a lot of the music for Sin City and it is a pret­ty heavy set of post-indus­tri­al tunage. Worth check­ing out on its own mer­it. I’ve added this movie to my heav­i­ly updat­ed wish­list, so you know I find it worth watch­ing over and over and over again.

Fur­ther read­ing:
Graph­ic nov­el ver­sus film shot com­par­i­son
Yahoo! still com­par­i­son
Wired arti­cle on Rodriguez