"Sin" Fully Delicious
by Homer Yen
(c) 2005
What's black and white and red all over? It's
the noir-ish world of "Sin City" marked by
varying degrees of good and evil and an even
greater degree of bloodshed on its mean streets.
In this wonderfully beguiling film, you can
watch a comic book visionary, a maverick
director, and pulp fiction come together in a
gloriously lurid way.
The film is virtually lifted from the pages of
Frank Miller's graphic comic books. This isn't a
mere adaptation. It really is the comic book,
brought to amazing life and injected with high
doses of adrenaline. The sets, the characters,
and even the script have been admirably
transformed from ink in a book to everything it
should be on the big screen.
The movie weaves together three of the "Sin City"
underworld narratives, each more or less
self-contained. One story involves Bruce Willis
as a weathered, old cop looking to take down a
suspected pedophile (Nick Stahl). One has
Mickey Rourke (in a career-reviving role) as a
schizophrenic goon looking for answers in all the
ugly places when his sweetheart (Jaime King) is
killed. One pits a good guy (Clive Owen) against
a wacko (Benicio Del Toro) who spills their feud
out onto the streets inside a district of
dangerous but beautiful hookers. And there are
plenty of other A-list stars and girls that
deserve cover photos on Maxim magazine, which add
to its absurdly depraved mix.
The presentation has that circular storytelling
structure so as to put all of the characters in
the same world although they never really meet.
Think of this as a city of heroes who occupy the
same place but never really enter each other's
field of vision. But every hero leaves their
mark with bare-knuckled bravado as they live out
their particular story. I just love the line in
which the tormented Mickey Rourke says, "I love
hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't
feel bad."
I mentioned that this film is based on graphic
comic books. And "graphic" is the key word.
This isn't the Sunday funnies. The material does
everything it can to earn the NC-17 rating
(especially the violence) but holds back just
enough so that it doesn't. What helps to mute
the violence is its clever, groundbreaking
cinematography using digital technology to create
palettes of mostly black and white. The only
exceptions are lipstick and blood, which is red;
eyes which are green or blue; hair which is
blond; and a coward that is Yellow. With the
sparing use of colors, the violence is more
artistic than gory. Visually, "Sin City" could
be a turning point as it re-imagines the world of
visual effects with the kind of Wow Factor that
accompanied films like "The Matrix" or "Sky
Captain and the World of Tomorrow."
"Sin City" is truly unique. The stories have an
underlying theme of love and revenge. It is
passionate. It is romantic. It is visually
arresting. It is a big, bloody valentine. And,
yes, it's a Wow.
Grade: A–
S: 3 out of 3
L: 2 out of 3
V: 3 out of 3
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39654 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1375932 X-RT-TitleID: 1143969 X-RT-AuthorID: 1370 X-RT-RatingText: A-
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