Sin City Review Contest Over
We lost the SIN CITY review contest, unfortunately. Ryan's reading was terrific and polished, and I'm glad he won. Here's a quick snippet
The story of filming Frank Miller’s graphic novel series Sin City began when 90s indie phenom Robert Rodriguez (he of the semi-automatic guitar), along with three CAA agents, actually booked passage onto the River Styx and sailed into darkest Hades in order to renegotiate the 9 1/2 Weeks contract for which Mickey Rourke sold his soul. Upon returning to the surface with Demon Mickey, the filmmakers immediately shoved him in front of a black and white camera, and the result was a new film genre: Post-noir.
Post-noir is globalized, glam-rock noir: we’ve traded in suggestive, the-Orson Welles-character-is-actually-selling-watered-down-medicine-to-sick-children creepiness for attention-starved, over-the-moon lunacy. Instead of sophisticated, cigar-chewing Kirk Douglas, we have the soured virgin Elijah Wood; icy school-marm Barbara Stanwyck has been traded in for a handful of Vivid Video box cover girls. Instead of claustrophobic realism, we have a post-Evil Dead nightmare world where even the most unspeakable crimes and Faustian bargains can’t create a ripple on the Easter Island statue face of Powers Boothe.
Film noir, past or present, has one constant: Blame the Dame. Two out of the three main storylines in Sin City involve hapless palookas who make the mistake of getting seduced by beauty and then go to ridiculous extremes to try to protect the beauty in a city of beasts. Apparently the mugs who populate this jerkwater burg haven’t seen enough noir of their own to know that every blonde has a heart full of quicksand. And everyone down to the janitor’s cousin has six agendas. I was reminded of Fritz Lang’s M, where the montages of scheming criminals are intercut with the equally disturbing paper pushing of the local police. In this movie, when the cops come calling, they don’t just arrive – they swarm up the stairs like mosquitoes.
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