Saturday, August 20, 2005
Sin City - Movie Review
From the previews, I thought Sin City would be way too stylish and stupid for me to enjoy, so I didn't run out and see it in the theater. I figured it might be worth a shot at home, though, and it turns out my initial take was only partly right. The movie is one of those that's interesting to watch from a movie-design perspective - it was really cool how much like a comic book they'd managed to make it, and it oozed with visual style, with flashes and glimpses of color occasionally sweeping through the black and white. I am not familiar with the source comic books, and I haven't really read comics at all since Groo, but even so, I could recognize and admire what they'd done with color and scene composition.
That it drips with style doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, though. The stories (three of them plus some connecting stuff) were fairly simplistic and disjointed, and it was hard to care much about any of the characters. In most movies, saying the characters were like those in comic books is an insult; in this case, it was the whole point, but even so, that doesn't make them complex enough to carry a movie. The violence was largely pointless, of the "look how violent yet artsy we're being!" variety, rather than having any meaning or emotion connected to it.
I had the same problem with this as I did with the Kill Bills. They were going primarily for style, and the characters, plot, and dialogue were sacrificed to this end. In the case of Kill Bill, I didn't really care for the style Tarantino ended up with at all; in this case, I found the style fascinating, but it still left me wanting more of a movie. I don't know that it would have been possible to do both (comic book style with a great movie underneath), so I guess I can't fault them too much.
So, an interesting experience, but as I thought, I wasn't all five-star-ga-ga-my-life-has-changed-completely over it.
That it drips with style doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, though. The stories (three of them plus some connecting stuff) were fairly simplistic and disjointed, and it was hard to care much about any of the characters. In most movies, saying the characters were like those in comic books is an insult; in this case, it was the whole point, but even so, that doesn't make them complex enough to carry a movie. The violence was largely pointless, of the "look how violent yet artsy we're being!" variety, rather than having any meaning or emotion connected to it.
I had the same problem with this as I did with the Kill Bills. They were going primarily for style, and the characters, plot, and dialogue were sacrificed to this end. In the case of Kill Bill, I didn't really care for the style Tarantino ended up with at all; in this case, I found the style fascinating, but it still left me wanting more of a movie. I don't know that it would have been possible to do both (comic book style with a great movie underneath), so I guess I can't fault them too much.
So, an interesting experience, but as I thought, I wasn't all five-star-ga-ga-my-life-has-changed-completely over it.
