Sin City

[Fast Learner]

I imagine I'll get flayed, but from the clips I saw, the dialogue in this movie sounds awful. That's not a slam on Frank Miller. That's not even really a slam on Rodriguez, although it possibly should be. This is a movie adapted from a graphic novel, and if I had to guess, I'd guess that they're being really really true to the dialogue (and caption-text voice-overs) from the graphic novels. Which is a wonderful kind of homage, a great project of transformation, and a fantastic way to create a movie that'll impress the people who loved the graphic novel and the people who don't care about dialogue, while turning off everyone else.

I'm not going to flay you, but I don't understand why, say, you're completely ignoring my review above. You know, the one where I said that I've never read the graphic novels and yet somehow think it's a great film.

You're postulating from extremely limited information. You may not know me from Adam, but it still seems weird to completely ignore the opinions of someone who had the precise opposite experience of what you're suggesting.

I've never read or seen a Frank MIller anything. The movie was amazing.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

...and I just don't believe you can judge dialogue based on out-of-context clips (for the most part; I mean, how do you judge a line like "I know."? (thinking of Han Solo, there -- GREAT line, but only in context)), but that's me.

A very good recent(well, fairly recent) example of this is the Bourne Supremecy trailer. Anyone remember that? We see the lady on the phone, screaming at everyone and eventually someone yells, "Where is he?!"

In the trailer, his response is, "Right next to you." and it feels like its cut off because of the quickness with which he's talking.

But in the movie, those two scenes are split up by at least thirty seconds, and he never answers the "where is he?!". Instead, he says "She's right next to you" about a girl he's mentioned a moment earlier.

Completely different context, and blew me away when I saw the movie as I had honestly been expecting what the trailer showed.

 

[takyris]

takyris: you seem to be saying that movies have more dialog than comic books.

That's flat-out wrong.

I agree, which is why I didn't say that. I said, with a lot of other bonus words, that graphic novels are constrained by space, and movies are constrained by time, with respect to their dialogue, and that difference necessitates a different flow. I didn't say which had more, because I don't know which has more, and I suspect it depends on the genre and the writers in each case.

It seems like you're making very very large assumptions about both the nature of the comic books and the nature of the film, and using those assumptions to rather extremely interpret the trailers, and using that interpretation to dismiss it. You seem to have gone a long way from the available evidence in order to reach your judgement.

With the caveat of the point above, that I didn't say (or didn't intend to say, although I'm open to having my own quotes thrown back at me) one of those large assumptions you've inferred, I'll agree with you that I haven't seen the entire movie. Of course, this turns it into one of those ridiculous "I'm not empowered to judge whether I like a movie until I go spend two-plus hours in a theater watching a movie that I could have told you from the trailer that I wasn't going to like" arguments. Maybe I'm just horribly misguided for believing that if the advertisers, who are trying their best to show me the cool stuff, show me something that doesn't make me want to go see the movie, then the movie isn't going to work for me.

Deep Blue Sea or whatever? The movie with the intelligent sharks? I watched the commercial and thought the shark effects looked stupid. That was their selling point -- cool shark effects -- and it looked like bad CG in the commercial. Has anyone here seen Deep Blue Sea? Were the shark effects amazingly kickass except for the few clips I saw in the commercials? Have I been led astray by my prejudice at judging the movie based on the ads the people trying to get me to see the movie showed me?

And I was interested in hearing what people said once they'd seen it.

Which brings me to Fast Learner: Dude, I don't know if you imagined me cackling evilly as I spurned your review or what, but really, seriously, I wasn't just mouthing off and ignoring your post. Seriously. I read it and everything. Even the big words.

I caught it at a screening this morning, and was absolutely blown away. Though I haven't read the graphic novels, the whole thing absolutely and utterly comes across like a (long) graphic novel brought to life. There are no "panels" in the bad sense, but there are lots of shots, stuff with shadow and facial wrinkles and that kind of thing that absolutely scream "graphic novel" while fitting perfectly into the overall film.

Visual setting stuff, which I said was probably going to be really cool, while noted that it wasn't a selling point for me in particular.

Now, I could go through your comments piece by piece and say "Doesn't refer to the dialogue, doesn't refer to the dialogue, doesn't refer to the dialogue," over and over again, or we could just agree that your review never actually used the word dialogue, which was what, uh, my post was about. So if you're going to get indignant:

'm not going to flay you, but I don't understand why, say, you're completely ignoring my review above. You know, the one where I said that I've never read the graphic novels and yet somehow think it's a great film.

You're postulating from extremely limited information. You may not know me from Adam, but it still seems weird to completely ignore the opinions of someone who had the precise opposite experience of what you're suggesting.

I've never read or seen a Frank MIller anything. The movie was amazing.

I don't know you from Adam -- which is not a slam on you, but I have no idea whether you're someone who can take or leave dialogue and judges a movie primarily by its setting, or whether you're a dialogue snob, or what. You didn't say what you were -- you didn't say what your standards for judging were. I flat-out said what I was, and your review never mentioned the dialogue. The closest I got was you saying that the stories meshed well, which is good, and that the actors were good, although you actually referred to their sexiness more than their acting ability. That's not a slam on you, but if you made up a title for my post, it probably wouldn't be "I'm concerned that Sin City isn't going to be sexy enough, and nobody has proven to me that it will be".

So honestly, I'd love to hear your feelings on the writing and dialogue, but your initial review didn't address any of what I was talking about. Which is fine, given that I wrote my post after you wrote your review. You have nothing to feel bad about on the review, but the reason I ignored your post is because your post didn't actually mention anything my post was talking about. Yes, sexy women, cool violence, good setting -- I got the Fast Learner review. Feel free to add to it as you feel appropriate, since you have seen the movie. I am interested in your opinion. I am not particularly interested in apologizing for a post that you're trying to turn into a vindictive attack upon you and your ilk, because I'm not ignoring you.

Again, if you just didn't like the trailer, that's fine. I don't share your opinion on throwing star posture (or Uma's grip, which was certainly one that I would approve of in a junior student. It's how I was taught how to hold a katana. Her hasso-no-kamae was wrong (when she and Elle are squaring off), but everyone's is. Nice ko-gasumi, though (when she's watching her surrounding enemies in the reflections in her blade)), and I just don't believe you can judge dialogue based on out-of-context clips (for the most part; I mean, how do you judge a line like "I know."? (thinking of Han Solo, there -- GREAT line, but only in context)), but that's me.

re:Uma's grip -- no clue. I wasn't judging it by its accuracy, since my martial art doesn't do formal sword work and I have no standard. I was judging it by whether the clips I saw looked cinematically cool and varied and inventive and fun and emotively real. They didn't, at least to me, but I'm a fight scene snob, and I'm notoriously hard to satisfy there. That's honestly not a one-upsmanship thing in terms of geeky "I am more picky than you". If her accuracy in the formal sword work hit your happy button, that's awesome. That's a deeper level than I can appreciate it on.

re:Throwing Star -- really? When she does the big hold-over-the-head pose with it? I'd rewind and look again if I hadn't already deleted it from my new-almost-Tivo satellite thingie, but it looked really really bad when I saw it, like she was holding her arm in a position that would be next to impossible to generate any real throwing force from, like a bad 60's martial arts pose that Mike Myers would strike before shouting "Judo Chop!" -- maybe good in the context of the movie, which was admittedly aiming for cinematism over reality, but it looked dated and fake, not cool and poseworthy. But if I didn't see it right, I didn't see it right. That's certainly more objective and judgeable than some of the other stuff I mentioned.

As for dialogue-judging: I'm sure there have been good movies done wrong by advertising that doesn't put things in the right context. No doubt there. But when you see a movie ad that has an element that's important to you and that you think is stupid -- it could be the dialogue, the action, the setting, the humor, whatever -- do you say "Well, despite the fact that the one sample they just showed me looked stupid based on my personal standards of judgment, which do not create an objective standard but only measure my likely level of enjoyment based on factors that are important to me, I'm gonna give them a chance," and see the movie anyway? I'm asking specifically about a movie whose ads display lousyness in one area that is important to you. I've never argued that Sin City looked unsexy, unintense, or uncinematic in its setting. Um, at least, I think I've never argued that. Anybody who is interested in seeing an intense, sexy movie with cool cinematography should get in line to see Sin City. No argument there. I just said that for me, the kicker is dialogue, and all the dialogue I saw looked bad.

If all the people who watch movies because they have awesome effects saw the trailer for a movie that had really really bad effects, would we say, "Look, you can't judge the effects just based on one shot! You have to see how they fit into the whole of the movie! Maybe that obviously bad-CG shark forms a meta-shark commentary on the nature of human perception once you're actually in the movie!" And yet, dialogue is apparently impossible to judge from a trailer. If anything, I've been suckered into movies by dialogue that looked fast and witty in the trailer because the ad people clipped things shorter to pick up the pace a little bit, only to find a lot of ums and pauses in the movie that messed up the timing. I've heard great lines, gone into the theater, and come out annoyed because the three great lines in the entire movie were all in the ad, and the rest was lousy. I can't offhand think of a movie that looked to have lousy dialogue in the ads but proved to have great dialogue in the movie itself.

There are, mind you, movies that I didn't think I'd go see in the trailers but ended up loving, but not for that reason.

 

[jonesy]

Deep Blue Sea or whatever? The movie with the intelligent sharks? I watched the commercial and thought the shark effects looked stupid. That was their selling point -- cool shark effects -- and it looked like bad CG in the commercial. Has anyone here seen Deep Blue Sea? Were the shark effects amazingly kickass except for the few clips I saw in the commercials? Have I been led astray by my prejudice at judging the movie based on the ads the people trying to get me to see the movie showed me?

And I was interested in hearing what people said once they'd seen it.

I originally went to see Deep Blue Sea because of Renny Harlin, and because I have a tendency to cut him a lot of slack; and because I actually do like his movies, even Driven (but perhaps not for the reasons you'd think).

The trailers did make Deep Blue Sea look really really dumb. Which is mostly accurate.

In the movie the sharks could have been done a lot better. They looked goofy on a couple of scenes where mechanical sharks would have been better.

But still, I liked the movie because it had a great flow (npi), there weren't any moments were I'd start checking the time left, and because it seemed like they had drawn straws to see who'd lose their life next. It's a dumb but fun movie.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Canis: Definitely true, re:movies and books. I had a great time watching the Lord of the Rings movies, though, and it'd been awhile since I'd read the books, so I'm probably not the right person to do that. I also get accused of trying to be too cinematic in my own writing (ie, people saying "This would make a great movie, but I'm having trouble reading it as written down like this") in a few cases, which likely stems from the fact that when I write, I pretty much envision a movie and write the novelization of the movie in my head. So I'm probably not going to be in touch with the differences.

Fair enough. And it wouldn't do much good anyway. Even here, people's opinions on movies of any stripe aren't really going to be influenced by a logical argument. Besides, much of the "logic" we cling to depends greatly on our own point of view. Witness the recent thread on Star Wars: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=124312

That thread had a series of conversations that went like this:

Conversant 1: "I like Star Wars."

Conversant 2: "Here are 73 logical reasons why that makes you a smacktard."

Irksome Greek chorus: "Smacktard! Smacktard! Smacktard! Lucas sucks!"

Convesant 1: "Thank you for your analysis. Here are 74 logical reasons why George Lucas is better than you."

Conversant 2: "No, no, thank you. But here are 75 logical reasons George Lucas is a smacktard."

Irksome Greek chorus: "Smacktard! Smacktard! Smacktard! pwned!"

Conversant 1: "I know you are, but what am I?"

Conversant 2: "A smacktard"

Irksome Greek chorus: "Smacktard! Smacktard! Smacktard! I really want to direct."

Conversant 1: <sigh> "I like Star Wars"

But, to get back on topic... I too am usually a dialogue freak (a condition I relax for Star Wars movies). And, on further review, I think that's what turned me off the second trailer. It continued to promise an intriguing visual style without showing much of anything else.

Of course, trailers can be deceiving, and the visual style alone is probably enough to get me to part with my money when it comes to the university cinema, so I'll find out about the rest of it eventually.

 

[Fast Learner]

I don't know you from Adam -- which is not a slam on you, but I have no idea whether you're someone who can take or leave dialogue and judges a movie primarily by its setting, or whether you're a dialogue snob, or what. You didn't say what you were -- you didn't say what your standards for judging were. I flat-out said what I was, and your review never mentioned the dialogue. The closest I got was you saying that the stories meshed well, which is good, and that the actors were good, although you actually referred to their sexiness more than their acting ability. That's not a slam on you, but if you made up a title for my post, it probably wouldn't be "I'm concerned that Sin City isn't going to be sexy enough, and nobody has proven to me that it will be".

I understand what you're saying about the dialogue. But what you said was "people who haven't read the comic won't like the movie." Then you went on to explain how the dialogue would ruin it for you. You didn't connect the two, that I could tell, and so I countered your first argument and ignored the second.

I still don't follow how your love of dialogue extrapolates into people unfamiliar with the graphic novels not liking the film.

 

[takyris]

You say:

I understand what you're saying about the dialogue. But what you said was "people who haven't read the comic won't like the movie."

What I said was:

...Which is a wonderful kind of homage, a great project of transformation, and a fantastic way to create a movie that'll impress the people who loved the graphic novel and the people who don't care about dialogue, while turning off everyone else.

...

It's going to please the people who wanted a literal porting of the dialogue, but not the people who were most impressed by the spirit that the dialogue in the graphic novels conveyed. (And a whole lotta people who don't really care about dialogue as long as it doesn't get in their way are going to judge the movie on other merits, and this is hugely irrelevant for them.)

If I implied that nobody was going to like the movie except the diehard fans, then I apologize. My parse of the end of the first paragraph was that:

1) People who loved the graphic novel would likely love the movie
2) People who don’t care about dialogue (ie, it’s not a make-or-break for them) may or may not like the movie (although actually I said “will impress”, which is more positive, there, and then later changed my mind in the second paragraph and said that people who don’t care about dialogue will judge the movie on other merits, and that this discussion would be irrelevant for them)
3) Everyone else – defined by the negation of the first two arguments to be the people who did not read the graphic novel and who DO care about dialogue – will likely be unhappy.

In retrospect, this leaves out people who didn’t read the graphic novel but who like film noir, which I hadn’t considered at the time, but merits a category as well.

But I did not say, to my knowledge, that nobody who hadn't read the graphic novel would like the movie. I did say (and this is not 100% accurate, because someone will like the writing for some personal reason and someone will like the writing because they love film noir and enjoy seeing this stuff rehashed, two factors I didn't consider while initially writing this) that nobody who was coming to the movie fresh (ie, without loving the graphic novel) and considered dialogue one of their massive important make-or-break features in the enjoyment of a movie will enjoy this film.

My extrapolation that the movie wouldn't do well is flawed, however, since it's based on the premise that there are a lot of people out there for whom dialogue is important, and that's not necessarily true. So it could do very well, or it could do very badly. There's also the fact that dialogue badness is not a boolean -- there are levels of badness that will turn off increasing numbers of viewers as the badness gets worse -- which makes the issue more complex. It could be that the dialogue was bad enough to turn me off but not bad enough to turn off Average Joe, the person who likes good dialogue but doesn't mind mediocre dialogue and has to encounter really awful dialogue to find it a reason to dislike a movie.

That said, every negative Rotten Tomatoes article I've seen has included a reference to bad dialogue, and even some of the positive Rotten Tomatoes articles have mentioned the dialogue as not being a selling point of the movie. So it would seem that I'm not alone here. Week two of the box office will eventually decide whether the dialogue is bad enough that it turns off the average viewer, or just the folks with extremely high dialogue standards.

(Again, note: "High standards" is not my attempt to be a snob. That doesn't make me better. I have very low standards for setting -- it has to suck high holy heck for me to even notice. Heck, I have pretty mediocre standards for plot, given how often my friends come up with plotholes in movies while I just go, "Uh, I liked the fight scene, and they had good one-liners.")

Those are my quotes as I see them. If I said something else somewhere else, please let me know.

 

[Fast Learner]

Now I understand you, thanks. I definitely read it differently.

The dialogue is very film noir, when there is dialogue. That is, taunting, sexy, descriptive of emotions (rather than the actors portraying them), and very to-the-point. In that last sense, it is also very much like a comic book/graphic novel, with the images telling most of the story and the words simply adding emphasis.

So I would absolutely agree that if enjoyment of a film hinges on good dialogue, this will not be the film for you. However, I think, however, that the vast bulk of the movie-going public doesn't really mind poor dialogue or a general lack of it if other parts of the film are sufficiently entertaining. I suspect your personal standards don't match as much of the general public as you might think.

Me, I love great dialogue. Most of my favorite movies and nearly all of my favorite television has great dialogue. But I don't need it to enjoy a movie.

 

[Mark]

Just so this doesn't get lost if the second thread gets closed -

http://www.filmrot.com/images/sincity-comparisons/sincity.html

Thanks to Krug!

 

[takyris]

Now I understand you, thanks. I definitely read it differently.

Cool. Really wasn't gunning for you in my post. Sorry about the confusion -- I posted late, and it was a bit of a stream-of-consciousness thing.

The dialogue is very film noir, when there is dialogue. That is, taunting, sexy, descriptive of emotions (rather than the actors portraying them), and very to-the-point. In that last sense, it is also very much like a comic book/graphic novel, with the images telling most of the story and the words simply adding emphasis.

Interesting. That does give me some hope, because that's the kind of thing that really does need to gradually reel you in. If it maintains the voice throughout, that might end up qualifying as good dialogue.

So I would absolutely agree that if enjoyment of a film hinges on good dialogue, this will not be the film for you. However, I think, however, that the vast bulk of the movie-going public doesn't really mind poor dialogue or a general lack of it if other parts of the film are sufficiently entertaining. I suspect your personal standards don't match as much of the general public as you might think.

Nonrandom side comment: How well did Sky Captain do? That's as close to Sin City as I can imagine -- not in terms of genre, and not simply because it's CG-background, but because it's the most recent attempt to do a faithful modern-day recreation of a story style from the past -- in Sky Captain's case, the pulp serials. Was it a hit or a flop or something in-between? My wife and I watched it in a hotel room on our anniversary (in Canada, where I was interviewing for the job I now have, having dragged her up there from California with our then-two-month-old son when it was -25 Celsius at the hottest point in the day -- dang, I've got a supportive wife), and we agreed that it had beautiful visuals but was hampered by trying to remain true to its roots when the average audience member no longer holds the same values as the audience member at a time when the movies that it was trying to recreate were popular. (Uh, that is to say -- modern audiences aren't as much into useless women who trip during the chase scene and deliver inane airhead dialogue, and the average viewer would much rather have watched Sky Captain and Frankie than Sky Captain and Polly, because Frankie was completely anachronistic for a pulp serial but a whole lot more interesting for a modern viewer.)

If Sky Captain did well despite what I saw as its flaws, then you're definitely right -- I utterly overestimated the degree to which audiences are gonna be picky about dialogue and writing. If Sky Captain bombed, then I dunno -- people might surprise you. If Sky Captain did so-so, well, that just leaves room for everyone to be right.

Me, I love great dialogue. Most of my favorite movies and nearly all of my favorite television has great dialogue. But I don't need it to enjoy a movie.

Yeah, there's a definite difference between "Able to appreciate good dialogue" and "Require good dialogue", and I'm sorry if I implied otherwise. I'm in the "require good dialogue" camp -- if it's got beautiful fight scenes and cinematography, I'll usually cringe my way through the bad dialogue while waiting for the fights to start up again (Hello, dubbed Jackie Chan movies!), but that's about the best I can do.