Sin City

[The_lurkeR]

Saw it yesterday... meh...

I gave it a generous 6.

My take on it has already been summed up pretty well by Takyris, Pants, and Gomez.

(For reference, I read the original Sin City comic when it came out, but not the others. Also I loved Kill Bill.)

 

[Trainz]

• cohabitation

Oh, the humanity.

 

[RangerWickett]

The trailers don't hype it accurately. They make it look like a Tarantino film, which it ain't.

I gave it a 6. I generally love Roderiguez flicks, and I usually like Frank Miller comics (never read Sin City before, though). But it must be something about the more visceral nature of cinema that made me cringe at this movie. It was the same as when I first saw Kill Bill. Now I love Kill Bill, but at my first viewing I found that the violence unsettled me, rather than entertained me. I felt the same for Sin City.

I disliked the Dwight story, except for moments with Benicio DelTorro. It could've been good, but the whole 'Valkyrie' thing grated on me; aside from that woman, Dwight seemed to be a good guy who wanted to stop people from getting hurt. But then he fawns over this woman who's pretty much just as bad as the 'villains.' And the prostitutes never got their come-uppance for killing a cop in cold blood. The other two storylines were kinda bad guys stopping worse guys, but Dwight's story was a guy choosing to work with the sexier of two groups of bad guys. I didn't like it.

The movie had some elements that I disliked, but it was ballsy enough that I enjoyed it for its style.

 

[KenM]

I hope they didn't use comic panels in this movie. Thats been done many times and its always been a failure.

The Hulk tried that a year or two ago, and we know what happened.

IMO the reason The Hulk did not do good was not because of that, but beacuse of the slow pace of the movie. The really good action stuff does not start until almost halfway though, and the poodle fight and the fight at the end was shoot to dark, hard to tell what was going on. END OF HIJACK.

Saw Sin City today, I liked it. I thought it was enjoyible if you liked the genre, very gory though. Not spetacular, but very good, IMO.

 

[king_ghidorah]

It could've been good, but the whole 'Valkyrie' thing grated on me; aside from that woman, Dwight seemed to be a good guy who wanted to stop people from getting hurt. But then he fawns over this woman who's pretty much just as bad as the 'villains.' And the prostitutes never got their come-uppance for killing a cop in cold blood. The other two storylines were kinda bad guys stopping worse guys, but Dwight's story was a guy choosing to work with the sexier of two groups of bad guys.

Dwight? The self-admitted murderer avoiding the cops with plastic surgery? The guy who was hunting a group of thugs with the intent of killing them before the women of Old Town got to them first? That's the good guy choosing to work with the sexier of two groups of bad guys? The only glimmers of good in him are his loyalty and his desire to give an unknown cop a break on the off chance he was a good cop. But he clearly had no hesitation about killing openly frequently, and for little reason, both in the comic and in the book. He just had a comic book mobster's code of ethics.

And as for killing a cop in cold blood, the impression I get regarding Jack is that he is a psychotic, woman-beating thug who planned on gang-raping a prostitute. He is not an innocent by far.

The only characters who seem at all like clear-cut good guys in Sin City are Hartigan and Nancy. Everybody else is a matter of sympathetic or unsympathetic crooks and scumbags. And I think that's pretty much the point.

 

[Kelleris]

Dwight? The self-admitted murderer avoiding the cops with plastic surgery? The guy who was hunting a group of thugs with the intent of killing them before the women of Old Town got to them first? That's the good guy choosing to work with the sexier of two groups of bad guys? The only glimmers of good in him are his loyalty and his desire to give an unknown cop a break on the off chance he was a good cop.

Actually, Dwight's stated purpose in going after Jack was to keep him from hurting anyone, not to kill him. And he tried to keep the schmuck from killing himself during Jack's "fight" with Miho, not once but several times warning him of some danger. He would probably have intervened before Miho attacked if he could have, and told, uhm, Rosario Dawson, what's her character's name...? Anyway, told them not to be too hasty killing the cop and his posse.

The plastic surgery thing is morally questionable, but well within genre "good guy" status - he was manipulated by a wicked dame into killing her husband. Apparently the Old Town prostitutes were the ones who helped him beat the rap, which is why he seems bizarrely loyal to them.

This info is from a website I dug up after seeing the movie. The Champions character sheet for Dwight on that page had him with the psychological disadvantage "sex makes him stupid", so that explains some of the other stuff.

Of course, he's still not a clear-cut good guy, like Hartigan, but that's kinda the point. In fact, I spent most of the Yellow Bastard arc wondering how on earth such a morally strong person could exist in a place as corrupt and, well, evil as Sin/Basin City.

Oh, and the he didn't shoot first in the whole episode with the IRA mercs. They dacked him with a sniper rifle before he even saw them. The "fight" with the mob guys is less clear-cut, but still easily within the range of this genre's heroes.

That said, I didn't like the Dwight episode much either. Too little set-up to do what they did with the character and the Rosario Dawson prostitute just irked me.

 

[orbitalfreak]

I gave it a 5/10.

I'm not really sure if I liked this movie or not; I'm coming away from the theatre with mixed feelings. I found lots of the film very enjoyable, but other parts had me feeling very "meh" about the whole thing. I'm not regretting having seen it, but I do wish I'd seen it at matinee prices.

Stylistically, the movie was amazing. A perfect capture of over-the-top film noir. I've not read the graphic novels for this, but it was still obvious that the movies pulled from that a lot for visual impact. The effects used to "comic-book-i-fy" the film were beautiful. The cinematography, like that of Sky Captain, was superb.

I'm a bit prudish when it comes to sex, nudity, and excessive violence in film. I was a bit uncomfortable with it at first, but fell into liking it as the film progressed. It just seemed to fit. Except Jessica Alba staying clothed. I could have done without that.

Sometimes, though, things just didn't feel right. The guy talking with the arrow sticking out of him was really jarring, pacing-wise. Here we have a dark, gritty movie, suddenly interjected with slapstick humor better found in Warner Brothers cartoons. Hilarious, but it just didn't work for me.

I also didn't like the three separate storyline format of the film. It made things hard to follow occasionally, especially dealing with character overload. Sometimes, the over-the-top violence went too over-the-top. I understand that that was how the film was made to be, and mostly I enjoyed it. It just seemed to go a little too far in some places, beyond what it should have in order to feel right. The blasting off of the arm, the stump left after cannibalization, and the weird way the cops helmet split after the axe hit, they all seemed... off... to me.

Elijah Wood's character, Kevin, was very flat. No motivation for what he was doing, no development of the character. He was just "Bad Guy #3" in my eyes, and I really didn't care about him (even anti-caring, since he was bad).

Quite a few great things about the movie, but enough of it had me thinking "They could have done that differently," and an overall feeling of "Great looking (including stylized dialogue), but not really memorable as far as story is concerned." Again, 5/10.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

And I'll jump in here and give this thing a 10. I loved everything about this movie. Marv had the best story, of course, but I enjoyed all of them and had no trouble at all following all of the characters. I loved the narration through the entire thing, though it wasn't even really narration as the characters were literally speaking it half the time.

The black and white just made it even better, especially the stark white of the blood, which was probably more jarring than when it was a deep red. And I don't care that Elijah Wood's character had no development...he had what he needed. Creepiness. And damn was he creepy.

 

[Mark]

With only one vote below a "5" and the vast majority at seven or better, I'd have to guess that most people who saw it and voted found this to be worth thier time and money. I think I will have to put this on the short list of flicks to see. Thanks!

 

[Wormwood]

I don;t know why I failed to enjoy this film.

I really loved the comics---I own the entire series and I've enjoyed them for years.

But seeing them brought to life on the big screen left me cringing uncomfortably in my seat a couple of times.

I guess I'm willing to accept certain comic-book conventions when they are in print, but I don;t find them so effective on film. The same dialogue that was evocative in the comic books sounded terrible when delivered by an actor.

Sorry, but I gave it a 3 on substance and 8 on style, with a one-point deduction for being too long by 20 minutes.