Well, I saw the controversial Sin City last night and my reaction was much closer to Edelstein’s than to Taylor’s. But, of course, that just proves I am in fact a pimply fanboy, aging badly, according to Ella Taylor. And in this aggrieved fanboy mode, can I just ask what kind of reviewer mistakes the barrel of an automatic pistol for a “dagger.” wasn’t she paying attention? The movie looks great and is thrilling. I don’t think you will find well-crafted lessons on “how we live†but something that takes the visual aspect of movies seriously—if you don’t like it, fine, but at least it is fully a movie where every element is working together in a stunning way. Manohla gives it some lukewarm praise but ultimately finds it a bore, as does Hoberman—no doubt in Film Comment both will give it one or two stars while the latest by Godard—a French-accented monologue about “the elusiveness of the past and the duplicities of cinema†accompanying a two hour tracking shot of Isabelle Huppert walking across a Parisian parking lot where all the cars are on fire—receives four. And, by the way, what’s up with skipping Sin City and watching
But, yes, the movie is great fun—I learned nothing, hooray! But in some ways I find excessive style to be more edifying than some well-photographed story about, say, well-meaning people in crisis. The exuberance of such a highly detailed and controlled visual style seems to counter the cynicism and brutality of the actual subject matter of the film—something that the few critics I’ve read seem to overlook. But they also seem to regard style as something that overlays a film—there’s either too much or too little to convey a story but the story is always primary. Sin City makes the narrative visual which is highly unusual in most movies these days. To its great credit, also, it does not pummel the viewer with an egregiously overwrought soundtrack, but allows the dialogue and images to move the film forward, with the music as subtle emphasis only.
I’d like to say more—but I wonder if anyone else has seen it yet, and just how much I should say….do we address the latest media controversy over film violence and its excesses? I just heard a commentator bemoan that Americans made this the top film of the weekend just as the Pope was dying—proving again our utter corruption and submission to Hollywood’s darkest impulses…
we skipped it on opening weekend night to catch it instead at a matinee–probably today (monday). please to hold off on substantive comments for one more day.
we have returned from a matinee priced viewing of “sin city”. it was great, though i thought it went on about 15 minutes too long–the last section felt a little unnecessary. i will now go read the dismissive reviews that we discussed earlier but i will say that it did not strike me as an empty, amoral movie: if anything it was deeply moral, if in a quaint comic-book kind of way; which is probably the point since it is a comic book.
while i agree with michael’s comments about style and story i will repeat my comment about “sky captain and the world of tomorrow”–that there is something a little off about an essentially cheap medium being translated at great expense into another. that being said i think a serious film critic–dargis and co. not me–should take a little more seriously the question of how this film (and others) is mixing media and keeping pace with changing narrative modes. “sin city” reminded me often of the video game “max payne”, itself a take on old-style noir filtered through john woo and “the matrix”. there are new ways of telling stories that are as worthy of attention as the stories themselves.
every movie of the last 10 years is about 15 minutes too long, including the recent “Cursed” which I found to be about 85 minutes too long . except Christina Ricci turning into a wolf is kind of sexy…
regarding the morality of Sin City–and in relation to the critics I’ve heard (albeit on nutty right-wing talk radio) bemoan the opening of the film on the same weekend as the Pope’s death–I wonder if any of these critics have reflected on the emphasis on bodily pain/mutilation/ destruction that typically accompanied fire and brimstone preaching, especially of the Catholic variety that emphasizes the pains of Hell? All that hand-wringing over the violence in Sin City while El Greco paints the crucifixion like a nightmare and Bosch gets away with some crazy bird cutting a guy’s head off while shitting him out at the same time…. or something like that, you get my drift. In brief, extreme violence often accompanies the most unrelenting moralism—perhaps these critics should reflect on the fact that Sin City seems to take the religious dogma of corruption, justice, damnation, etc.,in the same way that horror films like The Exorcist do, as completely legitimate and true, but from a reverse angle. As Arnab rightly points out the film is not amoral—its cynicism and brutality is the other side of uncritical religiosity. Passion of the Christ would be perfect on a double bill with Sin City.
[SPOILERS AHEAD!!]
In fact, Sin City made me think of the sentimentality of something like Mickey Spillane where Mike Hammer gets all weepy over the stars and stripes, capitalism and the family when he shoots a transvestite in the gut or imagines himself machine-gunning dozens of commies until their blood runs through the streets. I mean, what can a man do in the face of such unmediated corruption except to clear it away? The most morally questionable aspect of Sin City is not the violence at all but the figure of Hartigan (Bruce Willis) who according to some rigorous logic must sacrifice himself in order to save Nancy—nothing to do in the face of pure innocence (made even “more†innocent for having been victimized) except blow your brains out, especially if anything like sexual attraction compromises your paternal role. Of course, genres like film noir and horror—all the things Sin City plays with in a provocative way—always make use of such rather stark and often questionable figures, gestures, etc.? Does Sin City play with these ideas or submit to them? But it would be nice both that critics start paying attention to alternative narrative forms but also that they take a lesson from the dated outbursts over movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch and evaluate whether violence can’t be something essential to a movie (its “vision†for lack of a better term right now) and connected to its other concerns instead of just being something you “turn up†or “turn down.â€
I can’t say I liked the film, which disappoints me, but I have never liked Frank Miller’s stuff. Elijah Wood in the Charlie Brown shirt was my favorite thing. Anyone know what part Tarantino directed?
Taratino did the Benicio / Clive Owen car ride.
Was it just the car ride? I thought he might have directed the whole sequence where Jackie gets turned into a “pez dispenser?”
i like how mark answers his own questions.
what is the capital of kentucky?
frankfurt
let me add some substance lest i be accused of being all style: why in ella taylor’s review does she take such exception to rodriguez putting a “shot and cut” credit rather than “cinematograhy” and “edited by”? does this refer again, as per michael, to some sort of reverence for “authentic” cinema?
It was an odd cheap shot for Taylor to take by singling out Rodruiguez’s credit. After all, there is no one in Hollywood who comes closer to singlehandedly making studio films. He writes (except in Sin City), directs, edits, photographs, co-produces and co-scores his own films. Maybe she would have been happier to see Rodruiguez’s name showing up for 6 straight credits, but I admire the Shot & Cut credit he gave himself.
I got to see him speak last year at a music supervisor conference, and he is so engaged in every aspect of film – so in love with every duty – that it was really exciting just to watch him talk about it all.
It’s Frankfort, Arnab. I grew up there. Now, Sin City. I recognize that graphic novels and video games offer up new (and, for some, exciting) forms of pop narrative but there doesn’t seem to be a lot that is “alternative” about either. In fact, Sin City struck me as a poor man’s Pulp Fiction shot in front of a green screen (and cut, ostensibly, on a computer). I dug the Mickey Rourke sequence (felt invested in his revenge drama), and for about 45 minutes I was hooked by the film’s dizzying visual style (and Elijah Wood was creepy fun as was Nick “The Man Without A Face” Stahl) but then the naked ladies (arsenal firmly strapped to their g-strings) showed up and Bruce Willis started making out with his lap-dancing Lolita and, well . . . I’m relatively red-blooded, and am, for the most part, hetero-erotically inclined, but I found the representations of women troubling (and I grew tired of the film’s hermetic construction). More troubling, however, was the film’s gleeful willingness to distance itself from its own hyper-fetishistic depiction of screen violence. I’ve been reading Jonathan Letham’s collection of essays over the last few days and, well, if Sin City becomes this generation of thirteen-year-old’s Star Wars, then I fear there will be a lot less investment in alternative narrative forms thirty years down the road. I think Anthony Lane hit it on the head when he wrote the film appears to know “everything about violence and nothing about suffering.” That’s what distinquishes this film (all of Rodriguez’s films?) from Tarantino’s (or Chan-wook Park’s). In Kill Bill, you empathized with Beatrice’s suffering and you walked out of the theatre contemplating humanity. Sin City doesn’t do that and strikes me as a film that is all flash and very little substance.
I’m not adding much–but I would especially echo Jeff’s comments… aside from Mickey Rourke’s sequence (and–as an aside–Rourke should have been in the studio to help Bruce Willis figure out how to do voiceover), I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t dislike it, either. I was–gasp!–bored. Like Mark, I find Miller–in my few forays into comic books–perhaps visually arresting but narratively inert. And I’ll go ahead and affirm Frisoli’s point about Spillaney sentimentality. The folks I went with laughed, finding the narration ludicrously and intentionally bad. I winced, because it sounded all too sincere in some ways.
But enough dull rehashing: the point I’d add is about pleasure. I never enjoyed the film. Its stylized look carried me a bit, but only when Marv poured pills down his face, or dragged someone alongside a car, did my own engines rev.
I walked out thinking of, fondly recalling “Kill Bill.” The vividly brutal anime sequence and the following sequence in Japan, culminating with the (ludicrous?) ballet-slash-battle between tuxedo-clad masses and the Bride…. What exactly was it that made that reverent upgrade of exploitational pop shlock better than this one?
It might be the suffering–there is something sincere about how people experience pain in Tarantino (and Chan-wook Park). But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the suffering is not part of an ethical ground which anchors the violence, which makes it acceptable or more accessible.
For instance, what struck me in both “Bill” and “Oldboy” is that, despite the convoluted narratives unpacking the revenge motivation, the ‘origin’ is lost in the many pleasures of how the revenge occurs. Or, put another way, in a revenge plot the revenger says: hey, here’s why I’m doing this. But then goes bats imagining and reimagining and enacting and reenacting convoluted scenarios, which branch so far afield and so far from justification that we could (and should) safely put ‘motive’ to rest. It ain’t about a just cause; it’s about a continuous amplifying of the reactions which break free from the (dull) moral order of right/wrong and become sublimely, pleasurably, ends in themselves. The swordmaker in “Kill Bill 1” says that “Revenge is a forest.” That is exactly it–we may go into the forest for some reason, but once there–it’s all wolves and lost children, baby, and there ain’t no clean path to follow.
Now back to pleasures and suffering and “Sin” v. “Kill.” I think I buy Jeff’s point that suffering somehow gives shape and purpose to the violence in the latter. But I want to say that such ‘purpose’ is narrative, not ethical: the pleasures are in the extravagant mechanisms of plot opened up by revenge. That’s why I liked Marv; he just starts killing and torturing, assuming that someone will eventually produce an answer that actually fits his question. (And his nemesis–scary Cannibal Brown–is also neatly, wonderfully divorced from any “pure” purpose. He ain’t just a sicko–heck, he’s a sweet boy, as Rutger Hauer tells us…)
But I’ll go one step further: when the Bride gets buried alive, or gets her ass kicked, or brutalized in the hospital, she suffers tremendously. I may tell myself, oh, man, that’s awful: now she can do whatever she wants to them, and they’ll deserve it. But I think what those scenes do is FREE me to revel in her consequent violence’s anarchic attack on everyone and everything around her. I can just fucking enjoy… and not worry about pesky ethics. “Sin City” (aside from Marv) gets this all wrong–as did Spillane. Endless justification shuts down narrative pleasures, keeps returning us to original sin, rather than allowing us to revel in the mortal condition of sinfulness, rather than a pat justification opening up all kinds of narrative invention. And, fuck, if I want that, I’d still go to church.
A brief addendum:
I think I’m right about the escape from morality in Bill 1. But I think Bill 2, after the delirium of the first, does something more complicated pulling us back into a sense of ethics–albeit one ‘grounded’ in the cross-cultural representational universes of the revenge picture. And there is a complexity to the suffering and the conversation in Bill 2 which invites ambiguous attention to the ‘purpose’ of all that fun mayhem in Bill 1…. but, again, I find that this actually amplifies my pleasures in the text. I don’t disavow the violence, but nor can I fully relish …. or somehow my pleasures and pains are mutually imbricated–just like the Bride’s? Now I’m getting too fancy for my own britches.
I remember in Kill Bill I when Beatrice kills the Vivica A. Fox character and I was caught up in the exhilarating fun of the choreography, but then I had to confront the six-year-old daughter who witnessed her mother’s death and my response became complicated somewhat. I don’t think there is necessarily anything ethical or moral about that choice, but it does set up an ambivalence about screen violence that never quite goes away. I do agree with you Mike about the Jacobean qualities these films embrace–where the baroque eloquence of the violence releases the reader/viewer to revel in the revenge scenarios to come, but I would still argue that Kill Bill continually foregrounds Beatrice’s suffering throughout her journey (I think Sin City wants to accomplish this during the Marv section but is not successful perhaps because of the film’s total fidelity to its source). There may not be a clean path to revenge, but it doesn’t make it any less emotionally complicated (something Webster, Ford and their ilk do not do very well if I am honest with myself). Think about the coda in Kill Bill II–pleasure and suffering co-mingle and what should be a “happy” ending is more ambiguous and open-ended.