Will Be At Its Best on DVD

Rating: 2/10 (6 April 2005)

Someone suggested that whether or not you like Robert Rodriguez' and Frank Miller's SIN CITY came down to whether or not your Liberal or Conservative. The Conservatives, he said, were more likely to love the film.
I didn't much care for SIN CITY but political d'ruthers are irrelevant with regard to it.
I'm as Liberal as any anti-crypto fascist zombie brigade-bashing elitist snob can be. I'll fight the neocon Death Cult so long as I have breath in my body and wiggle to my fingers. But that had nothing to do with my reaction to the FILM.
I wasn't offended, didn't find it degrading to women, didn't mind the violence; I enjoy graphic novels, love comics, hell, I even write stuff like this (take a peek at my story, "Catching" in the anthology, SEX CRIMES). My problem was -- and this was a beautifully realized, well acted comic book -- that it was a comic book.
Comics/graphic novels make their point viscerally, they do it  in and out  in 15 - 20 minutes; they allow you linger on image, to move back or forth in time, to jump and skip at your rate. Comics don't have to be real. They exist in that twilight state between the shadows of the imagination and the world in which we live and breathe.
SIN CITY is a well-made, beautifully realize, amusing 45 million buck comic book. It costs $9.50 and takes you two hours to get through. It gives you no more character development, no more story than a $2.50 book that you can hover over allows you.
Movies have to BE, exist in a one frame, one that moves, bends, adjusts moment by moment. At their best, films give you some character progressionsomeone leans something along the way. Movies, at their heart are about change. They enforce a linear progression: we sit down, they begin, two hours later, they end (well, LORD OF THE RINGS gave you a year's intermission between acts). Yes, Rodriguez flips and shuffles time in SIN CITY, but it's at his rate, dealer's choice.
Maybe this film would best be seen, not on the big screen, but on a well-indexed DVD, one that allows shuffle and shuttle, one that lets you freeze and dwell on image. But, in the theater, for a film fan...it's not worth the emotional hype its being given.