There is something, very... very... wrong here

Rating: 1/10 (21 June 2005)

There is something, very... very... wrong here
Not specifically with the movie,though there is much wrong with that as well. No what disturbs me is this laudatory praise for a film, that even adjusting for varying degrees of taste, and standards, and mores... is by construction an empty, soulless movie.
Don't get me wrong, my issue isn't comics, or violence, or brutality or sex. My issue isn't with these things in a film, it's with these things in lieu of a film.
I have an issue with violence, and idiocy, misanthropy, and misogyny when these things fail to advance a story or a morality. It's the problem I have with Natural Born Killers, or Kill Bill, or... WWE wrestling or most reality television.
Don't get me wrong, I like good horror and action films as much as the next guy. But I ask of them to be films, to have a story, a plot, a moral center, a morality.
The negative, hateful aspects of our nature, the brutality, the hatred, the torture, the violence, when done for no other reason than to revel in these traits, is what I consider true pornography. I think films like this, as one excellent reviewer stated, are soft substitutes for snuff films.
I'm not a comic-book hater or snob, I know there are several people in the Comic medium... making riveting, admirable work. Names like Moore, Priest, Bendis, come to mind. And Frank Miller.
I'm a fan of Miller, but his work has never translated well to the big screen. His work, often uncredited, was the inspiration for most of the comic book movies of the last 20 years. And most of them are really, really bad.
And people are usually content to blame the director for making changes to the source. Here Rodriguez... to headoff any such comments, crams all the Sin City stories into one Miller inspired red, black and white screen sized comic book panel. A commendable idea that unfortunately fails horribly in the execution.
Here's a very brief outline of why:
-look, the look that has been praised for being garishly comic booky, is also its flaw. Page and screen are different mediums. What seems serious or haunting in one, comes off as campy and ludicrous in the other. Rourke's makeup, the band aids, the blood, the cheesy blown off limbs... it comes off as cheep and stupid.
-casting- casting name actors, stars, was a mistake, Because you're always distinctly aware it's rourke, and hauer, and willis, and madsen, play-acting these characters. There's no "acting" here. The film is really with few exceptions, full of poor, cartoony performances that left me bored out of my mind in the theater.
-structure- it was a mistake to make SinCity a melding of four different stories, rather than pick one book and flesh it out into a real story.
The reason is... Frank Miller repeats himself... a lot.
And the repetition that goes overlooked when there are months between these stories on the page, becomes glaringly obvious when followed one after the other on the big screen. Around the 3rd head in the toilet, or castration by gun riff, or Black evil henchmen slavish stereotype, and I was not only seriously bored, but also more than a little disappointed.
You begin to see Miller has some reoccurring issues going on here, and he really has not had anything new to say in the last 20 years, but keeps reworking his same old fetishes of big butts, big lips, toilet humor, and castration over and over again.
It came as something as a surprise to me, a Frank Miller fan, to realize just what a bloody hack he has become.
I wonder if looking at his work compressed... if it has become obvious to him as well.
A real director would have caught the failings of this structure, the repetition, the substitution of toilet humor, parody, and violence for anything resembling character. But like Miller himself, this film is directed by two others who have for the last few years simply been repeating themselves.
Rodriguez, who while competent at staging action scenes, is exceedingly incompetent at creating characters... situations, that we remotely care about.
And an action scene where you don't care if the character ducks a bullet or not, where there is no suspense, or fear or love for the character, is one of the most boring things in the world. Rodriguez has not made a good movie since his first one, and as his budgets have grown bigger he's grown equally better at crafting movies, filled with boring scenes... of action. Action drained of everything that makes it ... action.
Tarantino, off his equally bankrupt and boring Kill Bill series, has proved himself an equally flawed director. 2 once promising directors, 1 once great minimalist writer, add up to a film that is about noise over substance, laziness over character, and attitude over intellect.
In short they have given us a film for an age and a generation that no longer has any idea what quality is. A generation of monkeys who know neither beauty or brilliance, but simply flashing colors, loud noises, and broad photography of balls or breasts. And of course violence.
Violence.
This... WWE, Rush Limbaugh, Fear Factor, nightly news, bomb them all, Black men villains, Black women hors... generation knows violence. Maybe because it's all they're being shown these days.
Stereotypes.
You want to check out some good Comic Book inspired flicks try:
The first Crow First Two Superman movies 2nd Spiderman The first Punisher-with Dolph Lundgren, and Louis Gosett Jr. First Robocop 1st Matrix League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1st Blade
Any of the above is better than SinCity, a film that ultimately has too many sins to recommend it.