A Surreal Experience

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2005)

Saw Sin City tonight, and I can't remember a more bizarre movie watching experience. Five days after its release, at a 7 pm show time an hour north of Chicago, and the theater was dead. The same girl who sold my ticket also sold me my pop and popcorn. And this was a twelve screen theater complex. Two older kids walked up and asked for a a job application, but no one else was buying tickets or concessions. I walked down a short hallway to theater number twelve, and looked in. I was hesitant to sit down at first. The floor was sticky and the armrests greasy, and I saw a few broken chairs down one aisle, but what made me really pause was that it was five minutes before the scheduled run and nobody was there. I even started to walk out, just as the promos were starting, but then I saw trash left over from an earlier crowd and decided it must be a last minute kind of neighborhood. What the hell. I took the perfect seat, in the middle of the theater, two thirds of the way back from the screen. It was just me. I don't usually see movies alone, but the buzz was up. Buzz from IMDb, buzz from local radio shows, buzz from my wife who saw it on a girl's escape the night before. And still, an absolutely dead movie theater in Waukegan, Illinois. Lakehurst Theaters. Six bucks a pop, even though they charge ten bucks just a few miles down the road. Even odder, the promos were limited to one trailer, no ads, only three minutes long and suddenly the movie started. Two or three people drifted in during Bruce Willis's version of a Sam Spade narration. One person had a lights-up cell phone, even took a call about an hour into the film. She was courteous, though, and slunk down in her chair and talked quietly. Three more people walked in midway through the picture, apparently after their first choice ended. One of them was a kid, maybe eleven years old, the others his parents or guardians. They stayed ten minutes or so, which was longer than I thought they would considering the content they walked in on. Then it was back to just me and the first three, but by the time the movie ended and I got up to go, the others had already left before me. I left my trash and walked out in the hall, and still there was no one, no one in the halls between the twelve theaters, no one in the lobby but the one girl who doubled at the ticket and popcorn counter. "Have a nice night," she said, and as I responded in kind, "You, too," I considered that she might have been starved for social interaction. Me, too.
When the theater is more surreal and dark than a movie that depends on those characteristics, it's probably not fair to rate the film, but I'll give Sin City three stars out of four, all for its cinematography and make-up and caricaturistic style. My wife compared it to Pulp Fiction, but please, baby: The soundtrack sucks, there's nothing remotely like Pulp's humor or witty dialog, and for all the names in the cast there's really no acting that rises above the make-up and flash. There is also an air of misogyny in Sin City, and, yes, violence. Tarantino used to pride himself on how his violent shock shots were more suggested than actually on-camera, but I guess the standards have changed. And where the story loop in Pulp Fiction was absolutely cool and original, it felt a little stale this time. Sure, I'll want to see it again, to figure some of it out. But next time, even if it's ten bucks, I think I'll find another theater.