a rave fan review of sin city

today i read a balls-out review of sin city i just had to quote. it comes from kuro5hin (of course).

A confession: I like comic books. I like movies. I like tits. And I like to laugh. If you can relate to me on even three of these four wavelengths, then I would say that, like me, you are going to fucking love Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City.

This is the movie that comic book fans of the generation that calls them "graphic novels" can finally go see and not feel like Hollywood has tragically misunderstood them. The big studios have taken our Spidermen, our Punishers and our Hulks, but always have they turned up their powdered little noses at our Sandmen, our Watchmen and our Mausen. Well, no more.

The ever-denominatively truncated Basin City is a dark metropolis where the cops and clergy are marginally worse than the crooks and junkies. It is a town where the mob knows better than to cross the whores and Elijah Wood has the power to creep you right the fuck out.

From the opening scene with Josh Hartnett (who didn't even make the movie poster and is credited simply as "The Man"), it becomes apparent that this isn't your grampa's comic book movie. This is the world of comic books that doesn't pretend that the world's problems can be squeezed into spandex costumes and beaten up by the good guys. No, Sin City makes all the the visceral and terrible truths of the world bigger and uglier than they could ever possibly be and, in so doing, terrifies you with its restraint. The good guys and bad guys both shoot to kill, and neither of them can be counted on to miss. In fact, often times the only thing separating one from the other is which way the camera is pointing.

This movie thrusts the viewer into a world where nothing could possibly be more noble than a schizophrenic ex-con slaughtering priests and policemen in a desperate attempt to avenge a single dead hooker. It is a visual world where even the most gratuitous and unnecessary tits and ass shot flows so effortlessly into the narrative that you have to admit that maybe it wasn't gratuitous after all. It is a film noir inspired by a comic book inspired by film noir and it is so eminently obvious that the genre has grown only stronger for the detour.

more

i must say that em1 and i have been waiting to see this film (at a time when the theatre is mostly abandoned such that we needn't suffer the slings and hurled jujubes of teenage idiots). and with the many rave reviews by actual fans of the original work and sychlyke, i'm just getting more anticiconstipated.