Choose Your Own Sin City

The film adaptation of Frank Miller's classic comic has shocking things to say about our generation [or perhaps just about Luke Baumgarten]. If shocking things frighten you, you can read a less earth-shattering version.

While my comrades went off dipping quill and ink into that southern den of iniquity, no doubt indulging all manner of wanton desire, I made a day's journey west in search of what celluloid truth and beauty [beauty, truth] might, someday, find its way inland.

Strangely, we found [intoxicants, breasts, ultra-violence, asocial computer programmers] essentially the same things.

However, where they found these things in real life, front and center, under the epilepsy lights of Las Vegas, I found them on a massive movie screen, which I chose specifically because it was a relic of 1950's cinema, and as such made viewing an homage to crime dramas and film noir all the more poignant. I was forced to sit near the front and to the far left side because asocial computer programmers also care about poignance in movie watching, and because they like to stand in long lines for days to get good seats. Also, it's hard to find parking in Seattle. When I saw the movie, it looked bent and a little pinched on one end. Distorted and poignant.

[If you haven't read the comic or if you just don't care about comics, skip to the third to last paragraph]

Sin City is a lot of little orgies. Orgies of violence, blood, dismemberment, bondage gear, breasts, dangly earrings, overacting, under-acting, smoking, drinking, criminal insanity and others. Most of all however, it is an orgy of hyper-exact adaptation. If you're a big fan of the comic, it might leave you feeling schizophrenic.

The astute media critic Ben Kromer [asocial, though not a programmer] has argued that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's adaptation of the comic all my friends gleefully hid from their parents is perfect in every way, which is to say it's too perfect in all the wrong ways.

Because he has far more pulp, [maladjusted geek] and noir credibility than I do, here are his words:

"What's bothering me? I look for the word and come up with 'inflection'. The actors are saying the words I remember, but they're saying them wrong. They don't sound the way they do in my head. It's not the actors' specific voices, it's the inflection. Too fast, too slow, too high, too low."

The biggest problem with comic book movies, if Mr. Kromer is right, is that they can never play as well onscreen as the comic played in your head.

This is true of novels as well, though it's not such a bad thing. I never fell in love with the voice I made for Moll Flanders as she slept her way up and down the social ladder of 18^th century England or even Robert Langdon's as he deciphered DaVinci's code.

Comics, though, beg you to make up voices. They beg you to play out scenes. The voices you make up always kick ass. Each scene carries the perfect tone. Everything in your head is always perfect.

Then some plebian like Michael Madsen comes along, probably doesn't even read the comic, and screws up everything. Fifteen minutes after the opening day's first showing gets out, 10,000 blogs post saying just that. He ruined everything.

Sometimes though, taking liberties with dialogue works.

The comic was at once a fervent homage to and a gentle satire of the pulp and noir genres. The film takes the satire one step further, as now there are actors, forced to recite the implausibly hard-boiled dialogue.

If you've ever read a crime novel or a pulp comic and thought to yourself, real people don't talk like that, Sin City proves you right. Shellie's [Brittany Murphy] parting soliloquy to Dwight [Clive Owen], urging him on, is brash and babydollish. With a single, massive tear poised on the apple of her cheek, she takes her time, pouting, over-mouthing the words, pausing between them.

It's time Rodriguez gives to her, offering an extended and uncharacteristic pause in a highly frenetic movie. The audience laughs.

Comic book dialog sucks, and we, realizing that it sucks, are awesome. Likewise, 15 minutes after the first showing of the day, 10,000 blogs post to that effect. That was, and we are, awesome.

This, in a sense, is what the cult of pop culture is, either what it always was or what it has become. We watch, read, or listen to things and either revel in them until they become a part of us, or we critique them with detachment, depending on which clique you roll with [depending on if you ride a Vespa or if you live with your parents].

Sin City, the film, is the perfect illustration of this. For people who loved the comic, it's just about the most faithful adaptation imaginable. As such, it's awesome.

The person who wrote and illustrated the comic also co-directed the movie. He practically used his comic panels as storyboards, but still it lacks something untouchable and certainly unfilmable. Something like childhood. As such, it's not good enough.

[Comic haters skip to here]

I could continue, but to those that have never read the comic--to those who didn't devote large chunks of their childhood and adulthood to pop culture in general--such meta-aesthetic pondering and psychological posturing would mean nothing. It probably means nothing anyway.

Sin City is starkly black and white, with occasional splotches of color. The film has lots of blood, but it's usually not red. There are beheadings and dismemberments and a lot of joking about both of those things. There are lots of female breasts. The bad guys are rapists, child molesters and murderers. The good guys are murderers too, but while onscreen they demonstrate profound good will, masculine compassion and self-sacrifice, almost not like murderers at all. Despite the strangeness of this, Sin City has many familiar tropes and themes. Good and Evil [in the Platonic sense] fight it out here. Good always wins.

If this sounds appealing to you, go watch it.