Sin City (2005)

Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books. In the first of three separate but loosely related stories, Marv (Mickey Rourke in heavy makeup) tries to track down the killers of a woman who ended up dead in his bed. In the second story, Dwight's (Clive Owen) attempt to defend a woman from a brutal abuser goes horribly wrong, and threatens to destroy the uneasy truce among the police, the mob, and the women of Old Town. Finally, an aging cop on his last day on the job (Bruce Willis) rescues a young girl from a kidnapper, but is himself thrown in jail. Years later, he has a chance to save her again.

Read our interview with Frank Miller.

Based on three of Miller's immensely popular and immensely gritty books (The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard), Sin City is unquestionably the most faithful comic-book-based movie ever made. Each shot looks like a panel from its source material, and director Rodriguez (who refers to it as a "translation" rather than an adaptation) resigned from the Directors Guild so that Miller could share a directing credit. Like the books, it's almost entirely in stark black and white with some occasional bursts of color (a woman's red lips, a villain's yellow face). The backgrounds are entirely digitally generated, yet not self-consciously so, and perfectly capture Miller's gritty cityscape. And though most of Miller's copious nudity is absent, the violence is unrelentingly present. That may be the biggest obstacle to viewers who aren't already fans of the books and who may have been turned off by Kill Bill (whose director, Quentin Tarantino, helmed one scene of Sin City). In addition, it's a bleak, desperate world in which the heroes are killers, corruption rules, and the women are almost all prostitutes or strippers. But Miller's stories are riveting, and the huge cast--which also includes Jessica Alba, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Michael Clarke Duncan, Devin Aoki, Carla Gugino, and Josh Hartnett--is just about perfect. (Only Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen, while very well-suited to their roles, seem hard to separate from their established screen personas.) In what Rodriguez hopes is the first of a series, Sin City is a spectacular achievement. --David Horiuchi

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The Graphic Novels and Books	Films by Robert Rodriguez	From Graphic Novel to Big Screen
The Soundtrack	Films by guest director Quentin Tarantino	Crime on DVD

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 Sin City DVD
This movie is great. I had a hard time getting it here. I ordered the first from and independent person selling on Amazon. They canceled it on me and said nothing...I waited and waited and thought it got lost in the mail, then tried tracking it and found it hadn't been sent because the one they had got damaged. No one told me though. They had even refunded my money without a word to me. I reordered it from the actual Amazon as a new product and had it in 2 business days. I'd say if you're going to buy something...just buy it from Amazon's wharehouse, it's safer. April 5, 2008

 High POW Factor and Overloaded Extras in the Collector's Edition DVD Set Make for Audacious Thrill Ride Into Sin City
A visually audacious movie and an unpredictably wild ride into palookaville, this is one unique film viewing experience. I am not familiar with Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, but my guess is that Miller, who shares a co-director credit with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, has remained faithful in capturing the hard-boiled, crime-infested world of Basin City and its cynical inhabitants. This 2005 film takes a visual cue from 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow by green-screening the backdrops and using digitally-produced images as the landscape, but that's where the similarity ends. Instead of Sky Captain's sepia shadings, this one is in vividly rendered black-and-white with carefully selected splashes of color (perhaps inspired by Steven Spielberg's use of a red coat in the otherwise black-and white Schindler's List). It evokes the perfect feeling for its modern-day film noir sensibilities which includes pulp fiction-type dialogue and a rogue's gallery of exaggerated characters, some made up in prosthetics to make you think you've landed in the dark side of a Dick Tracy comic strip. But Miller's world feels much different, at once capturing the cartoonish, highly stylized violence of Quentin Tarnatino's films (he is identified as "Special Guest Director" though I'm unclear what he exactly did) and the special effects-driven black humor of Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her (which coincidentally starred Bruce Willis).

The plot revolves around three separate stories that share some of the supporting characters but little more than that story-wise. Continuing to improve and deepen with age, Willis plays a tough-talking cop named Hartigan in the first one. Just before accepting his pension, he pursues one last case to save an 11-year old girl from the clutches of a murderous psychopath who happens to be the son of a US senator. The girl grows up to be a stripper, played blandly by a Lolita-esque Jessica Alba. Completely unrecognizable as the actor who once enticed and coerced Kim Basinger in Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks, Mickey Rourke portrays Marv, a contract killer who falls in love with a beautiful hooker who is murdered in her sleep. His journey in finding her killer creates the most concurrently harrowing and darkly hilarious joyride in the movie, replete with decapitated heads of beautiful women mounted on a wall, a mute psycho-killer played by Elijah Wood (stunt casting for sure but intriguing in exposing a dark side to his Frodo persona) and a comic electric-chair execution scene. Rourke is a revelation, grotesquely ugly and built like a Mac truck but strangely insightful and impervious to what happens to his character.

The third story is the most surreal with a monotone-voiced Clive Owen, an almost heroic fugitive named Dwight, who saves a mouthy barmaid (an annoying Brittany Murphy) and a gang of empowered prostitutes (led by his former lover played in convincing dominatrix fashion by Rosario Dawson) from a corrupt cop. A Cyrano-nosed Benicio del Toro portrays the cop with his trademark fiery menace in what feels like a throwback to his career before Traffic. Dead people don't stay dead in any of the stories, but in this one, the concept is taken to an extreme, and the clutches between Owen and Dawson amid the violence provide a surprisingly amusing touch. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and it's nice to see some otherwise under-the-radar actors get a chance to chew on some scenery in atypical roles, chief among them Carla Gugino as a perennially nude lesbian parole officer, Nick Stahl as the senator's son who becomes the comically disgusting Yellow Bastard, and in seething, whatever-happened-to-them cameos, Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer.

All the ingredients are so over-the-top that I was hoping the three stories would synthesize more than they do perhaps in the hope of a greater untapped theme. Moreover, for a movie so dependent on style to sustain itself over its two-hour-plus running time, it does feel a bit overlong and at times, repetitive in its visual elements. After all, one can take in only so many severed heads and limbs and heads shoved in toilets, as well as the inordinate amount of blood splattering in colors ranging from red to white to yellow. But no matter, as Rodriguez and Miller have fashioned something quite startling and entertaining here, a comic book come to life. Not for everyone's tastes but this is fun for those willing to take the ride. The incremental value of the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set over the standard single disc will depend on whether you have become obsessed with this cult film since there is only a behind-the-scenes featurette on the single disc.

Disc One contains the 124-minute, theatrical-release version with an excessive three audio commentaries. The first is with Rodriguez and Miller, who focus mainly on the book-to-screen translation and benefits from the author's perspective. The second has Tarantino and Willis join Rodriguez, and the focus turns to the technical aspects of the production even though Tarantino's contribution to the film is marginal at best. The third commentary track is actually the recording of the audience reaction at the movie's Austin première in order to replicate the experience one would have had at the theater. The remaining extras on Disc One may seem superfluous if you already sat through the first two commentary tracks. Six featurettes are offered - a five-minute short on how Miller and Rodriguez got together ("How It Went Down: Convincing Frank Miller to Make the Film"); seven minutes on Tarantino's contribution to "The Big Fat Kill" segment ("Special Guest Director, Quentin Tarantino"); seven minutes on the vintage 1950's cars used in the film; en minutes focused mainly on the weaponry; nine minutes with special makeup effects supervisor Greg Nicotero on how the looks of the principal characters were achieved; and finally, nine minutes with costume supervisor Nina Proctor about the stylized clothing. There is an odd feature on Disc One, "Sin-Chroni-City Interactive", which allows you to pick characters and locations and get a timeline view of relevant events. Disc One ends with two theatrical trailers.

Disc Two contains the 147-minute version of the film advertised as "recut, extended, and unrated". The additional 23 minutes amount to expanded cuts in each episode which allow them to be presented as separate short films. This gives you the option to watch the film as an integrated whole or separately. Each segment has its own menu of scene selections. From a story standpoint, the incremental value of the footage and flexibility is marginal at best. Five more featurettes fill up Disc Two - a twelve-minute short called "15 Minute Flic School" in which Rodriguez shares behind-the-scenes information and basic tricks of the trade; ten minutes where the entire film is shown in accelerated fashion to show how the actors had to improvise in front of green screens; a 17-minute piece on Tarantino's shooting of his scene; and most dispensable, nine minutes of a concert from Willis and his band the Accelerators at Antone's nightclub in Austin, and six minutes of Rodriguez sharing his recipe for "Sin City" breakfast tacos (seriously!). Beyond the discs is the complete Sin City graphic novel in printed form, The Hard Goodbye (Sin City, Book 1: Second Edition). April 2, 2008

 Living Breathing Comic Book
I haven't read the graphic novels, so I can't really disagree with someone who trashes this movie because it might be unfaithful to the source material. I'm usually hard on film adaptations of books I love.

I loved this movie. It's big, ridiculous, cheesy, loud, and the dialogue is complete camp. I never saw any film that came closer to being a comic book than this. It's really incredible. I can't say it's a great film, I mean, the characters are paper-thin, the plot is strictly pulp novel potboiler stuff. The acting was all way over the top. The whole movie was, in fact, way over the top. But for those who grew up reading comics, it's an absolute gas. This movie was about as fun to watch as any I've ever seen. Despite it's grotesque violence, it really appeals to the kid in me!
March 21, 2008

 Power comes from lying: a fair trade!
"Sin city" is one of these films you will never be able to forget due among other things, its original style with smart blinks respect the Noir genre but told, spattered and hovered by those dark, bizarre and tragic atmosphere where no one is safe about nothing and where in every step you take, may lead you to the same entrails of the hell.

Based on the famous entries of Robert Miller, the movie turns around two well defined stories intermingled, where the revenge and the implacable thirst of justice works out not as mere legal practice but a natural necessity in order to re-establish some sinister state of things to its place of origin.

The first story tells about the horrible kidnapping of Nancy, by a bunch leaded by the sadistic son of a Senator and a sinister web of corruption around it. A cop resists and walks around this nasty marsh and does what the thinks he's right. But a dark complot awaits for him and after eight years in prison he will have to make justice by his own . The other mixed story collides with Nancy in the bar, where Marty tries desperately to seek the murder of Goldie the only woman who loved him although his ugliness (Mickey Rourke is in top form with this underground character who reminds to Johnny the handsome).

The third story is about the last frontier, habited by women who live and survive from harassments, abuses, rapes and unthinkable touches of evil.

The film is told, through voices in off, another honoured tribute to the Noir genre. There are emblematic scenes, filled of artistic violence in the middle of the endless night.

From its immediate release, it became a cult movie.
February 21, 2008

 Original, exciting and unbelievably entertaining
Sin City, based on Frank Miller's successful series of comic books of the same name is an intense thrill ride from start to finish. The film was directed by Miller himself as well as Robert Rodriguez, along with Quentin Tarantino, who directed a small segment of the final cut.

The ensemble cast is tremendous and includes (among others): Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Mickey Rourke, Michael Madsen, Josh Hartnett, Benicio Del Toro, Elijah Wood and Rutger Hauer.

The stories of the various different characters and the consequences their actions have on their counterparts are ingeniously interweaved to form a narrative that is constantly moving at break neck speed.

The story begins with Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a detective of Sin City with one day left from retirement, in pursuit of a sick child killer. The ensuing events are violent, unexpected and exhilerating. After Hartigan's story has been told, Rodriguez and Miller move the action along to Marv, a man determined to find out who killed the girl of his dreams. This leads him to the girls of Old Town, the hookers who work the streets there, enforcing their own laws and looking after themselves. After a series of events leads to a possible war between the police and the prostitutes, action has to be taken by all of the characters to prevent it before it is too late. It is during the second half of the film that all of the characters' connections to one another become clear and the story trundles on towards its shocking conclusion.

Usually a film featuring strippers, prostitutes, extreme violence and explosions would be considered "bad taste" cinema, but Sin City is so beautifully acted, shot and directed that it is an astounding masterpiece. The cast are all on top form and the production values are tremendous. Sin City is a must-see!

The DVD extras are excellent, with the second disc featuring the extended director's cut of the film which only adds to the experience, and offer an insight into the creative process behind the film. February 18, 2008

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