As reported over on Gabe’s Blog, here’s a snap of the new, extended wheelbase mini:
* * *
Had insomnia last night so I finally decided to watch Sin City
This stylized movie version of Frank Miller’s graphic novels by the same name stars nearly everyone in hollywood who’s under 40 and who’ll work for under $2 million: Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Josh Hartnett, etc. Dark and surreal, the “plot” is actually 5-6 vignettes that occur in “Sin” (short for Basin) City, a land of angels, demons, murderers, and corruption, with the normal Film Noir inversion of sympathentic/antagonistic chracters–the “officials” are mostly evil, and the ex-cons and prositutes are the “good guys”.
The vignettes are uneven: Bruce Willis’s Officer Hartigan, whose fatalistic, chivalric tale bookends the others, is interesting but pathetic, making him hard to root for but for his mission to save tasty Nancy from a fate worse than death. Clive Owens’s interlude among the killer prostitutes of Old Town falls oddly flat, but for the magnificent swordplay of Miho (Devon Akohi). The best of the lot is Mikey Rouke playing the psychopathic demon Marv, finding love and death on the same trippy tale, marking the anticlimax (lowest point) of the film.
Throughout, life is cheap, violence omnipresent, and disturbing imagery abounds. For instance, we encounter Elijah Wood as the angelic/demonic Kevin, cannibal who’s refuses to scream even as Marv metes-out his torturous demise. (Rubber tubing + hacksaw + flesh eating dog. I’m GLAD Bella didn’t watch this with me!)
Anyway, Sin City was a spell-binding art project masquerading as a mainstream film, pointless in its excess violence. Watch the Marv sequence and dispose of the rest (yes, even Jessica Alba’s cowgirl outfit)