Sin City

(I wrote this blog entery before I left but blogspot was acting funny and wouldn't let me post for some reason, here it is now.)

Let me start out by saying that even though I've been a huge comic book fan for years I'm not the type to get all excited about comic book-based movies. The Spider Man films are great as is the first Batman. I liked the X-Men movies and Daredevil was pretty cool. I haven't even seen The Hulk or Elektra. And my favorite comic movie might be Road to Perdition and not many people even know that it's based on a comic.

More than the superhero stories, I love the idiom of comics themselves. Author Scott McCloud calls it "seqential art" which I think is a very appropriate name for the art form. Comics force you to take part in the story. There are a series of pictures but the action BETWEEN the panels, how Batman gets from one end of Gotham to the other, how Spidey moves his body between kicking Green Goblin and punching Doctor Octopus, is totally up to your imagination.

That's why I dig comics. So I don't geek out very hard for comic movies, it's just not the art form the stories were meant to be told in. I don't read comic prose novels, I don't watch comic TV shows.

But Sin City is nothing short of brilliant. The greatest thing about this movie is that it's actually a COMIC BOOK adaptation, it doens't merely take the story out of a comic and make a movie out of it. The story is only one small part of what a comic book is. This movie takes the "art direction," the mood, the color, and the dialougue right from Frank Miller's brilliant graphic novels.

I was very leary of this movie. I love Miller's work and have for years. The Sin City books are among the best comics ever made in my opinion and the opinion of many others. One of the great parts about it is the art. Miller draws shadows, not outlines of forms. I thought this would never be translated into film. You can read an entire 60-page Sin City story in mere minutes. The action and dialougue move quickly and there is heavy emphasis on the art. And it is not one continuous story but a series of different stories with the same setting. And this film captures all of that.

Not to mention the hard-boiled violence, the strict noir attitude, and the camera work. It's all there. And it is a dark pleasure to watch. Mickey Rourke gives the best performance I've ever seen him give. Bruce Willis is as solid as he always is. Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino direct the stories brilliantly.

I usually hate sequels but I'm actually hoping for another Sin City. Particularly because there's more of Miller's original Sin City stories that weren't used (especially "A Dame to Kill For," I really dig that one).

Two thumbs up.

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I'm off to Iowa early in the morning. The brother-in-law's wedding should be fun. The trip will be a nice warm-up for Moscow. I hope to blog again before I leave for Russia.