AirForceChief
04-01-2005, 10:37 AM
Pretty much as expected: not so hot screen writing, cool effects, hot chicks. Good thing I don't get paid by the word...
Flesh, fantasy run rampant in 'Sin City'
By Mike Clark, USA TODAY
Frank Miller's SinCity reaps genuine fun with more pummelings than Popeye and enough bad girls to fill a Donna Summer box set.
Jessica Alba plays Nancy Callahan, a stripper with a heart of gold in Sin City.
Dimension Films
But it'll help if you are an enthusiast of comic-book fantasy and stylized sadism with a wink. That's the target audience for this worst-of-all-date-movies. If not, there's an army of scantily clad trollops whose equally stylized sordidness could seduce even E.T.
Told in three parts with, alas, the best one first, City has been lifted with perverse gusto from co-director Miller's popular graphic novels. And like last fall's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (though this is a better film), it benefits more from the novelty of seeing actors imposed against imaginatively computerized backgrounds than any screenwriting to write home about.
If you live in Sin City, you know it's the anti-Mayberry. Elijah Wood's Kevin eats the bodies of women whose heads he then hangs on a wall (say it ain't so, Frodo). As Marv, Mickey Rourke's face looks as if Dr. Frankenstein's mad assistant assembled it from body parts.
And Rourke, in his best role in years, plays one of the film's good guys.
About the movie
Sin City
* * * 1/2 (out of four)
Stars: Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson
Director: Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez
Distributor: Dimension
Rated: R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content, including dialogue.
Opens Friday nationwide
Rourke's character dominates the first story, and Bruce Willis is the focus of the third. Both are motivated by big-hearted babes gone and done wrong, as is the midsection's Clive Owen, embroiled in a gang-war fracas over a waitress in a dive. This movie is full of males who belong in this genre: Willis, Rourke, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer. There's even Quentin Tarantino, who does not appear but helped co-director Robert Rodriguez by directing one rainy scene.
In artfully exaggerated noir fashion, the women are unlikely to be found at a NOW mixer. Rosario Dawson dons what looks to be Victoria's Secret bondage garb — leaving few secrets. Jessica Alba is professionally naughty, and Carla Gugino as a lesbian parole officer guarantees you'll never watch her as Spy Kids' mom the same way again.
Occasionally very funny, the picture tends to coast on its cosmetics. A first-rate script might have made it a twisted masterpiece, not just a visual entrancer whose purposeful ugliness could probably be rendered only as a cartoon.
It'll be interesting to see how time treats City's novelty value once live action/computer screen hybrids become more common. Right now it looks like one of the movies that will define its year even more than the Kill Bill duo did.
Kill Bill, but loooove Carla.
Flesh, fantasy run rampant in 'Sin City'
By Mike Clark, USA TODAY
Frank Miller's SinCity reaps genuine fun with more pummelings than Popeye and enough bad girls to fill a Donna Summer box set.
Jessica Alba plays Nancy Callahan, a stripper with a heart of gold in Sin City.
Dimension Films
But it'll help if you are an enthusiast of comic-book fantasy and stylized sadism with a wink. That's the target audience for this worst-of-all-date-movies. If not, there's an army of scantily clad trollops whose equally stylized sordidness could seduce even E.T.
Told in three parts with, alas, the best one first, City has been lifted with perverse gusto from co-director Miller's popular graphic novels. And like last fall's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (though this is a better film), it benefits more from the novelty of seeing actors imposed against imaginatively computerized backgrounds than any screenwriting to write home about.
If you live in Sin City, you know it's the anti-Mayberry. Elijah Wood's Kevin eats the bodies of women whose heads he then hangs on a wall (say it ain't so, Frodo). As Marv, Mickey Rourke's face looks as if Dr. Frankenstein's mad assistant assembled it from body parts.
And Rourke, in his best role in years, plays one of the film's good guys.
About the movie
Sin City
* * * 1/2 (out of four)
Stars: Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson
Director: Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez
Distributor: Dimension
Rated: R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content, including dialogue.
Opens Friday nationwide
Rourke's character dominates the first story, and Bruce Willis is the focus of the third. Both are motivated by big-hearted babes gone and done wrong, as is the midsection's Clive Owen, embroiled in a gang-war fracas over a waitress in a dive. This movie is full of males who belong in this genre: Willis, Rourke, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Madsen, Rutger Hauer. There's even Quentin Tarantino, who does not appear but helped co-director Robert Rodriguez by directing one rainy scene.
In artfully exaggerated noir fashion, the women are unlikely to be found at a NOW mixer. Rosario Dawson dons what looks to be Victoria's Secret bondage garb — leaving few secrets. Jessica Alba is professionally naughty, and Carla Gugino as a lesbian parole officer guarantees you'll never watch her as Spy Kids' mom the same way again.
Occasionally very funny, the picture tends to coast on its cosmetics. A first-rate script might have made it a twisted masterpiece, not just a visual entrancer whose purposeful ugliness could probably be rendered only as a cartoon.
It'll be interesting to see how time treats City's novelty value once live action/computer screen hybrids become more common. Right now it looks like one of the movies that will define its year even more than the Kill Bill duo did.
Kill Bill, but loooove Carla.