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Written for another forum It's always tough being a writer or a director making a movie based on a book or a comic. What works on screen and what only works on the page? Every time they do it, they take lierties with the source material that inevitably pisses off fans of the original material. Robert Rodriguez has broken this Hollywood bad habit with Sin City. This new movie is THE most faithful adaptation of a comic book I've ever seen. It is shot for shot, word for word, exactly like the comics, of which I am a huge fan. Frank Miller is a loving genius. He single handedly (okay, not exactly, Alan Moore helped out enormously around the same time) turned the comic medium on its head and took it in an entirely new direction. He took one of the world's most recognizable franchises (Batman) and changed it from the Adam West image into the Dark Knight. Everything he touches (except for the Robocop sequels) turns into gold. The man is a legend and his masterpiece is the Dark Horse line of Sin City comics. Nothing else he's done comes close to their perfection. The writing is dark and very Raymond Chandler, the art is ground breaking and experimental. Black and white was nothing new to comics at the time but Miller did black and white like no one else. This was completely different and most importantly, it worked. This brings us to Rodriguez. When I'd heard the news that he was making Sin City, I didn't believe it. Not possible. Not that comic. There isn't anyone on earth who could do that one. Well he did and he did it very, very well. Every bit of the comic is reproduced here perfectly. Every second of the movie looks and feels exactly like Miller's art and writing (he's given directorial credit, but I don't know what his exact contribution to the movie is, though). The basic premise is that it's three of Sin City's story arcs, each one running roughly six issues (about 180 pages each), book ended by two three or four page shorts featuring an assassin named the salesman. The movie segues from The Customer Is Always Right into the fourth arc of the Sin City continuity, That Yellow Bastard featuring Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a cop framed for the rape of 11 year old Nancy Callahan (played by Jessica Alba). Hartigan, actually rescues her from the pedophiliac son of Senator Roark. Hartigan spends eight years in prison while Nancy carries a torch from him. Then it segues to The Hard Goodbye featuring Mickey Rourke as Marv, a slab of a man out to avenge the murder of the only woman who ever loved him, a hooker named Goldie, murdered by super-psycho Kevin played perfectly by Elijah Wood. Following this is Clive Owen as Dwight in The Big Fat Kill, a story about the hookers of Old Town keeping a lid on the murder of a cop (one of the best characters in the movie, played by Benicio Del Toro) that could blow their truce with the cops to hell. Make no mistake, this movie is action city. The characters are extremely cool even when the acting is a little over the top and hammy and the violence is unrelenting. The violence is a point worth mentioning as well as it is extremely graphic. The death of the Yellow Bastard from the Hartigan portion of the story is particularly vicious. Though, I am gushing now, I'm not even remotely giving you a clear illustration of my elation with this movie. It is the perfect comic book movie. See it now, bitches! I give this baby a 5. Kaiju fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Apr 2, 2005 |
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Apr 2, 2005 03:09
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:22 |
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