March 30, 2005

"That's you all over, Tom. A lie and no heart."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx...............xxxxxxxxxxxx- x- (Not Frank) Miller's Crossing

"Sound and fury signifying nothing" has sadly become a cliché when writing about film in the CG era. Thanks to advances in technology, anyone can make a really loud, really flashy film… even when the unlimited resources of creation can cost a film the chance to be something really special.

Robert Rodriguez is not just anybody. It is impossible to write him off as a hack since he continues to be at the cutting edge of lower budget high impact filmmaking. He clearly has great skill in making intense and compelling images. His taste for the perverse is often thrilling. He gets smart, sexy young actresses to work in their underwear for low pay and finds smart, aging actors who are willing to work in cool make-up.

But Sin City is nothing but a video game on a big screen without the interactivity.

Every indicator is that this was completely intentional. But artistically, it is kind of an inversion of Any Warhol's pop art. By pointing to the ordinary and calling it art, Warhol infused a can of Campbell's Sour or a box of Brillo Pads with more meaning than they had traditionally had to the audience. By using live actors and technology to essentially animate with enormous loyalty the Frank Miller graphic novel, Rodriguez somehow managed to diminish the power of Miller's inked images. Film is not a variation on a comic book any more than film is just a big version of television… at least when film is actually good.

This is a conversation that is a constant in film, because it's not just a comic book converted to a film, but every time one medium generates another… and in that I include even film-to-film transfers, including sequels. Recreating a carbon copy of something that worked wonderfully almost always fails.

In the entire two hours and six minutes, there is just one moment that actually seems to have an effect on the audience that rises to the level of emotion. It is a joke in which a guy, being cocky and brash, is surprised to find a spear arriving in his chest. The audience laughs out loud for a simple reason - the character has a clear focus and both he and we are surprised by what happens… and even while a bit over the top, we can relate to the gag. Somehow, that moment plays a lot better than any of the way, way, way over the top stuff inflicted on Benecio del Toro's character. (This is, perhaps because this film can not be outquirked, the least interesting performance in Del Toro's entire film career.)

The film is a trilogy of tales, though the structure pays very little mind to that structure, opening and closing with a connected gag. But it is that first opening gag, between Marley Shelton and Josh Hartnett, that can define your feelings about the film pretty accurately. It gets far more perverse and far more graphic as things move forward, but in that first scene we can separate the people who are going to be awed by Ms. Shelton's dress and lipstick turning up in blazing red against a black & white landscape and those who would actually like to see a performance and hear some dialogue that actually connects, even among all the showing off.

It is doable. Not everyone agrees on the film, but I think that Tony Scott did it brilliantly in Man of Fire. And while T.S. has had an up and down career, his high energy filmmaking has always found a way to make that connection when the script worked… particularly with the Quentin Tarantino script for True Romance. But even in The Hunger, which in its day was the defining "director coming from advertising" movie - way, way, way over the top and not much of a story - it is still memorable because of the groin level sexual connection between the three leads.

Rodriguez is very much like a younger Tony Scott. He can bring the visual. But he desperately needs the collaborators he doesn't seem to want to indulge. It's ironic, as he has gone well out of his way to have Frank Miller as his co-director here and QT as a "guest director," but the jack of all trades, master of none rule seems to be in effect. And the reason I don't feel that Rodriguez is a master of the visual is that he has a hard time bringing much emotion into his images, no matter how melodramatic or intimate the scenes.

Robert Rodriguez is one of the rare directors who could make Jamie King grinding topless on top of any man, even Mickey Rourke, unsexy. She is an object… not in the script, in which she is a hooker that the Rourke character sincerely loves, but in the execution, which fetishizes her hair, breasts and eyes in a way that would be amazing on the pages of a graphic novel and which are airless on the big screen.

Two films sprung to mind as I watched Sin City. The first was a film that was oddly similar, Jonas Akerlund's Spun. That hyperactive story about speed junkies also starred Mickey Rourke and Brittany Murphy and a similar parade of hot girls actors and kitschy veterans. Spun was also a film unlike you have ever seen. But amazingly, I connected to its characters more than those in Sin City. They were way over the top, but there was always an undercurrent of reality. That brings to mind John Leguizamo, who is in Spun and is the ultimate actor for these kinds of films… he is completely capable of disappearing into the scenery chewing, yet in many cases, he is unusually great at hanging on to the core of truth while some director's excessive "vision" is trying to chew him up.

The other film is Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, which is also heavily invested in CG and hyper-reality, and even unreality, but remarkably remains a character comedy in which a dozen characters are developed and the audience has a functional emotional relationship with every one of them. When major characters are suddenly killed, you feel it. It isn't the dark ride that Sin City is. But like all great films, the audience has enough of a relationship with the characters to anticipate - correctly or not - behavior… we invest in them. Kung Fu Hustle is not perfect… and its broad sensibility may not be for everyone… but the experience is one of an embrace, not one of a show off, who you may or may not find charming.

As for the endless violence… I reject that issue outright. If you don't like violence… mostly extreme cartoon violence, don't go. But that doesn't make the movie bad. What makes the movie bad is that you have a guy who beheads women and eats their body and the audience is not asked to feel any emotion about it at all, outside of wanting the heroic antihero to be effective in killing the evil little weasel. But you know… that sentence has more emotion than the sequence about the killer.

The three sections of the film all feature men (Willis, Rourke & Owen) saving women who are no less than a decade younger than them (and one about 40 years younger). Willis is the only one who is not there for sex first. Rourke is the most sympathetic, playing a man who sees himself as a freak and who is therefore incredibly grateful to the woman who seemed to love him, if only for one night. But even then, his protestations about being shunned by women seems unlikely in Basin City, where even the good looking guys kinda look like freaks. (Rourke's character suffers a bit from Kingpin Syndrome… as in when even Michael Clarke Duncan seemed too small for the massive size the role called for as per the comic. And btw… the sequence in the TV spots of MCD crawling in pain… which I thought in an earlier edit of this piece were from Sin City, but turn out to be from The Island... there is, again, more emotion in those flashes than in the entire character here.)

The most interesting element in the movie is the idea of the red light district being run by the whores themselves, in a shaky truce with the mob and the police. But, like so much of the film, Rodriguez is too busy showing us the lovely asses and hairstyles of his female stars (Carla Gugino sets a new standard for small, curvy woman who take off their clothes on camera within a couple of years of giving birth) to really explore the complexity of that fascinating idea. Everyone just keeps talking about it, but it is never dramatized.

Sigh.

It is unique visually. But so was Sky Craptain. At least it's not as boring as that film. And Rodriguez is a far more skilled visualist. But it's a Super Size Me movie… some people will like it and feel great after eating it, some will feel sluggish and not know why, and others will vomit out their window.

Me? I'm just sad that so much skill and so much daring came to so little. It's a sin.

(More on Sin City On The Hot Blog.)

E-ME: If you're going to complain, at least be clear about whether you have actually seen the film or not...