My own preferences aside, there is no ignoring that obession with lurid violence has been a growing trend of US movies for many years. As such, these films can't be written off as cheap Grand Guignol exploitation. They reflect deep, dark currents in the American psyche that are clearly becoming more corrosive and dangerous.
Any society that nurtures cultural products like the movie Sin City (review below, full text to preempt registration) is one that would be fully capable of conducting a self-indulgent, blood-drenched, fantasy-fueled exercise like the US war on Iraq. This is a very sick country.
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Movie review: 'Sin City' is a collision of technical genius and moral bankruptcy Colin Covert Star Tribune Published April 1, 2005
'Sin City" will without a doubt have a spot on my top-10 list this year. Maybe the top spot. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. A work of brilliantly crafted nihilism, it scores a zero as big as a Hula Hoop on the scale of socially redeeming values. Not since "Triumph of the Will," Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 glorification of Adolf Hitler, have I seen such a collision of technical genius and moral bankruptcy.
Based on Frank Miller's vividly vulgar series of graphic novels, "Sin City" is film noir on steroids. Robert Rodriguez, who shares the directing credit with Miller and "special guest" Quentin Tarantino, is fetishistically faithful to the source. With its high-contrast black-and-white photography, lurid splashes of color and dynamically framed action, the movie is a veritable flip book of Miller's panels. Shot almost entirely with digitally rendered backgrounds, this is as close to an animated movie as you can come without entirely abandoning reality. Even the actors, many hidden under layers of makeup and prosthetics, seem like a gallery of goons, geeks and gargoyles.
And the artifice works, creating a more dramatically compelling dream world than the equally synthetic "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."Sin City" inhabits a squalid world where daylight never breaks and every sight and sound is designed to hammer our nerve centers. It runs a tight two hours, but it is so visually berserk it seems to last at least three.
Or maybe its No Exit feeling of claustrophobia stems from its horror-movie vision of human nature. "Sin City" tells three interlocking stories, but they all come from the same corner of Miller's brain; interchangeable tales with only a few surface details to distinguish them. Some girls -- hookers, because all the girls in Sin City are voluptuous hookers -- have been victimized by corrupt politicians, despicable cops or decadent clergy. The male protagonists step in to defend them, or to exact revenge, in episodes of near-pornographic violence. If one Sin Citizen drags another face down over the asphalt from a speeding car, or shoots an unarmed man in the crotch, he's the good guy.
Our first hero is John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a burned-out cop with a failing ticker. For his retirement-day penance, he battles his shady partner (Michael Madsen) to rescue a little girl from a U.S. senator's psycho-sadist son (Nick Stahl). Next we meet Marv (Mickey Rourke), a mountainous but feeble-minded palooka looking for whoever killed his beloved Goldie (Jamie King). Then there's Dwight (Clive Owen), a private eye embroiled in showdown with a killer cop (played with elegant nastiness by Benicio Del Toro). The rough justice they mete out is just a couple corpses short of genocide, and it's viciously stylized. Bodies aren't just cut in half; they're sliced into thirds or quarters.
I'm not averse to violence in movies. "Kill Bill," to cite a recent example, strikes me as a smart, ambitious revenge film about the futility of revenge, and I left the theater hoping against hope that the surviving characters would pawn their samurai swords. I draw the line at movies that peddle brutality as sheer entertainment, and I think that's what's happening in "Sin City." Its jubilant cruelty and corrosive humor seem to carry no deeper message than "violence rocks." And I worry that it encourages viewers to flirt with the ultimate evil, an inability to imagine the suffering of others.
Still, there are many ways to read a story and others might find that this ride on the dark side casts light on important issues. Or they might find its absurdly overblown bloodshed so exaggerated that it's comic. What is undeniable is "Sin City's" thundering power. It has the defiant energy and stunning tension of a James Ellroy novel, the feeling that rage could explode at any moment.
Willis is riveting as the fatalistic Hartigan, offering a superb vocal performance, too, as narrator of his sequence. Nobody does disillusionment and introspective agony as well. Rourke, whose career was on the scrap heap before Rodriguez cast him as Marv, is ideal as a battered pug too stubborn to fall down. Owen's Dwight has the sketchiest back story, but his air of solemn, tarnished nobility communicates volumes.
The women's roles are profoundly trashy, but they throw themselves into their roles with wet-lipped gusto, especially Rosario Dawson as an Uzi-toting Amazon hooker. The cast is impressive down to the smallest roles, where we find the ever-menacing Rutger Hauer ("Blade Runner") playing a decadent cardinal, Powers Boothe (TV's "Deadwood") as a despotic politician and Elijah Wood as a smirking cannibal fiend.
I can't endorse the content, but I can't dismiss the presentation. "Sin City" is superlative filmmaking in service of a poisonous view of humanity. It's a dangerous work of art.
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Carl