*** Official SIN CITY Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Jeff_Standley]

Saw it last night and was blown away. I loved it, the visuals were amazing and the story was kick ass. I have read very little of the comic books so I cant really compare. But from what ive read and seen it was great. I loved the car scene with Del Tore and Owens. MIckey Rourke was awesome as Marv to, I like him alot but he picks up some terrible roles as an actor quite a bit. It was good to finally see what he can do again on the big screen.

 

[Doug Miller]

Very happy with it. I'll spare the long books to movie comparison and just say that I was much happier with Big Fat Kill than I expected to be. Big Fat Kill has been one of my least favorite Sin City yarns, but Clive Owen was terrific as Dwight. That guy has a great presence.

I felt at times the movie felt a little "campy". That said, there were enough really awesome moments that made it worthwhile.

If there was one thing I hated, hated, hated, it was the tacked on Salesman ending to bookend the movie. Ugh! Just end if with the gunshot and roll credits dammit!

Doug

 

[ThomasC]

The music at the very end of the end credits didn't sound like it was composed for the movie. Does anybody know what it's from or what it sounds very similar to?

 

[Phil Florian]

Outstanding bit of movie making, this. I poured on the praise in the Review thread so I won't repeat.

Specific stuff I found interesting was that, even after years of reading this book (I have gotten them in trades since the original was released a decade ago), this was far funnier that I thought. I picked up on plenty of the humorous stuff that was more direct (the two wannabe intellectual hoods, Stuka and the arrow, etc.) but the line interpretations of Marv and Dwight, in particular, struck me as having a lot of humor. I honestly didn't think I would be giggling as much as I did during this most depressing of movies. But I loved it and the audience was for the most part there all the way through.

One part I really, really missed was Marv going back to his mom's house to pick up his old gun. This is a great scene in the book, showing a very tender and, dare I say it, innocent moment for Marv. I really hope the implied extra footage for the DVD will include this scene. It would have been a great break from Marv's rampage.

How did folks feel about the 'extra' colors? Until the very last book in the series (Hell and Back), Miller was really sparing in the use of color. Usually it was one color per story ("Dame Wore Red," "Blue Eyes," "That Yellow Bastard," etc.) but this movie added in areas that wasn't colored in the books...like any of Marv's story (the first three books were all b/w), Dwight's shoes, etc. Also, was it me just getting into the b/w or did the scenes at the bar in the end with Hartigan look almost fully colored? Not eye popping color but very subtle color on most surfaces. Was cool and odd.

Brilliant work. Too bad it doesn't look like these two will be working on Miller's OTHER amazing piece of non-superhero comics, "300." That would be splendid if shot in a similar light.

 

[Joseph S]

Note to other directors: Don't leave stuff up to Jessica Alba.

Fantastic movie, though I'm still puzzled why yellow blood or anything in B/W is less "offensive."

 

[todd stone]

the music sounds like the theme to the video game "spy hunter"

check out spy hunter and you will see

 

[Scott Weinberg]

Sin City made approx. $12m on opening day.

Very glad to see that everyone's having such a good time with this movie. Here's my review of the film, for those still itching to read some reviews.

Heading out for a second visit to Sin City tomorrow afternoon! (How great it feels to be enthusiastic about a movie after three straight months of wide-release CRAPBURGERS!)

 

[Dustin Elmore]

Just wanted to add that the Theme from Spy Hunter is the Peter Gunn theme, and it was very influential to Rodriguez's theme for Sin City. However, City's music was still all "original" material.

 

[Haggai]

Excellent review, Scott, I really enjoyed your take on the movie. Don't really agree about Bledel and Alba--I thought Jessica as a stripper was more believable than Alexis as a hooker (though my friend I saw it with assured me that she showed a lot more range than she does as Rory Gilmore)--but, aside from that, rock n' roll. Bruce was definitely great. Though I guess the "too young" comment from some people was borne out in his line about being old enough to be her grandfather, which he obviously isn't (Bruce just turned 50, and Jessica is just shy of 24). Maybe they should have changed that line for the movie.

Did anyone else think that Jessica was going to use that lasso once she recognized Bruce? Rope him in just as he's about to walk out. That might have been kinda cool.

Oh, one more thing--Miho is certainly a Japanese-sounding name, but isn't it also just "me ho"?

 

[Kevin Grey]

Mixed reaction from me. I thought it was good but not great. I really enjoyed the first and third segments but the second was kind of flat and stalled the pacing badly, though Clive Owen did bring things up a bit.

I didn't care for Tarantino's contribution much- probably my least favorite scene in the movie.

I thought the look was way too digital. The entire movie looked way too clean. This movie sorely needed a nice dose of film grain. Overall it seemed much more cartoonish and less grity than Millers' work on the page.

The acting by the leads was uniformly excellent but I didn't care for some of the casting. I thought Brittany Murphy was pretty awful and Rosario Dawson's sneer during some scenes seemed like over the top vamping. Elijah Wood, however, was very effective and creepy.



That scene seemed weird to me because the hospital corridor looked so modern and realistic compared to rest of the movie.

 

[Chuck Mayer]

I didn't mind the closing scene with Hartnett. It was less abrupt.

I readily admit that I consider That Yellow Bastard my favorite of the GN's. Easily Miller's best art in the series, and that's saying a lot. But The Hard Goodbye stole the show in the movie. They nailed Marv's profile, and Rourke was effing perfect. Definitely the audience favorite at my (first) showing.

With the $12M first day, they have a profit by next weekend. I'd expect excellent DVD sales as well. We'll be discussing what tales to cover in the sequel PRETTY DAMN SOON.

Good for us,
Chuck

 

[Matt Stone]

I'll post some more thoughts later, but I really liked the film. I'm still trying to decide how much I liked it, but needless to say, I was impressed with the storytelling, acting, as well as the technical aspects of the film. It may not be the best film ever made, but it was the comic book on film. I'm sure Frank Miller is very proud.

 

[Jeff_Standley]

This scene is confirmed to be on the DVD when it comes out. I forget where I saw the story. The DVD sounds like it will be awesome. It will have the theatrical version and each individual story with additional footage.
Here it is. DVD story

 

[todd s]

At first I wasn't sure if I was liking it. But, then I let reality go and it became much more enjoyable. A few things....

-Carla Gugino...WOW!!!! She has come along way since as she played a Wilderness Girl in Troop Beverly Hills.

-When you first see Elijah Woods character. The first thing I noticed was the zig zag shirt and said Charlie Brown finally had a meltdown. Then all I saw was how much he looked like Toby McGuire.

-The nicest collection of hot woman in one movie!

-The most unrealistic part of the movie.....Was how hot all of the street walking hookers were. In real life they would be the high end ones. Not that I know of these things.

 

[Haggai]

todd, thank you, I thought I was the only one who saw a resemblance between shadowy Elijah and Tobey Maguire.

Did nobody give Jamie King a shout-out yet on this thread, in the hottie department? I'll dispense with that right here.

 

[Mark E J]

I hope they do "A Dame to Kill For" and "Family Values" to close out Old Town trilogy. (Plus I want to see Miho on rollerblades) Also the two Marv short stories "Silent Night" and "Just Another Saturday Night" would be great book ends.

 

[Craig S]

Great, great flick. My gushing is up in the Review thread.
I got kind of a Nosferatu (Max Schreck) vibe from him, myself.

I have never read the GNs (indeed, hadn't ever heard of them until a few months ago). I assume the Josh Hartnett bookend scenes were part of another tale from the books?? I'm not really sure exactly how they fit in. I do plan another viewing soon to try to figure it out...

 

[Haggai]

Ah, Nosferatu, I can kinda see that as well.

 

[Claire Panke]

Craig, I also got a very Nosferatu vibe from the Yellow Bastard.

And I've thought Elijah Wood resembled Toby Maguire forever, or at least since they both appeared in The Ice Storm - they looked more like brothers than the child actor who played Wood's brother in the film.

 

[Robert Anthony]

I give it a B. It was dragging like crazy near the end, and the narration started to be a bit much after awhile. It was like watching an audiobook.

The sloppy CGI actually worked, though, considering everything else was so stylized, it was a lot harder for a crap CGI car exploding to pull me out of the movie.

Hard Goodbye was great, and I honestly hoped the movie would have just ended there, to tell the truth. Big Fat Kill meandered a little, but the psychotic humor redeemed it. I felt if they hadn't slavishly stuck to every last line of dialog, it would have been a lot better, as lines like 'You fool. You damned fool." just don't work onscreen, if they even really worked all that well on the page. Make it a black comedy, even more-so than it is, and it's right up there with Hard Goodbye. As it stands though, it's pretty damned good, riffing on, and poking fun at, all the noir trappings.

Basically, the dialog needed some editing. Jamie King had to spit out some crap lines as well, although she handled herself way better than Brittany Murphy did. I know the narration was in the book, but you didn't need to transfer ALL of it to the screen. Let the actors do their job without making them read some WAY overheated (even for pulp-fiction noir) dialog to hammer home what they're doing onscreen.

That Yellow Bastard was the weakest, and was the segment that made me start shifting in my seat, waiting for the credits to roll, but it still did it's job pretty effectively. I'm thinking that the DVD release is where this movie is really going to shine, as each segment will be presented on it's own, in full, with some of the deleted scenes restored to fully flesh out each story without having to worry about pacing since two other stories won't be butted up against it. There's some stuff in Hard Goodbye that will be returned to it that I think will make that one even BETTER.

Major gripe--Alba's not getting naked. And not just because I want to see Alba naked. For all of Miller's over-the-top visuals, the one character in the movie that NEEDED to be naked was the one that was clothed in order to give the story more punch. Hartigan is supposed to feel like hell when he sees the girl he's anointed to sainthood buck-ass naked writhing on a pole, and I'm sorry, but seeing her fully clothed doesn't really sell that. That dilutes the shock there, and neuters Nancy's character a little. For a movie that attempts to stay as slavishly chained to the graphic novels, to the point where there's no screenplay credit, it makes no sense to me to cut sequences out of the book and throw clothes on Nancy. If Alba was balking at being nude--get another actress who will. King and Gugino had no problem doing it.

And Nicky Katt's arrow through the chest reaction was one of the funniest lines I've seen in recent memory.

But Rodriguez's comments about the DVD release got me thinking: Directors are just waiting on the DVD. It's kneecapping the theatrical experience even more than shoddy projection and annoying as hell audience members are. It's prompting directors to make easy, lazy compromises instead of the hard ones that more often than not, IMPROVE a movie, forcing creative solutions to problems, solutions that typically ENHANCE the storytelling. Instead, now that people know they can just do it right on DVD, they half-ass it for the theatrical release.

If you could have made Sin City better by cutting "Big Fat Kill" out completely and doing a 45 minute version of "Hard Goodbye" and a 45 minute version of "That Yellow Bastard" then why not do that? Why truncate 3 stories and then slap them together, forcing your movie to drag anyway? Why wait for DVD to fix that mistake?

If "Sin City" had been two stories instead of 3, I think I would have liked it more, because "Hard Goodbye" just screamed past onscreen, and it wrapped up very satisfyingly. And I think I would have liked "Yellow Bastard" a lot more if I hadn't had to sit through "Hard Goodbye" and "Fat Kill" before I got to the conclusion of it. Honestly--starting with Hartigan, and then finishing up with Marv's finale? That would have prompted a lot more 4 star ratings straight across the board.

Especially if they'd cut about half of the narration.

And one thing I never understood about Miller--why is Miho throwing swastikas at people? It's like he stuck it in there just to stick it in there. It's in some of his other work, too. Swastikas just sorta pop up from time to time, and I don't really get it.