Skin City
No elaborate, structured review of Frank Miller's creative leap to the big screen for his Sin City material from me, most likely. I'll make some random comments on it, though.
Visually, it's engaging and - if nothing else - it's Frank Miller's illustration style brought to life. The shades of gray that define most elements (nearly all computer-generated, but well done) in the movie are punctuated by intense colors. A gown the color of fresh blood. A bright blue car. Golden hair. Some elements -- predominantly blood -- are not what you'd expect most of the time. With the exceptions of when someone's been superficially roughed up, and in one instance where there's a gout of blood from one character splashing onto the face of another, blood in Sin City isn't red. Generally, it's white, sometimes with a washed out yellow hue. Well, it's considerably more yellow in one case, but that's a special exception. In general, when people are shot or sliced up, limbs hacked or blown off, the blood's white. Whether it's done for effect or simply to help them keep from stepping into NC-17 territory without losing the violence you'd likely have to ask the filmmakers, but it seems fairly clear to me it's mostly for the latter. The film presses the ratings envelope in many respects, and judging by how close to the release date we were hearing "this film has not yet been rated" at the end of the commercials, I suspect they were battling scene by scene up to the end.
Morally, well, it's Frank friggin' Miller doing over-the-top noir, and it's over the top on every scale. The Mickey Spillane-ish patter plays with being a parody of the genre - if the pace slowed a little it would have been laugh out loud funny in more than a few spots. The soundtrack is often a variation on music from Peter Gunn. There's color-shifted blood and gore everywhere, tits and ass seemingly in every other scene (second thought: It struck me shortly after signing off that the first two scenes in the film, book-ending the title sequence, didn't have any nudity in them), and the violence often shifts into a cartoonish mode. On that last point, Marv (Mickey Rourke) leaps about, taking and delivering punishment as if he were auditioning for the part of a villain in the next Spider-man movie, for instance. The main difference there is that he wouldn't have to take half as much punishment in a Spidey film. It's in the Marv scenes that the world most behaves like a cartoon. The surface of brick walls buckle and bend like, well, props, and tremendous levels of kinetic energy are transferred with only superficial damage to our brutish and psychotic hero of the moment.
Fans of the structure of a film like Pulp Fiction will like this more than those more in favor of a linear storyline where everything connects more directly. Indeed, this aspect may prove to be the most damaging element to the film for the average filmgoer (unless the violence, etc. is a surprise), especially as the commercials at least strongly suggest that the story centers on detective John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), who finds himself up against a vastly powerful and truly evil power structure (all true so far) and that the other characters are friends and allies who come to his aid. Go in with that expectation and you will be disappointed. The film has multiple storylines followed by separate characters in the same time and (roughly) place, and by the end we see where several of them overlap -- much as seen in Pulp Fiction.
The performances are generally entertaining, even if the most moral of the characters is still going to be found very lacking by moralists. (You may have a few laughs reading a review of the film from a "Family Guide", where they gave it three out of four stars for its technical quality but rate its acceptability as "abhorrent.") Rourke's Marv is probably the most fun to watch as he takes incredible levels of abuse and hands out better than he gets. Those familiar with Miller's work will see that Marv in particular is very much a distillation of Miller at his 1980s peak. Elijah Wood's character, Kevin, is a silent, supernaturally-efficient killing machine with distressing appetites. It was immediately following a scene where we saw what his interest truly was in the women he'd been abducting that a couple in their early 50s, seated a row ahead of us, got up and left the theater. Frodo he's not.
As mentioned several paragraphs back - and suggested in the headline - there's T&A everywhere. Those going hoping to see Jessica Alba baring herself will be disappointed, though, as compared to most of the females seen in the movie she's very well-covered. As her character is supposed to be a stripper, well, they plainly altered the character to suit the actress.
I don't regret going to see the movie, but I'm not going to be running out to see it a second time. DVD..? Ask me when the time comes around for it. Most likely I'll pick it up eventually especially if it has some cool extras -- which is almost a certainty.
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