April 11, 2005 - Sin City

Jamie Zawinski - my very own personal jesus - wrote this simple, yet powerful one-liner about the movie Sin City last week: "Oh my god, this may be the most perfect movie ever made".

So I went to see it last Friday. And realized, that poor Jamie may be utterly and completely out of his mind (even if just this one time).

Really, Sin City is not much more than a giant gore fest.

Sure, it's stylish.
Sure, it's groundbreaking.
Sure, it's visually a cinematic achievement.
But what's all that - without a real story?

Cause seriously - there is no plot. Rather, it's a twisted quilt of semi-coherent stories, held together by only one red thread - violence. There's decapitation, castration, dismemberment, smashing of skulls, faces and virtually every other body part, good old-fashioned semi-automatic shooting, and even an assault with arrows (did I leave anything out? Oh, wait, yes. I faintly remember an attempted hanging. And someone gets their skull split by a small flying metal swastika...) In a particularly creative moment, director Robert Rodriguez even helped Benicio del Toro's character shuffle off the mortal coil by having him imbed his own back-fired gun shaft in his forehead.

As a matter of fact, were the movie not predominantly in black and white - with the blood mostly neon-white, but sometimes also red and yellow - it would be a worthless piece of blood-soaked cinematic junk, sure to be relegated to art house screenings, and rented only by serial-killers and other similarly depraved human beings.

And yet, interestingly, the very fact that the "stories" are set in a surreal surrounding, the characters look surreal themselves, and the plot makes no sense at all, turns the violence in something equally surreal. Ridiculous, even. Only the most sensitive of viewers could possibly be offended or nauseated by it. I know I wasn't. Rather, I was shocked on a sublime level - shaking my head at the director's feverish dedication to it, without having any real and true purpose for it all.

And the acting? Well, the movie features a roster of well-known names and faces, sure to be a major draw for the general audiences. Most promimently, there's Bruce Willis, Clive Owen ("Closer"), Elija Wood (in surely what will turn out to be the most bizarre part of his career), "Carnivale's" Nick Stahl, Rosario Dawson ("Alexander"), Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba, Michael Madsen, pretty-boy Josh Harnett, and even good ole Rudger Hauer (who can forget him in "Bladerunner"?).

And yet - ironically - the best performance comes from someone with such a savagely deformed and dehumanized facial prostetic, that he's almost unrecognizable (which in retrospect was utterly unnecessary - he's plenty scary-looking in real life): Mickey Rourke. Yes, risen from the cinematic graveyard of oblivion, he has come to claim the doubtable crown of having outperformed everybody else in this particular movie. Leave it to director Robert Rodriguez (or rather, it seems more likely the idea came from Quentin Taratino himself) to resurrect the 90s poster boy for depravity and cast him as a surreal super hero - and actually make it work....

Overall, I'm convinced that a major influence in casting these people were not necessarily their names or faces, but rather their voices: As the three main characters (Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen) narrate their part of the movie , you notice that they all have similar, if individually distinct, voices. Raspy, deep, with a certain danger, reminiscent of those 1940s mystery movies. Smoke and whiskey voices. Again - it does work as a style device. If nothing else.

The women also - none in specific, but notable as a whole - are worth a mention. Not one of them sports a single piece of proper clothing in this movie. Ever. They are all either half-naked (meaning, they'll wear a thong at best), or outfitted in some sort of fetish-wear - consisting mostly of fish-net stockings, black leather, chokers, chains, and of course lots and lots of gleaming latex. Their eyes are huge, their lips too. They look as if freshly plucked from some 1950s comic strip. Now lucky for the audience, every single woman is also drop-dead gorgeous - meaning it doesn't really matter that they wear next to nothing most of the time. They're eye-candy, and a vital part of the overall look and feel of this movie.

So style - really - is its saving grace.

I don't know if that makes it worth seeing (it certainly doesn't make it palatable for wider public consumption), but if you're into cinema and the art of movies, you might wanna sneak in for an afternoon screening.