Sin City received 4 Stars **** in the Toledo Blade newspaper..
www.toledoblade.com
Christopher Borrelli did a great article in Tonights FRiday paper.
Kirby McDaniel wrote:
> Here is the review from the main Austin Newspaper, The Austin American
> Statesman.
>
> ** TWO ** stars!
>
> Streets gleam with graphic
> zeal, but words fail the film
>
> By John DeFore
> Special to the American-Statesman
>
> Posted: April 1, 2005
>
> Author and artist Frank Miller is an icon of macho in the comic-book
> world, known for a powerful graphic style and a fondness for testing
> the limits of an already hyperbolic medium. After pushing grim
> vigilantism to the brink of parody with his ultraviolent 1980s
> reinvention of Batman, Miller shifted his focus from a legendary hero
> to an entire genre; without a well-known character to lend it a soul,
> the crime series "Sin City" was an exercise in pure, pedal-to-the-floor
> style. You'd have to be emotionally stunted to take the stories
> seriously, but they were a lot of fun to read.
>
> So it's to be expected that, from its opening scene, "Sin City" the
> film sounds like a "Saturday Night Live" riff on hard-boiled fiction.
> The lines are corny, delivered cartoonishly and full of deliberately
> dumb epithets. So far, so good, sort of.
>
> And in one way, the film (co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Miller
> himself) is almost perfect: It is difficult to imagine another movie
> capturing the comic's look with any more accuracy and brio than this
> one. Employing the stark black-and-white of the comic and (as the
> series' covers did) lacing it with potent bursts of color -- a dame's
> red lips, blond curls or pulsing green eyes, for instance -- it mimics
> the artist's bold compositions.
>
> Rodriguez and company use prosthetic makeup, digital manipulation and
> plain old attention to detail to get things right, from the way
> individual raindrops gleam to the dispassionate expression on Elijah
> Wood's face just before he gets what's coming to him. There are
> probably only two ways the film's look could have been improved: It
> could have used real cars instead of digital re-creations, which zoom
> around here without any believable weight; and it could have
> compensated for the fact that depicting bloody wounds as white
> splotches looks fine on the black-and-white printed page, but resembles
> bird droppings when done in a live-action film.
>
> Problems arise, though, for viewers who expect "Sin City" to do more
> than look gorgeous. Fans who relish the visceral kicks of the comic, or
> newcomers expecting an action movie, might be surprised at how little
> punch this flick packs. Not that it's short on violence -- hacksaws
> meet flesh, bullets pierce groins, Bruce Willis has a heart attack
> every 15 paces -- or that Rodriguez is unwilling to join in Miller's
> lewd appreciation of the big-haired, big-bosomed inhabitants of Sin
> City's prostitute-run "Old Town." The problem is that there's a barrier
> between the audience and the sex and violence on the screen.
>
> That barrier is Rodriguez's incessant use of voiceover narration, which
> is so prevalent here (tough to recall another film that uses so much)
> that it's almost shocking when our tough-guy antiheroes move their
> lips. Fans will understand why Rodriguez does it -- first-person
> storytelling is the spine of Miller's Spillane-on-steroids world -- but
> film noir connoisseurs will remember more engaging adaptations that
> skirted this trap. In "The Big Sleep," for instance, the filmmakers
> discard Raymond Chandler's internal monologue in favor of action and
> dialogue. Even Chandler's immortal language wasn't worth retaining at
> the expense of character interaction -- and Frank Miller is no Raymond
> Chandler. (Many classic noirs use voiceover, of course, but they're
> wise enough to know when to step away from that and into the action.)
>
> One noteworthy spot where voiceover takes a back seat, incidentally, is
> in a scene "guest directed" by Quentin Tarantino. The switch-up is a
> joke, in fact: It's one place in the story where the voices really
> don't exist outside a character's head.
>
> Echoes of Tarantino hang over this project, from that guest spot, to
> the way the movie uses Willis, to the film's structure, which cobbles
> together three main "Sin City" storylines with overlapping chronology,
> � la "Pulp Fiction." As the timeline doubles back on itself and we
> return to a plot we thought was finished, the film does shake off some
> of its alienating fog; many members of the cast (Clive Owen, for one)
> exude chiseled cool, but toward the end Willis comes closest to making
> us relate to his dark knight's mission.
>
> By this point, many viewers will have drifted away completely and
> others will be drawing up comparisons to "Sky Captain and the World of
> Tomorrow," another gee-whiz digital project with unimpeachably cool
> looks and insufficient soul. As a test-reel to show off Robert
> Rodriguez's pet technologies, or as a fetish object for comics fans,
> "Sin City" is praiseworthy. As a stand-alone piece of cinema, it has a
> few Hail Marys to say.
>
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