No matter when, or where, or who
- A dirty moment
Walk down the right back alley in Sin City and you can find anything, apparently. Here's a quick view of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Good
The movie looks great. The texture is fantastic, the use of colour is great, the whole black and white thing is done in a way that makes fim noir look grey.
It feels like Raymond Chandler turned up two notches beyond the end of the dial.
Structurally, it works - the disjointed narrative gives it an episodic feel, but you're never left hanging, wanting to know what happens next.
It's possibly the most accurate adaptation of a comic you'll get, in terms of the visual look and the narrative style.
Elijah Wood is damn scary.
Bad
The dialogue's awful. It's a comic book adaptation, and the trick would have been to adapt the dialogue so it felt like stuff that people would say, rather than your basic stock "Kill him for me, kill him good" that I laughed out loud at.
Ugly
The whole dirty feeling that you leave the cinema with, like you've just spent two hours lurking at the back of the mind of someone who has some serious issues.
Women are whores or lapdancers, or failing that they're lesbians who walk around in just a g-string. They're all beautiful and statuesque.
The men are either hard, scarred ruthless killers or pretty, psychopathic ruthless killers. It's hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys. You wouldn't want to go for dinner with any of them.
The horror is... gruesome. I have no real issue with gruesome but this is pretty bad. Where the most heroic character in the piece also happens to enjoy sadistic torture it's never going to be cheery and relentlessly upbeat, is it?
Overall
Somewhat cautiously, I enjoyed it. It's not for everyone, although the cinema was packed and largely quiet throughout. It looks great. Take a bucket.
7 June, 2005
