Sin City

Okay, so this movie is stuck in my head, even though I watched it last night and that usually means it was a good movie ('good' at least in a 'makes michele think' kind of way). So if you haven't seen it (and it's been out for a while, so you should've already) don't read 'cause there might be spoilers, yadda, yadda etc. 'nuff said.

Stylistically, I thought of Sky Captain and the World of Tommorrow - though the acting in this one was better, probably in part because the effects were created in the editing studio after shooting on actual sets as opposed to against a blue screen, and Hulk in the attempt to replicate the comic/graphic novel structure. I even found myself comparing the gritty black and white 'traced' aesthetics of this film with the brilliant-over-the-top-color of Dick Tracy (yeah, I know that's going back a bit).

The structuralist in me *gasp! strucuralist!?* was fascinated with the representation of the epidodic nature of comics/graphic novels in the movie. Hulk used multi-pane windows to indicate concurrent activity, which closely replicates the actual structure of the comic book genre, but Sin City used an episodic, temporally overlapping series of narratives to express the same thing. This second strategy does produce a sense of confusion in the viewer momentarily (particularly when Kevin (re)appears in the Nancy narrative, but then doesn't threaten anyone), but its advantage is that it creates a disconnect between scenes that, although belonging to different story lines, would otherwise be juxtaposed and seem therefore to be related to each other in a concurrent telling of the disparate storylines.

The other thing about the structure/form of the narrative that fascinated me was the jarring proximity of the hard-boiled detective story kind of narration (complete with voice-over) and the fantastical elements of the story (Kevin's activities and then his ability to survive those same activities when they are enacted upon him by someone else) See? Not a complete spoiler there...

Then there was the pretty much entirely unrealistic storyline about Oldtown. I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that if women had complete control over prostitution, they would continue to engage in it. Aside from money, where might be the attraction in it? And if these women were so strong and powerful, would they not be able to invent other ways of using that to their (financial) advantage? Or are we to believe that the women of Oldtown are some subset of women who like walking around half naked - all the time - and being paid to have sex? Don't they ever just feel like being a little less Amazonian at times? Do they go to the grocery store like that? And since when did all hookers have such tight, perfect bodies? And skills? you know, like bow skills...

Maybe I'm just having problems with it, not so much because it is unrealistic, but because it just strikes me as another example of male fantasy, which, let's face it, drives the whole movie. The only reason anyone takes on corruption in Basin City is because they're horny for women (I don't count the prostitutes as taking on corruption since they've coopted it into their scheme of turned heads), not for some altruistic meaning. That's why the scene where Hardigan saves little 11 year old Nancy has to be the first in the movie, otherwise, after seeing all those other men go ga-ga over scantily clad women and embark on a killing spree, Hardigan's altruism 'an old man's life for a little girl's' just would get icky, looking like the pedophillic accusations that he is 'falsely' accused of in the narrative. After all, the relationship that starts so innocently ends up less so, particularly when he repeats his maxim, changing it to accomodate a grown-up, curvy, exotic dancer Nancy, 'an old man's life for a young woman's'.

And yes, I know that some of this has to do with the conventions of the genre - both comic/graphic novel and the detective story or vice and crime. Like I said, it made me think, stuck with me, got me thinking about other movies that do the same thing different ways or different things in the same way. Overall, money well spent.