I've mentioned here about my quest to actually watch movies and that I joined Net Flix last week in an attempt to meet this goal. Last night I watched the first movie in my queue-- Sin City.
I wanted to like this movie. It's one I almost went to see in the theater, but I had to walk past the scrapbook store at the mall to get to it, and well, I didn't make it out of there until after the movie had started. All I have to say is thank God for Archiver's! My money was much better spent in the store than it would have been at the theater.
It wasn't the gore that turned me off, although I am squeamish and it was pretty bad. (A dog that was trained to eat human flesh? And then showing it? Ugh!) I had three main reasons why this movie didn't work for me. The first was that I think the film makers assumed a certain familiarity with the comic on which Sin City was based. I don't have that familiarity. In fact, I'd never heard of the comic until the movie came out. I found myself scrambling, trying to figure out the world in which the stories took place and being given very little help from the movie itself.
For example, it took me a long time to figure out that the cops in this world are largely corrupt and that the good ones are few and far between. Yes, it opens with Bruce Willis and his partner talking about it, but I thought it was just a couple of dirty cops like they mostly do in those kinds of movies. I continually felt like I was given information too late for things to make sense to me.
My second reason kind of ties into the first--I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on. Is the character hallucinating or is the dead guy not really dead? I mean they're doing the comic book violence kind of thing where they're shot like 40 times and still walking around, so even a character being riddled with bullets didn't mean he was a corpse. I was never sure about this.
The third reason is the really big one for me. I didn't care about the characters. They were as two dimensional as a comic book and I was never really given an opportunity to get to know them or care about them. Part of this could be that the movie was a series of vinettes strung together (And did they ever tie together or was it all just random?). But if I don't care about at least one character, I'm not going to care about the movie.
I'll confess that I didn't make it all the way through Sin City. I tried. It was a 2 hour movie and I watched 1.5 hours of it, but when I realized that I was more interested in the cinemaphotography than I was in the story, I decided it was time to quit and watch Sunday night baseball.
The technique of mixing splashes of color in with the mostly black and white movie was fabulous. I really loved how they did that. I also liked the warrior women who protected themselves in Old Town, unfortunately that didn't last long before it became a quest for the policeman's head and that's when I quit.
Edited to add: One of the things that irritated me in the warrior women vinette was that these strong, kick butt women kill this cop and then they become stupid and it's up to the MAN to fix everything for them. The women's leader was preparing for war with the cops, but luckily the big smart man was there to try to take care of everything for them. Argh!
Overall, I give Sin City 2 stars. On the Net Flix rating scale, that means I didn't like it.
I didn't do much else yesterday. Lolled around mostly. It made me feel vaguely guilty, but it was so much fun to not have to do anything. :-) I did start sorting my reference books, but didn't finish that yet. I'm thinking I might have to make an Ikea run and pick up this table they have. I saw it when I bought my bookcases in February, but I didn't want to spend even more money. But I really need a table in the scrapbook room and this one is nice and deep.
Oops! I gotta get ready for work.
