Sin City | Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller (II)

Sin City | Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller (II) | Sin City DVD

DVDs:

Sin City

	Sin City Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller (II) Dimension, 2005 average customer review:based on 781 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sinful city

The nights are cloudy, the alleys are dark, the men are dangerous, bars are smoky and femmes are fatale. "Sin City" is a thing of dark, bloody beauty.

It certainly says something if a graphic novel author helps out with a movie... especially if that creator swore he'd never let it be adapted. That is only one of the things that makes "Sin City," the adaptation of Frank Miller's comic, such a fascinating film.

"Sin City" is actually made up of three stories: In the depths of Basin (Sin) City, scarred hulk Marv (Mickey Rourke) sleeps with a beautiful prostitute, Goldie (Jaime King), only to find her dead beside him the next morning. Enraged, he goes on a killing spree to find her murderer, and learns that sinister cannibal Kevin (Elijah Wood) is responsible. But there's a powerful figure behind Kevin, who calls the shots.

Elsewhere in Sin City, Dwight (Clive Owen) does his best to defend Gail (Rosario Dawson) and the other Old Town prostitutes. But when Dwight kills a crooked cop, he has to somehow cover up the crime. And Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a cop with a failing heart, goes out of his job with a bang: He rescues little Nancy Callahan from a child molester who happens to be a senator's son. Hartigan is jailed, and when he gets out, he finds that Nancy (Jessica Alba) has grown into a lasso-twirling stripper. But the senator's son -- nicknamed Yellow Bastard -- is still after her.

"Sin City" is one of those few comic book adaptations that doesn't seem... well, cartoonish. Sure, it's the very image of noir, but the grim tone and grey characters are very real. It's not a movie for the fainthearted, but whoever enjoys the films of Quentin Tarantino (who directed one scene here) will surely be blown away.

Like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," this film is done almost entirely digitally. But unlike "Sky Captain," it has substance as well as style. All the sets and props are done with computers, and nearly everything is in black and white. Here and there we get a splash of colour -- red lipstick and matching dress, Yellow Bastard's face, green eyes.

The contents of three "Sin City" comic books are interwoven here, and Rodriguez is constantly faithful: A lot of these shots could have been lifted straight from the comic's pages. He also preserves the stark, black-and-white style that the graphic novels are known for. You can't get much more faithful than that.

"Sin City" is not quite a "Kill Bill" bloodfest, though -- surprisingly, this brutal movie has a dark sense of chivalry. Each story is about an outcast man defending a woman's honor, safety, or memory, even if he sacrifices himself in the process. "Sin City" wears its heart on its sleeve, even if that sleeve is bloodstained and torn.

Most of the actors do wonderful jobs -- Owen's dark photographer, Rourke's scarred strongman, Stahl's revolting Yellow Bastard, and Alba's surprisingly sweet stripper. Only a few, like Brittany Murphy, have lackluster performances. But perhaps the most memorable performances come from Bruce Willis and Elijah Wood. Willis plays his aging cop role with unusual grace, even when shooting the genitals off Yellow Bastard. And Wood plays Kevin with both creepy evil and spiritual ecstacy... all without saying a word.

"Sin City" is a remarkable, bleak, intense movie -- a halfway point between Tarantino and Raymond Chandler. An outstanding piece of work.

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Sin City DVD

This movie is great. I had a hard time getting it here. I ordered the first from and independent person selling on Amazon. They canceled it on me and said nothing...I waited and waited and thought it got lost in the mail, then tried tracking it and found it hadn't been sent because the one they had got damaged. No one told me though. They had even refunded my money without a word to me. I reordered it from the actual Amazon as a new product and had it in 2 business days. I'd say if you're going to buy something...just buy it from Amazon's wharehouse, it's safer.

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High POW Factor and Overloaded Extras in the Collector's Edition DVD Set Make for Audacious Thrill Ride Into Sin City

A visually audacious movie and an unpredictably wild ride into palookaville, this is one unique film viewing experience. I am not familiar with Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, but my guess is that Miller, who shares a co-director credit with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, has remained faithful in capturing the hard-boiled, crime-infested world of Basin City and its cynical inhabitants. This 2005 film takes a visual cue from 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow by green-screening the backdrops and using digitally-produced images as the landscape, but that's where the similarity ends. Instead of Sky Captain's sepia shadings, this one is in vividly rendered black-and-white with carefully selected splashes of color (perhaps inspired by Steven Spielberg's use of a red coat in the otherwise black-and white Schindler's List). It evokes the perfect feeling for its modern-day film noir sensibilities which includes pulp fiction-type dialogue and a rogue's gallery of exaggerated characters, some made up in prosthetics to make you think you've landed in the dark side of a Dick Tracy comic strip. But Miller's world feels much different, at once capturing the cartoonish, highly stylized violence of Quentin Tarnatino's films (he is identified as "Special Guest Director" though I'm unclear what he exactly did) and the special effects-driven black humor of Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her (which coincidentally starred Bruce Willis).

The plot revolves around three separate stories that share some of the supporting characters but little more than that story-wise. Continuing to improve and deepen with age, Willis plays a tough-talking cop named Hartigan in the first one. Just before accepting his pension, he pursues one last case to save an 11-year old girl from the clutches of a murderous psychopath who happens to be the son of a US senator. The girl grows up to be a stripper, played blandly by a Lolita-esque Jessica Alba. Completely unrecognizable as the actor who once enticed and coerced Kim Basinger in Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks, Mickey Rourke portrays Marv, a contract killer who falls in love with a beautiful hooker who is murdered in her sleep. His journey in finding her killer creates the most concurrently harrowing and darkly hilarious joyride in the movie, replete with decapitated heads of beautiful women mounted on a wall, a mute psycho-killer played by Elijah Wood (stunt casting for sure but intriguing in exposing a dark side to his Frodo persona) and a comic electric-chair execution scene. Rourke is a revelation, grotesquely ugly and built like a Mac truck but strangely insightful and impervious to what happens to his character.

The third story is the most surreal with a monotone-voiced Clive Owen, an almost heroic fugitive named Dwight, who saves a mouthy barmaid (an annoying Brittany Murphy) and a gang of empowered prostitutes (led by his former lover played in convincing dominatrix fashion by Rosario Dawson) from a corrupt cop. A Cyrano-nosed Benicio del Toro portrays the cop with his trademark fiery menace in what feels like a throwback to his career before Traffic. Dead people don't stay dead in any of the stories, but in this one, the concept is taken to an extreme, and the clutches between Owen and Dawson amid the violence provide a surprisingly amusing touch. Everybody seems to be having a good time, and it's nice to see some otherwise under-the-radar actors get a chance to chew on some scenery in atypical roles, chief among them Carla Gugino as a perennially nude lesbian parole officer, Nick Stahl as the senator's son who becomes the comically disgusting Yellow Bastard, and in seething, whatever-happened-to-them cameos, Powers Boothe and Rutger Hauer.

All the ingredients are so over-the-top that I was hoping the three stories would synthesize more than they do perhaps in the hope of a greater untapped theme. Moreover, for a movie so dependent on style to sustain itself over its two-hour-plus running time, it does feel a bit overlong and at times, repetitive in its visual elements. After all, one can take in only so many severed heads and limbs and heads shoved in toilets, as well as the inordinate amount of blood splattering in colors ranging from red to white to yellow. But no matter, as Rodriguez and Miller have fashioned something quite startling and entertaining here, a comic book come to life. Not for everyone's tastes but this is fun for those willing to take the ride. The incremental value of the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set over the standard single disc will depend on whether you have become obsessed with this cult film since there is only a behind-the-scenes featurette on the single disc.

Disc One contains the 124-minute, theatrical-release version with an excessive three audio commentaries. The first is with Rodriguez and Miller, who focus mainly on the book-to-screen translation and benefits from the author's perspective. The second has Tarantino and Willis join Rodriguez, and the focus turns to the technical aspects of the production even though Tarantino's contribution to the film is marginal at best. The third commentary track is actually the recording of the audience reaction at the movie's Austin première in order to replicate the experience one would have had at the theater. The remaining extras on Disc One may seem superfluous if you already sat through the first two commentary tracks. Six featurettes are offered - a five-minute short on how Miller and Rodriguez got together ("How It Went Down: Convincing Frank Miller to Make the Film"); seven minutes on Tarantino's contribution to "The Big Fat Kill" segment ("Special Guest Director, Quentin Tarantino"); seven minutes on the vintage 1950's cars used in the film; en minutes focused mainly on the weaponry; nine minutes with special makeup effects supervisor Greg Nicotero on how the looks of the principal characters were achieved; and finally, nine minutes with costume supervisor Nina Proctor about the stylized clothing. There is an odd feature on Disc One, "Sin-Chroni-City Interactive", which allows you to pick characters and locations and get a timeline view of relevant events. Disc One ends with two theatrical trailers.

Disc Two contains the 147-minute version of the film advertised as "recut, extended, and unrated". The additional 23 minutes amount to expanded cuts in each episode which allow them to be presented as separate short films. This gives you the option to watch the film as an integrated whole or separately. Each segment has its own menu of scene selections. From a story standpoint, the incremental value of the footage and flexibility is marginal at best. Five more featurettes fill up Disc Two - a twelve-minute short called "15 Minute Flic School" in which Rodriguez shares behind-the-scenes information and basic tricks of the trade; ten minutes where the entire film is shown in accelerated fashion to show how the actors had to improvise in front of green screens; a 17-minute piece on Tarantino's shooting of his scene; and most dispensable, nine minutes of a concert from Willis and his band the Accelerators at Antone's nightclub in Austin, and six minutes of Rodriguez sharing his recipe for "Sin City" breakfast tacos (seriously!). Beyond the discs is the complete Sin City graphic novel in printed form, The Hard Goodbye (Sin City, Book 1: Second Edition).

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Needs better packaging for shipping

Everything was great, except that the product was a little damaged in shipping. It needs to be packaged better.

Sin

Great quality DVD, Though he package was a little damage (due to the post office), all was great

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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