Sin City, a little more sinful than Vegas

Clive "2 hot 4 tv" owen

I don’t really enjoy writing reviews for good movies because I don‘t like analyzing the nuances of filmmaking, so usually I just say ‘it’s good, go see it‘. I prefer writing reviews for bad movies or movies with lots of cheesiness because there’s plenty of humorous material to rip apart. Everybody loves parody! Anyway, Clint said “are you going to write a review?”
So yes, here is it.
Once again, just like the last comic book movie I watched (Constantine), I didn’t really know anything about it. I knew Frank Miller created it, so I knew it was going to be bizarre and dark, but not much else. I did skim through a few pages of the graphic novel at Borders though. What I do know is that anything different is (usually) good.
The movie starts out with a beautiful scene on a rooftop that sets the mood of not knowing what to expect. The color is really the first thing that strikes you. About 90% of the film is done in black and white, but a brilliant idea which I’ve never seen done in a movie before, is how certain objects and people are given color to draw attention and accent shadows.
The second scene of the movie started to get me pretty worried, it involved Bruce Willis and Michael Madsen exchanging some badly delivered lines. Willis was ok, but Madsen was very disappointing. He delivers his lines in this really cheesy dry manner. And so I thought, great, here we go, this movie isn’t going to be believable at all.
But very quickly the quality of the acting and believability increase, it takes a bit to get used to but you’re quickly drawn in to the world of Sin City.
Stylistically Sin City reminds me a lot of the Dick Tracy movie (which I love) with Warren Beatty and Al Pacino. Sin City has that same type of highly stylized imaginary world. It has a lot of over-the-top memorable characters, much like Dick Tracy. And to my surprise, Sin City was a very funny movie, at least every 10-15 minutes there was a great laugh shared by the audience. Some of it because of funny lines but some of it was also caused by the occasional extreme cartoonish violence.
Though Sin City takes place in this far out world filled with extreme characters, the actors make it believable. Everyone does an excellent job, especially Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen, who play their characters with perfect conviction. Clive Owen is my new hero, he is so amazingly cool in this movie and HE NEEDS TO BE JAMES BOND!
The only real problem at all that I have with the movie is the occasional sloppily done blue screen work. Most of the movie’s environments are computer generated and were done wonderfully, but sometimes the actors and their background just don’t look right. It was really only noticeable 4-5 times in the movie though, but detracts from the quality, just a little bit.
Very good movie, kept me captivated, awesome art direction and acting, I give it 8.76/10 Jessica Albas