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Sin City: a contextual review

Shut yer pie-hole Bussmann, here I am.


I should get this out right now: I've never actually read Sin City. Not one graphic novel. This was partially on purpose. A couple of times, I tried to read one of them, but I couldn't get past the coarse, ugly art and the overwhelming monologuing. Then, last year when I heard about the coming film, I decided that I would go to this movie without having read the comics; see the story the same as any non-geek would.

I saw a few of the trailers/commercials for the film, and I started getting seriously excited. The look of the movie was insanely cool - the black and white with splashes of color here and there. The list of actors was awesome, a great ensemble cast. And I knew, since Frank Miller himself was involved closely in the project, it was going to be taken very seriously. That last part was key to me. Often times, writers and directors take what they think of as 'sensationalist' characters and stories and try to create a sensation of a movie out of them. Daredevil is the prime example: a horrible movie, even though the past few years have seen some of the most incredible writing in comics in its pages.

With Sin City, however, it seemed that the movie was not going to be chewed up by the hollywood machine, and that was a big deal for me.

In the end, I think the movie truly did stick to it's roots. And even though I've never actually read the graphic novels, I can safely say that for two reasons: the script, and the cinematography.

The Dialogue:
Before going into the theater, I knew that the script remained almost perfectly true to the comic. As in, there were scenes that played out word-for-word what Miller wrote in the comic. This was highly unique to this film. Usually, for adapted screenplays, the original story is retold in different words on the screen. This is due to consideration of what works onscreen versus on the page of a book.

But this higlights exactly one of my frustrations about movie adaptations of comics: that too much change is often made in the name of 'what works' onscreen. The problem as I see it, is that, unlike books, comics use images to tell stories, so there should only need to be a minimal amount of change done to the script in order to tell the story as it was originally intended.

The Cinematography:
Now, knowing that the movie script was almost a one-to-one transfer from the comic, I was able to consider how the dialogue fit into the pace of the film itself. In any given scene, I watched as the camera would seamlessly move from shot to shot, with the dialogue following in unison. What was amazing about the composition of shots, was that they moved as the dialogue moved.

An example: Clive Owen stands on a ledge outside Brittany Murphy's apartment (check out the clip titled 'Stop'). They talk, then he leaps from the edge. Watch as he drops, and listen to how the narration fits into the shots. A shot is set, it stays static while a person talks, then changes as new person is talking, or as a new thought is narrated. Basically, what Miller and Rodruigez have done is taken the exact frames of the comic, and stuck transitions in between. It's a crazy, awesome technique that literally translates the comic onto the screen.


The Contextual Argument:
It is due to this serious treatment of the original stories that Sin City triumphs. What we get when we go to the theatre is a look at the raw story as told by Miller, almost as though we could consider it a literary work and discuss things like Miller's use of color and symbol.

Last week, I watched the DVD release of Once Upon a Time in the West, the ultimate spaghetti western by Sergio Leone. Featured on the DVD was an exclusive commentary track with analysis of the film by various film scholars, discussing influences, plot analysis, and symbols in the film. In the same way, scholars will easily be able to look at Sin City years from now, and consider the thoughts and techniques of Frank Miller. Why does the young prostitute have blue eyes? What comparisons can be made between the two characters who had their genitals attacked in some way?

Sin City onscreen offers us a great wealth of questions to consider, just as it did in the comic. In fact, with the movie as such a literal translation of the comic, we will certainly be able to open the pages of one of these graphic novels and find the exact symbols and questions as we saw in the film.

And that's truly the beauty of Sin City. As a film it allows us an open window into the serious consideration of comics as literary masterpieces. Hopefully, this movie will convice more than a few people that comics are no longer for children. That they are rich with emotion, symbol, and meaning, and that their open pages are ready for open minds.