Sin City (2005)
(Release Date: April Fool's Day, 2005)

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J.C. Maçek III The World's Greatest Critic! As an avid fan of Comic Books and Comic Book movies, I've always been frustrated by the quality disparity between the source material and the end product! As if Whoreywood knows how to tell a Graphic Novel story better than the Genre it was created for. Look, folks, it's a comic book... you've got your script and your story-boarding already done... get your filthy ladle out of my four-color soup! Seriously... how great would Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns look if brought to the screen intact? Alas, after nasty turns with Robocop 2 and Robocop 3, Miller himself looks upon Whoreywood the way most of us might look upon a Codfish Waffle... none too tasteful... so it couldn't ever happen. That is until Maverick Director Robert Rodriguez brought old Frankie to his Austin-Based Troublemaker Studios and proved that his works could be made intact (with the help of an unauthorized short film). Was Miller convinced? Well, scant months later we're given his most unlikely-to-be-filmed project, the ultra-noir and ultraviolent Sin City... and we're given Sin City intact, using the comic as the script and the panels as the Story board. Yes, it's safe to say they've pulled it off! And amazingly they did it without any stars whatsoever. Oh, except for Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Clive Owen, Nick Stahl, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer, Elijah Wood, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Jaime King, Carla Gugino, Devon Aoki, Brittany Murphy, Michael Clarke Duncan, Alexis Bledel, Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Nicky Katt and Frank Miller himself. Oh, and Jude Ciccolella too. But aside from that there were... very few stars. But this is far from just some Woreywood Who's Who. This is Film Noir at its darkest. The Black and White-cum-colorized Green Screen and CGI mastery of the vastly underrated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is met and surpassed here! Miller's trademark artistic grotesquerie is perfectly captured with colorized accents of Gold and Red for emphasis when desired. Miller's own use of negative space, silhouette and the disconcerting use of the wrong color for the right thing is somehow translated to near-perfection here. While any sort of "Recap" would be ridiculous here, Sin City is the episodic adventures of the residents of Basin City, a fictional city that seems to never have a sunrise (figuratively and literally). As our heroes and villains battle the corrupt underworld and the even more corrupt aristocracy, we're brought to the door of a hideously frightening Serial Killer in the woods, the erotic nightmare of "Old Town" where the prostitutes are the police and a linear adventure from the docks to the prisons to... Miller only knows. In Sin City the good guys are flawed to the point of tragedy and the bad guys are worse than can be discussed at the dinner table. The women are impossibly beautiful, the men are impossibly scarred. While Sin City is so damned good because it is a graphic novel, many mainstream audiences might be turned off by the intentionally choppy film-noir dialogue and the surreal landscape of CGI, Live Action and anti-color. There is also the cartoonish aspect of the physically impossible and the absolutely indestructable anti-hero... probably a little hard to swallow for those who carry their realism like a rosary. This is also a very, very violent film with beheadings, fatal beatings, more bullets than a Fallujah documentary and enough depravity to keep you up all night with a tummy ache. The blood isn't always red, but it's almost always there, so be ready. Still, this is a universally well-acted movie (if you can take the intentionally over-the-top lines) and it's a wonder to look at. Troublemaker Studios just might have made a name for themselves on this one. Directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller (yes, he gets a co-directing credit) and "Special Guest Director" Quentin Tarantino manage to keep this fun, even at its most horrific, and one may or may not really understand what's being shown them until its too late. Even with three directors, this is one cohesive piece of artistic cinema, and certainly nothing you've ever seen before. While not for the weak-of-heart, the easily offended or the squeamish, this is the most accurate comic book adaptation to date. I only hope the trend continues! Great action, great acting, great story, great nudity and great accuracy gives Sin City Five Stars out of Five. You might not like what Sin City says, but the way it says it is a hard-riding joy to experience. So until The Dark Knight Returns gets made into a bright, bright sunshiny Hollywood Film with Robin Williams as Batman and Mary-Kate Olson as Robin... I promise to see you in the next reel! Oh, and Mickey Rourke is a Genius!

Sin City reviewed by J.C. Maçek III
who is solely responsible for his own views
on Jessica's Bod and Frank Miller's BRAIN!
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I love Beauty, but I don't care about PRETTY!

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