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This movie gave me an orgasm in my brain. If it's a fanboy movie, so be it...if it's a sexist fanboy movie, so be it (though I saw more than a few packs of youngish girls there, sans boyfriends, enough so that for a moment I thought I'd maybe walked into Beauty Shop by accident)...for the first forty minutes or so at least, I saw what was for me what Spider-Man must have been to...y'know...those other fanboys. I totally, TOTALLY wanted nothing more than to step into the screen and just, like, go live there. Wow. Just.....wow.
Sadly, the Marv segment SO owns the picture that the rest of Sin City just doesn't feel quite up to snuff -- to me. I'm not sure structuring the movie as three separate stories was the best way to go; Miller plays with chronology enough in the GNs that it wasn't really necessary, either (i.e., the GNs tend to overlap). It felt a little too Pulp Fiction in that regard, and again I felt like the last two stories (which would otherwise have been fucking amazing) suffered somewhat for...well...just not being the first story.
My only other quibbles are that (a) everyone smokes ALL THE FUCKING TIME, which -- as a smoker stuck in a movie theatre for two hours -- is a little anxiety-inducing (I found myself wondering if the one or two walkouts that I witnessed were due to the gore, the abuse of women, or just because said deserters just couldn't take any more and HAD to have a cigarette), and that (b) white blood squibs, quite frankly, look like big blasts of busted nut. Perhaps this is just me. Weird psychosexual connotations aside, however, I couldn't help but feel that some bright bright RED amidst all that black and white would not have been out of place (but I suppose might have netted the film an NC-17 a la the original version of Kill Bill Volume 1).
Oh! And I was crushed that we didn't get to see Marv visit his mom. Oh, well.
On the plus side...uh...on the plus side is everything else.
Well...okay, I probably wouldn't have cast Bruce Willis as Hartigan; he does a good enough job, but he kinda comes across less as a grizzled old cop than he does Bruce Willis in old guy makeup with a totally unconvincing scar. On the other hand, the Hartigan/Nancy relationship plays just as desperate, weird, creepy and strangely sweet to me here as it always did in the comics, to the credit of Willis and Jessica Alba both -- in a way, Marv's "relationship" with Goldie almost seems healthier. Great twisted stuff.
I'm still trying to decide if this movie is sexist -- I think it's more misanthropic than anything else. The women in the film are all either hookers, strippers, or just arbitrarily naked, yeah...but then again, the men in the film are all either psychos, psychos for hire, cannibalistic psychos, or psychos with hearts of gold. (With the possible exception of Dwight, who -- with his backstory omitted -- doesn't seem to be much of anything except a guy who just happens to be hanging around Brittany Murphy's apartment when he takes it upon himself to dive out a window and kick ass when he could, in fact, be getting laid. Which kinda makes him a psycho, too.) Besides which, any theory of criticism that would lead logically to the removal of Carla Gugino's nude scene is clearly one I myself want nothing to do with. |
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