i am confused by this one part in the NYT sin city review

i know i was just kiddin' witcha.

I was very torn by this movie. On the one hand: totally gorgeous looking, fantastically complete and immersive visual world, non-stop action, well edited, thoroughly "entertaining", fun fun fun. So it totally works at being what it's trying to be, which is a film adaptation of a comic book. So it's not as if it's a failure, and the reviews which allege that it is too violent clearly just don't get the horror/comic book context, nor do I buy the idea that it's ultimately "dull" because it's so focused. So on all those fronts, it's a great film as an experience for the eyes and ears. On the other hand: what we have is a film adapatation of a comic book adaptation of noir as a template, so this triple amplified chain of exaggerrating something that was an exaggerration of something that was already very crude becomes very dodgy in relation to gender and how "maleness" and "femaleness" get visually realized and scripted. I found it a kind of embarassing reductio ad absurdum of cartoon lovin' fanboy heterosexual male desire: hookers (with hearts of gold!) innocent wittle schoolgirls (that you get to watch grow up just enough so that you can fuck them! and when you do it's because THEY PUSH THEMSELVES ON YOU! yeah that happens ALL the time!) ie. there's this fucked up centrifugal engine at work in which women are desirable yet continually the objects of extremely sadistic violent energies- the plots try to resolve this thorugh splitting- there is the "evil psychopath" who incarnates the direct sexual sadism (the bad guys) and then there are the good guys who as vigilante figures outside the law etc. just go out and seek to do good in the name of the ladies they love (the absent "good" women who sit on the sidelines and suffer, and look awfully good as they suffer) which makes them laughably improbable and corny, and the whole thing, when viewed coldly and dispassionately, looks pretty sad, a pure distillation of adolescent flight from what sex is like, what interactions between men and women are like, the compromises and shadings of, um, actual human people. So yes the picture succeeds at being a gorgeous comic book, but in the process the intensely adult precision of its art direction and focus reveals very clearly that it was made by people who know that these plotlines and characters are utterly flat and clichéd which means that you have a creeping sensation of void or flight that washes over you.

To put it another way: The question for Rosario isn't "omg, you played a prostitute, that must have been hard, eh?" but "geeze isn't it corny that somebody is so out of touch with what an actual prostitute's life is like that they when they stage a gang of prostitutes they basically look like Tekken fighters as dressed by Hot Topic?". I know the knee jerk response is Dude, it's a comic book what do you expect? to which I would reply "the plot of your comic book makes the way you think about women and the way you think about yourself extremely obvious, and the relentless violence of that vision and the virgin/whore clichés that drive your fantasies seem really obvious and worn-out".

Drew OTM.

Dang.

yeah, i suppose the adolescent vision of sexuality on display is another reason i thought of the film as essentially pornographic.

the film didn't seem to have the conviction which would inspire me to be offended; it just left me feeling indifferent and a little chagrined.

I mean, the obvious counterexample people will bring up if you charge this film with sexism is "but the whores of old town have guns and they kill people with swordz and stuff"- but the scene in which those same prostitutes get mocked by Marv for thinking that they can tie him up and he indulgently and patronizingly lets them think they can control him pretty much puts them in their (inferior) place relative to the strong male tough guy who is wild and untameable etc.

The friend that I saw this with (milton) pointed out that a lot of Miller's lines read well on the page but sound corny when read aloud by actors- I haven't read the original comics- do other people think that this is true?

some of the corniness was intentional--or perhaps it's just that certain actors weren't able to read such lines without putting a certain humorous ironic spin on them. michael madsen in particular read his lines as though he were in some kind of looney-tones noir parody.

i was just reading the other thread ("i loved sin city") and... i just can't identify with all the things that people have loved about this movie.... this movie obv pushes a lot of people's buttons but they just aren't my buttons. like, not at all.

well, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum. what might be right for you, might not be right for some.

as they say.

i should add that before i checked my watch after the film was over, i was confident that the movie had been like 3 1/2 hours long.

it doesn't appeal to me because there are no aliens in it. it might be nice to look at.

i dunno. i thought the flick moved along quickly, with it weighing down only in the later parts of the Dwight part and the 2nd half of The Yellow Bastard...

"The friend that I saw this with (milton) pointed out that a lot of Miller's lines read well on the page but sound corny when read aloud by actors- I haven't read the original comics- do other people think that this is true?"

The lines are pretty corny on the page too, but obv everything sounds cornier when you are actually hearing them read aloud. Both the comix and the movie kind of play the corniness for yuks too.

The obviously clicked noir lines were hilarious! That's part of the point, it's got satire of noir built in. I mean, there is no universe in which "You kill him good!" can be delivered without laughter.

I'm still amazed that Frank Miller's leather/German fetish made it through intact. Not just the iron crosses, but the swastikas too! I've never completely unraveled what he's going at with it, and I don't think anyone's going to be able to analyze it through this film alone. His imfamous Batman story, "The Dark Knight Returns" has this element as well.