A shiny black engine of destruction, Frank Miller's Sin City might just be the most extravagantly brutal live-action cartoon ever made. It's an experience not easily forgotten – although not for its story or, perish the thought, its ideas. What's really unforgettable about Sin City is its ravishing look, its all-consuming attitude, and, most of all, its devotion to excess.
What makes Sin City so compelling is seeing just how far this movie is willing to go in its relentless pursuit of the extreme, a mad rush to constantly one-up itself in eye-popping onscreen depictions of violence, gore and every conceivable mode of over-the-top behavior. That the movie does most of this with a big fat wink and a nod mitigates the intensity only slightly, prompting occasional giggles as well as gasps (and cringes) at scenarios so extreme they often cross over into the absurd. This is a movie that takes Kill Bill Volume One's ultra-aggressive operating premise and amps it up fourfold.
Sin City is all about attitude and exaggeration. The movie wraps itself in hardboiled mood and nocturnal menace so dense and self-contained that not even the tiniest sliver of light squeaks in. This is the sort of movie where even the good guys are bad, where characters are shot dozens of times before they finally die, and where a severed head used as a Bible bookmark is played for laughs. The men here are tough-guy archetypes, preposterously big and mean, the women are equally cold-blooded but with impossibly hot bodies, and all flesh is fair game for being pawed or mutilated. Body parts are routinely and graphically shot or hacked off, faces beaten to a raw, bloody pulp and captured in loving close-up, as if to demonstrate the true meaning of pulp fiction.
Robert Rodriguez is officially the director here (with Rodriguez's pal Quentin Tarantino listed as a "guest director"), but, as the movie's full title more than implies, this is Frank Miller's show all the way. Miller is the designer and guiding light of the graphic novels on which Sin City is based, and virtually every frame of the film is a stunning replica not just of the artistic sensibility that permeates Miller's work, but of specific panels from his comics. Rodriguez shoots Sin City the way Miller drew it, in lustrous, super-high-contrast black and white, with just a sliver of red-red or cobalt blue stabbing through the blackness here and there. The film's elaborately stylized sets all appear to have been digitally created (think an infinitely seedier Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and when the characters bleed – and they bleed a lot – they bleed a variety of unsettling colors, including a chalky white goo that looks a lot like barium; a sickly, glowing yellow; and even a deeply saturated version of your standard, garden variety red.
The movie takes the form of a series of vignettes, all set in Miller's unique Mickey-Spillane-meets-Grand-Guignol universe, and all about bad people doing bad things in a very bad place. Murder, frame-ups, double-crosses and revenge are the basic building blocks, and there's often some mildly amusing O Henry twist involved. Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro add star power to the various segments, the best of which features a prosthetic-laden Mickey Rourke looking like a cross between Jack Palance, Kirk Douglas and a Klingon, in a vignette that mixes a bit of Gothic horror with its noir. With his lopsided grin plastered on that carved-from-granite, Mount-Rushmore-in-Hell kisser, Rourke's character is as close as Sin City gets to a hero – a sadistic, psychotic killer on the trail of someone even worse than he is.
Sin City offers plenty of moments of jaw-dropping brilliance (at least for those of us with strong stomachs), but there are also numerous missteps, beginning with the dovetailing, episodic structure – a self-referencing, wraparound shape that was integral to Pulp Fiction but that here just seems gratuitous and maybe a little pretentious. There are some sub-par performances too, notably from Alexis Bledel, a delicate but utterly gravitas-less beauty who should stick to The Gilmore Girls. Beyond all this, Sin City is a good half hour longer than it needs to be, giving us a little too much time to become numb to all the blood and guts being sprayed across the movie's surfaces.
And therein lies the rub. As ridiculously entertaining as it can be, Sin City is far from an "important" movie like such ultra-violent flashpoints as Straw Dogs, Reservoir Dogs or Man Bites Dog (do you notice a trend here, canine-watchers?). For all but the most insatiable gorehound, Sin City inevitably begs the question of why watching something so purely nasty should be so much fun, and that's something sure to count against it when the movie inevitably reignites those old debates on movie violence that flare up every few years.
But we'll just have to put these monumental questions on the backburner for now. As the doting parent of a 6-year-old child, I'm duty-bound to inform you that I wouldn't let my kid within miles of Sin City. But personally, I'm hooked – and with designer sensationalism this tasty, this fit-to-bursting with energy and imagination, it's nearly impossible to Just Say No. Sin City won't open up the doors of perception, but it takes no prisoners, generates one of the wildest rides in recent memory, and it doesn't apologize for anything. Now that Rodriguez has gotten all that PG-rated Spy Kids stuff out of his system, at least for the moment, here is the movie that he's obviously been itching to make for a long while now. And you can bet that he won't be letting his kids see it either.
Timing is Everything:
Ybor Festival of the Moving Image &
Tampa International Film Festival 2005
For the past few years, the Tampa International Film Festival (hereafter referred to as TIFF) and the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image (henceforth YFMI) have done us and each other the favor of allowing at least a day's breather between the end of one festival and the beginning of the other. This year, however, for reasons known only to the festivals' organizers, these two local film events will actually overlap, briefly but significantly, with TIFF taking place April 1-9 and YFMI running March 30-April 3, potentially forcing movie lovers to choose between one festival or the other. If you're thinking it's a bit odd for an area that's traditionally had trouble supporting major film events to hold two of them within the exact same time frame, you're not alone. The overlapping doesn't end there. Like politicians moving toward the center, each of these festivals seems to have slightly softened some of its defining (read: most extreme) characteristics – an understandable move when you're trying to sell tickets, but one that inevitably muddies the justification for two local festivals appearing so close together. YFMI still specializes in fusing experimental image-making, agitprop and performance-oriented artsiness, but this year's schedule is dominated by more-or-less narrative filmmaking, including a tribute to Canadian films that wouldn't have been out of place at TIFF. Meanwhile, TIFF, a festival that has screened some of the most uncompromising global fare ever seen in the Bay area (even daring to show Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango in its entirety), is sprinkled this year with generic dramas and a few offerings that might have made more sense at YFMI.
Make no mistake: there are still plenty of excellent, hard-hitting films to be seen at both of these film festivals. It's just that, in this year of 2005, there's less difference than ever between the two events – one filmmaker, Michael Haneke, even has movies appearing in both festivals – and the overlapping dates can't help but confuse things further. Still, better too much of a good thing than not enough, I suppose, so let's take a look at what's happening.
This year's YFMI takes place at various sites at Hillsborough Community College's Ybor campus and at Muvico Centro Ybor, kicking off on Thurs., March 31, with an elaborate, multi-media-packed evening at HCC. Meanwhile, over at Centro Ybor, YFMI's salute to Canada gets underway with an 8 p.m. screening of Anais Granofsky's lushly inscrutable The Limb Salesman, followed at 10 p.m. by a prime slab of cult craziness, Phil the Alien. If intoxicated extraterrestrials, talking beavers and levitating bar bands sound good to you, Phil the Alien repeats April 2 at 4 p.m. and midnight.
Among the other highlights of this year's YFMI are two films both playing April 2 at 10 p.m. at Ybor Centro: Lilya 4 Ever, a gritty but absolutely mesmerizing coming-of-age tale from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (Together), and Austrian auteur Michael Haneke's devastating apocalyptic vision Time of the Wolf. Other don't-miss films include Guy Maddin's surrealist hoot Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (April 2, 2 p.m.; April 3, 6 p.m.) and Be Here to Love Me (April 2, 4 p.m.; April 3, 6 p.m.), a solid documentary on country-folk legend Townes Van Zandt.
Perhaps my favorite film in this year's YFMI is Jonathan Caouette's amazing Tarnation (April 2, 8 p.m.), a documentary so radical it nearly re-defines the form. Hypnotic, compulsive, alternately moving and disturbing, and relentlessly honest to the point of recklessness, Tarnation finds Caouette manipulating some two decades' worth of home movies into a semi-experimental collage that offers a self-portrait of pain, loss and (you knew this was coming) redemption. Caoutette, whose life is almost too strange and sad to be believed, edited his autobiographical opus on a laptop and made it for a mere $218 – an artistic success story that will almost certainly open some unwelcome floodgates by offering carte blanche to all sorts of less talented filmmakers. Be that as it may, Tarnation is the real thing, and a must-see.
There's a lot more going on too, from a tribute to image-maker and local treasure Bud Lee (April 2, noon), to an acting workshop by Eugenie Bondurant (April 1, 10 a.m.), to the experimental shorts of Ted Lyman (April 2, noon), to a Saturday night performance of (MASS) Ensemble from California, a musical group that combines video with the large sculptural instruments they build and play. As with past YFMI events, the schedule is extremely fluid and you can probably expect some enormous changes at the last minute, so check the festival's website or call for up-to-the-minute info.
Meanwhile, there's a whole lot of incredible cinema shakin' over at the Tampa International Film Festival, held this year at Old Hyde Park's Sunrise Cinemas. My very favorite films in this year's festival are mostly older offerings (referred to by TIFF as its "Open Vault" selections), beginning with Charlie Chaplin's immortal comedy of the ascendancy of the machine, Modern Times (April 2, 5 p.m.). Chaplin's film is brilliantly paired with Fritz Lang's Metropolis (April 7, 8 p.m.) and a fascinating, impressionistic documentary called Phantom of the Operator (April 9. 7:30 p.m.), as part of a series called "Technology, Film and the Future."
TIFF is also presenting a long overdue mini-retrospective on the works of acclaimed Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, whose What Time is it There? (April 5, 7 p.m.) and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (April 6, 7 p.m.) are among the most original and effective examples of cinematic minimalism in recent memory. Die-hard cinephiles will also want to investigate Hungarian director Miklos Jansco's 1967 masterpiece The Red and the White (April 3, 5 p.m.), a widescreen epic that is one of the most rigorously poetic war films ever made.
Other recommended offerings include a nearly wordless day-in-the-life of Cuban society called Suite Habana (April 3, 7 p.m.); Paper Doves (April 5, 8:30 p.m.), a magnificently photographed tale of a Peruvian boy seduced by the glamour of terrorism; and Bedtime Stories for Crocodiles (April 2, 9 p.m.), a metaphorical journey through Mexico's past. I was less enthusiastic but still intrigued by Port Djema (April 4, 9 p.m), a somewhat self-conscious meditation on Europeans in war-torn Africa, and, although I haven't been able to preview Touch the Sound (April 2, 7 p.m.), I'm eager to check out this well-regarded documentary on hearing-impaired wild-woman musician Evelyn Glennie.
Not to overlook the films that didn't exactly sweep me off my feet, there's I Am David (April 1, 6:30 p.m.), a quasi-artsy tearjerker about a displaced young boy's trek across Europe. The Indian film Everybody Says I'm Fine (April 4, 7 p.m.) is MoR filmmaking that lacks either the finesse of that country's finest art films or the kitschy pleasures of its Bombay extravaganzas. Despite some nice local color, God is Brazilian (April 1, 8 p.m.) is an overly cutesy road trip fantasy from Cinema Novo pioneer Carlos Diegues. Finally, The Sea (April 1, 10 p.m.) is a predictable take on a Cuban-American's cultural awakening. And then there are the obligatory Holocaust dramas, The Hungarian Servant (April 6, 8:30 p.m.) and Volker Schlondorff's The Ninth Day (April 3, 9 p.m.), both laced with interesting ideas that get lost in a sea of good intentions.
This is still the Bay area's most exciting festival, though, and some of the very best films featured at this year's TIFF don't show up until its last few days. Lang's Metropolis, Michael Haneke's brilliantly scathing The Seventh Continent, Godard's Notre Music and some other altogether amazing offerings from France, Hungary and even (gasp!) America will all show up between April 7-9, and we'll be here next week to fill you in on all the details.
All TIFF screenings will be held at Sunrise Cinemas in Old Hyde Park. Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for students and seniors. A Gold Pass for all screenings is available for $125. For more information call TIFF at 813-253-3333, ext. 3425, or visit the festival website at www.tampafilmfest.com.
All YFMI events take place at Muvico Centro Ybor and on the Hillsborough Community College campus at Ybor City. Muvico tickets are $8 and $5 for students and seniors. Tickets for all other venues are $5 and $3 for students and seniors. Festival Passes good for all events at all venues are available for $50. For more information call 813-253-7674, or visit the festival website at www.yborfilmfestival.com.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2005.
