I held back, wondering if perhaps the Spy Kids would have been better served if the films had not been such a manic demonstration of his method. You want a nuclear submarine, you make one out of thin air and put your characters into it. You want a light over here, you grab a light and put it over here. This is the future! You don't wait six hours for a scene to be lighted. I remember him leaping out of his chair and bouncing around a hotel room, pantomiming himself filming "Spy Kids 2" with a digital camera and editing it on a computer. Rodriguez has been aiming toward "Sin City" for years. And there's a narration that plays like the captions at the top of the frame, setting the stage and expressing a stark existential world view. Some of the stills from the film look so much like frames of the comic book as to make no difference. On the movie's website, there's a slide show juxtaposing the original drawings of Frank Miller with the actors playing the characters, and then with the actors transported by effects into the visual world of graphic novels. We get not so much their presence as their essence the movie is not about what the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest dreams. The actors are mined for the archetypes they contain Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. It internalizes the harsh world of the Frank Miller "Sin City" comic books and processes it through computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid costumes and dialogue that chops at the language of noir. The movie is not about narrative but about style. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map. It's silly, too long, and sometimes narratively lacking, but it's one hell of a ride.This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. Although completely lacking in susbtance Frank Miller has done a masterful job of transitioning his comic book to the big screen with Robert Rodriguez, and without any doubts in my mind, hands down, it's his best film. Perfectly conveying to the neo noir thriller genre in all it's grim, shadowy, blood spilling edginess. Featuring a memorable ensemble of characters and truly eye popping costume design, Sin City is energetic and heart poundingly thrilling over the top fun. It would be easy to mistake it for an animation, it peculiarily looks just like a comic book, yet it never strays from looking realistic. The world in which it is set is absolutely stunning, stylishly shot with eye for detail, with murky, eery, black, beautifully lit set pieces that are absolutely cartoonish but feel physically existent. I found the CGI effects and gore very convincing but not once did they distract me from it's brilliant interlocking plot and it's strong characters and exceptional writing. It sometimes goes from being knowingly amusing to incredibly straight faced the next, and it's easy to go along with it. There have been many adaptations of graphic novels that have never managed to capture the atmosphere, the overall tone, the visual spark and the characters from it's inspiration, but Sin City is an exception. Sin City is nothing less than a pulpy, fantastically violent, visually incredible neo noir thriller.
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