Bleeding Fiction

I was a little preoccupied to mention it yesterday, but Friday saw me going out and seeing Sin City with Lukas. It was stylin'.

Now, I've never read the comic, so I can't speak for the movie's faithfulness or lack thereof, but I can say that there were shots in that movie that looked like comic panels, so I'll assume the rumor I heard - which is that they jused used the comic as the storyboard for the movie - is true. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

Violent, too. The worst of the violence is stylized; painted red in a grey world, thrown over-the-top with cinematography to turn it unrealistic. It's not visceral; we, the audience, have no sense that it might really be happening. But it's not slapstick, either. It doesn't make you want to laugh. It's violence painted as art.

Lukas had told me, before going into this, that in reading the comic he found most of the characters irredeemable; potentially likeable, but all ultimately villains. I don't think that's true for the movie. The protagonists in Sin City kill, and they kill a lot. But there's never a sense, for me at any rate, that they're not doing what's right. These are harsh and brutal men, who don't feel bad about the death they cause. But they're killing to avenge the innocent, to protect the thelpless, to save their friends. These are brutal men, but they're not anti-heroes. They're definitely the good guys.

Sin City is film noir, not just because of it's in black and white, but because it aspires to the same harsh, bitter world that Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett saw, the same world that Humphrey Bogart stalked through. It's colored (pardon the word) more by a modern sense of violence, but like the classic film noir it exists in shades of grey so that it can cast both the black and the white in starker relief.

When I left the movie on Friday, I said that I'd like to rent it on video when he comes out. By now, I think I'd like to see it again next weekend.