Good and Gruesome

As all of you already know, I’m a huge comic book fan. I have been since I was a little kid. While most other girls were playing with Barbie dolls, I was buying comic books. I read a little of everything (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, the tiny little independent labels, etc). That being said, I never really got into Frank Miller’s noir graphic novels, “Sin City” until recently. I picked up one book a few years back but it was in the middle of the series somewhere and although I liked it (you can never go wrong with Frank Miller), it just didn’t excite me enough to really get into the series. When I heard that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller were going to do an adaptation of these books, I got more interested. So I went back to the beginning of the series and started reading the books. I was hooked. They are dark and violent and gritty. Pulp fiction. Film noir. Really fucking great works. Rodriguez was the perfect choice to direct this. I like his work a lot. He’s a great filmmaker who plays by his own rules and doesn’t let the big studios tell him what to do. He’s a visionary. A revolutionary... So the film opened this weekend. I of course went and saw it. Twice. I loved it. You could tell from the trailers that visually the film was going to be stunning and it was. It is a live action comic book. The Marv story in particular was frame for frame out of Book 1. The casting was great. I approved of every choice that was made - except maybe for Britney Murphy. She was particularly annoying to me for some reason – Mickey Rourke was the definite standout though. He was Marv... Clive Owen demonstrated that he really can act when given the correct material... Benicio Del Toro was brilliant as usual and managed to pull off creepy and funny at the same time... Hartigan is the type of role that Bruce Willis was born to play. He's got that tortured cop thing down pretty good now... It was a little disturbing to see Alexis Bledel go from playing sweet, little Rory Gilmore to playing an Old Town prostitute, but she was really good... Then there was Elijah Wood. I adore Elijah and I loved his character, Kevin. He was one of my favorite characters in the books and Elijah was the perfect choice to play him. Good career move. He went from playing a Hobbit who saved Middle Earth to a serial killer who eats prostitutes. I don’t think type-casting is anything he’s going to have to worry about :) Is it wrong for me to say that I thought he was really hot in this movie? Probably. So I won’t. Just pretend I didn’t say anything… This is not a movie for everyone. It’s black and white (mostly). It’s bloody. It’s gruesome. It’s film noir on a bad mescaline trip. It is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart and I loved every fucking frame of it.

“It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying, sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.” -- Clive Owen - "Sin City"