I really didn't like Sin City!
I go through much of my life thinking, "Nah, I'm not so much a feminist. I mean, I read Maxim." And then I see something like Sin City.
I want to never be exposed to Frank Miller or his issues ever again. They make me feel unclean and unhappy. I don't want to see worlds where every woman is a prostitute, except for the dyke (and god knows why she's a dyke, since she could have any man she wanted). Putting guns and weapons in their hands doesn't empower these women, not at all, it just makes them further fetishes, to a degree that does not titillate me (and I can be pretty darn titillated by female exploitation and fetishism), but rather repells me. Women who are so "empowered" are only so in that they don't have pimps. "Pretty little Miho" in particular turned me off, because, well, I took about four classes that barfed all over that particular archetype. I think I wrote papers. (Yes, I like Kill Bill. And anime. They're different, just trust me on this one.)
There's only so far you can go in fitting with the noir genre before this starts to just be a sickness. I could have possibly better handled these stories one at a time, but stacked up as they were, just gradually getting worse and worse (The section with Marv was okay. The segment with the hookers was where my lip started to curl and I wondered if it was just me that this was bothering. "The Yellow Bastard" segment could not have ended soon enough for me).
I mean, in fairness, the male characters were two-dimensional archetypes, as they were meant to be, but at least they got to be a range of two-dimensional archetypes. At least they got to wear pants occasionally. ...I could go on, but my point is pretty clear. Frank Miller's ladies upset me.
So, yeah, I should have known better, because I knew I didn't like Frank Miller. I bought into the hype, because the movie was supposed to be visually wonderful.
...you know what? I'm not that impressed, Rodriguez. If you are adapting a work and you (...I'm talking out of my ass here and just going from what people have said about the comics, since I haven't read Sin City) are basically adapting it directly, not changing anything, going so far as to directly imitate the panels of the comic? You aren't directing. You have put nothing of yourself into the work, you have done nothing to allow the movie to exist in its own media, as an example of the art form it appears in. I'm sure for the $10.75 I spent on that movie ticket tonight, I could have picked up a Sin City trade and gotten the exact same experience. Only it would have taken less time, since I read fast. I may not have read the original, here, but I could tell this was a comic book. It looked like one, I could nearly see the monologue text boxes. Neat trick, but a movie should be a movie, and not a comic book, or a book (you know who else is guilty of this crime? Chris Columbus. The first two Harry Potter movies. Oh yeah. I went there.), and it should exist to create an experience that can only happen on the screen, or it has no worth. ...so, yeah, basically I'm hatin' on this movie for the reasons that everyone else has praised it.
...my only other comments are that if you're going to cover a guy in makeup so much so that he ends up looking like Ron Perlman, hell, you should just hire Ron Perlman for the part. HE'd be happy to have a job where he could use his own face.
I liked the scene that Quentin Tarantino directed. And that guy who got shot with arrows.
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