Sin City

[Sal]

I saw this last night and was extremely satisfied with it.  

It's relentless, though.  They really don't beat around the fact they're condensing an entire series into 2 hours.  It's the equivalent of being force fed stuff that you hope to god will go down smooth, and for the most part the movie's entertaining but it's also extremely self aware.  I guess a lot of noir is self aware in principle, but this is inverting that genre and rather than playing it down, it plays up up up.  It doesn't look easy, either.  There are some films that look like they were a breeze to make, and knowing films are never easy to make that sort of quality is a testament to the expertise of the craftspersons.  This, however, really struggles in its effort and you feel that sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

That said, this shit is glorious.  Rourke is fascinating.  All the characters play well with one another...great chemistries.  The actors you hope don't recieve too much screen time...don't! And thank god for that.  If the opening scene of the movie scared you off it does clinch the credits with the greatest line I've heard in a long time so it made the whole thing worth it.  

Other than that, there's stuff here for everybody.  I would recommend it to people not familiar with the comics....especially.

[cron]

Rodriguez has a very elaborate DVD planned for the movie already. "We shot the full stories of the books, and I knew we could truncate it down, knowing that we weren't going to lose any scenes; eventually they would all be available for people to see. So the DVD will come out with the theatrical cut, and then there'll be a separate disc that's got the individual episodes separated with their own title card, and you can just watch The Big Fat Kill from beginning to end, the full cut. That's a single story, and then switch over and watch The Yellow Bastard and that's forty five minutes. It'll have all the material back in. So it'll be like the experience of picking up the book, where you pick up one story and you read it from beginning to end. And it'll have all the material in it. You can shuffle your own version of the movie and just watch them all separately... And then I'm gonna add on a twenty minute film school, probably for this one, cause there's so many things and I want another ten minute cooking school to be 'Sin City breakfast tacos'; which I'll make a home-made flour tortilla, and it's the best meal you can probably ever learn."

[bonanzataz]

hehe. rodriguez is funny.

one thing i did remember after sal's post. the credits. it was so obvious that he just made the credits on his computer at home. i wish that they had a cooler title sequence.

[cowboykurtis]

theres a decent article in this month's WIRED about Sin City.

[metroshane]

it was so obvious that he just made the credits on his computer at home

Have you SEEN his home computer?

[MacGuffin]

'Sin City' Effects Crews End Up on Same Page

Visual effects artists typically struggle to make phony computer-generated imagery appear intricately real. The challenge for Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City," which opens nationwide Friday, was to make live-action photography appear boldly hand-drawn.

To emulate and amplify the visual style of creator and co-director Frank Miller's graphic novels for the silver screen, Rodriguez tapped three digital boutiques to create stark virtual worlds for each story in the "Sin City" triptych.

Canadian firm Hybride Technologies tackled 600 shots on "Hard Goodbye," Santa Monica-based CafeFX handled 600 for middle story "Big Fat Kill" and the Orphanage's San Francisco branch produced 600 for "Yellow Bastard."

Stu Maschwitz, senior visual effects supervisor at Orphanage, recalls that he was delivering shots on "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" when he caught wind of Rodriguez's ambitious new project.

"I read about it on Ain't It Cool News, and I called him immediately," Maschwitz says, noting that he made the call with some incredulity given Miller's tense relationship with Hollywood based on prior adaptations of his work.

Once he confirmed the news, the VFX supervisor says that Rodriguez doled out the shots and allowed each house to come up with its own home-brewed techniques to convey Miller's style onscreen.

Each story's distinct look in "Sin City" is largely due to how each digital boutique first interpreted Miller's graphic style and then devised an in-house process to render the desired look. Maschwitz notes that there was little discussion among houses, which is highly unusual in the VFX realm where multiple shops often need to collaborate to match each other's looks.

"Robert's vision for film is broad enough to include other people's ideas," he explains.

The Orphanage, for example, recognized that Miller drew very detailed pencil images -- in stark black and white, no shades of gray -- and then later painted in silhouettes, "blowing over meticulous detail," Maschwitz says.

To apply that graphic aesthetic to the cinematic realm, the Orphanage first tackled the virtual production design, relying largely on matte painters and 3-D modelers. Next, the crew concentrated on lighting using a global illumination ray-tracer rendering engine called Brazil, developed by Splutterfish.

Whereas a sole artist like Miller can fluidly move between such mediums as pencil and ink or paint, in cinema there are distinct departments, Maschwitz notes.

"Usually the production designer wants to light everything," to display the detail in the sets. "And the cinematographer wants to light nothing," to impart dramatic lighting, he explains.

That same interdepartmental struggle can flare up in computer graphics production.

"There's sometimes a preciousness with a small crew," Maschwitz says. "You never want the guy who built the 3-D model to light the set (because) he wants you to see every nook and cranny."

Instead, the Orphanage relied on copious amounts of darkness and shadow even if it meant blotting out hard-won CG details. Making matters more complex is that the application of such extreme lighting is pretty illogical to artists who work so hard to make the phony look passable by using realistic lighting.

"We didn't want the stylization to come out of a traditional CG aesthetic -- CG doesn't look good," Maschwitz says. "The focal point for us was always that the problems are aesthetic not technical. Sure, we had numerous technical problems to solve, but the most important problems to us were always aesthetic ones."

[03]

this will be the first time i will see a film solely for someone in it

[Jeremy Blackman]

This has more noirish density than anything I've seen. It's everything I expected.

I loved this movie in the same way I liked Kill Bill. I feel like this is where Tarantino might have arrived 10 years from now.

It has the kind of unapologizing masculine brutality that makes you feel guilty. And the whole thing is beautifully overacted, though it became a little obvious with Brittany Murphy's role.

[Sleuth]

what

[metroshane]

Freakin' incredible.  Papa say he hasn't felt that way coming out a flick since he was a chillin.

[Film Student]

I plan on seeing this movie tonight; I'm wary of the extreme digital stylization (Sky Captain didn't work out too well), and I'm inclined to agree with the philosophy of Armond White's scathing New York Press review, but the geek in me is still excited beyond belief.

[modage]

yeah, i just saw it a 2nd time and i feel exactly the same as i did the first time.  my criticisms still stand but its still pretty damn cool.  B-

[Weak2ndAct]

I thuroughly enjoyed the movie, it was hard to hate it since I'm an unabashed fan of Miller's comic and the movie is so unabashedly faithful.  That being said, it stumbled in one respect: in trying to cram so much in so little time (three graphic novels in 120 mins), the whole thing felt a bit rushed.  I would have liked to have seen a bit more patience, a bit more poeticism.  Hell, some slow-motion-- like when Marv crashed feet-first though a squad car.  The scene where Marv visits the priest carries so much more weight in the book, but it's so damn sudden that we hardly have a moment to realize what's happening.  

And Jessica Alba sucks.  I mean seriously.  

But I really did like it.  And christ, the most violent thing I've seen in ages (if Marv's car/interrogation technique doesn't shock you, who knows what will).

[Myxo]

This was an all-around great film. It's like JB said. I sat through this movie not looking for some spectacular plot but waiting for each page to turn. I could see the bubbles above each character's head and the narration scripted at the bottom of each frame in the comic book. Whatever it might lack in dialogue it more than makes up for in being one of the (if not THE) most visually stunning film this year.

[Ghostboy]

It was great, as I expected, but also had all the numerous problems I was also anticipating (posted somewhere in the first three pages of this thread). As I wrote on my blog just now, I think what it comes down to is: the comics are works of art, and the movie is an imitation of those works of art, and there's a loss inherent to such slavish adherence.

Still, I can't wait to see it again.

The Yellow Bastard was the best story, in my opinion - which I wasn't expecting, since I much prefer the original Marv story when it comes to the graphic novels. It was the only one that didn't feel completely rushed, and the only one with a really solid emotional core.

Also, one of the lead actors from my film plays the DA who gets his arm broken by Marv. Which was sorta cool to see.