Saw Sin City on Sunday.

Meh.

It was a rather surreal experience, actually. Comic fans do nothing but gripe about the changes made to their beloved stories once they're adapted for a motion picture, and I know I've done my fair share of bleating on that subject. But comic fans are shit out of luck in this area when it comes to Sin City. This was 98% straight out of the comic. Shot-for-shot, line-by-line, I've never seen anything like it. Sure, I giggled like a fanboy on crack during X-Men 2, but I could have sat down in the movie theater with the Sin City comics and (with a handful of minor exceptions) read along precisely without missing a beat. For the first time, a movie based on a comicbook that will succeed or fail solely on the strengths (and weaknesses) of the comicbook. Dialogue sounded dumb? Frank Miller's fault. Didn't like the stories? Blame Miller. Too violent? Too sexist? No scapegoat this time.

Let's get some of the boring stuff out of the way: The direction was great. Frank Miller knows how to draw and Robert Rodriguez knows how to direct. You ain't going wrong in that department, period. The acting was, overall, well done. Brittany Murphy can't act her way out of a paper bag, but beyond that everyone else was passable to fantastic. The standout was easily Mickey Rouke's Marv. He nailed the character perfectly, easily surpassing Bruce Willis' Hartigan and Clive Owens; Dwight. (Both Willis and Owens seemed to struggle with the movie's many monologues; Willis improved over the course of the film but Owens never sounded comfortable delivering the lines; but Rouke hit every note.)

Understand also that the comicbook is literally black-and-white; no grayscale shading. There's light and dark, and it still allows for the illusion of depth that a black-and-white-only scene in a film can't convey. Yet what Rodriguez and his crew does with lighting effects (real and digital) still evoke as powerful a mood as what Miller accomplished with his pen.

Much has been made about the degree of violence in the movie, and I don't think I've read a review yet that hasn't used the "M" word. I'll admit, watching all that in a public movie theater was a mite uncomfortable. But, again, the extremity of it all is deliberate. Women get treated poorly in this movie, but the men aren't exactly coming up roses in comparison here--every one of them is a killer, they get beaten to a bloody pulp, and if you did a body count comparison, just as many (if not more) men die as women. I think people's reactions to the sex and violence says more about our culture's view of them than anything the movie implies.

Don't get me wrong. Sin City is a check your brain at the door kinda story. Yes, it's pulp detective fiction/film noir amped to 11. Yes, the dialogue is overly hokey, the characters are two-dimensional archetypes, and the sexuality is so gratuitous it becomes grotesque. But, somehow, it seemed to work better in the comic. It didn't seem as ridiculous, as preposterous as it plays out on the screen. The plot holes seemed bigger, the stories less enjoyable. I've read those stories over and over, but it took me seeing it in live action to realize just how dumb it is.
Yes, it's supposed to be over the top. But hearing that kind of hyperbolic dialogue for two hours straight, actually seeing the ridiculous costumes of the prostitutes, the endless barrage of blood and bullets . . . there's a reason why story elements get changed in adaptations of one medium to another; sometimes, some things don't work as well on the screen as they do on the page.

I'm still trying to decide if it was simply too much of a good thing. The movie consists of (mainly) three stories. The first one, "The Long Goodbye" is the best. The middle story, "The Big Fat Kill" is the weakest, because the whole thing is one extended shootout but the reason behind it all isn't strong enough to justify it.("The Big Fat Kill" is a sequel to another Sin City story, and much of the ending only pays off if you're familiar with the earlier story.) It also doesn't help that the cardboard-cut-out-characters don't give you anything to sink your sympathies into. The last, "That Yellow Bastard" falls somewhere in between. More meat than the middle story, but there are no characters in it have the kind of (hyper)humanity as Marv does in "The Long Goodbye". I also think the actual yellow bastard doesn't work very well on screen. Like the comics, his skin is banana-yellow; I think this would have been an excellent case for the movie to not have remained so faithful to the comic and toned down the extreme representation. But then again, that would rather be against the whole point of the movie, wouldn't it?

That all three stories were told exactly like the comics, with none of them able to fill out an entire movie, shows you just how superficial they all are. I think the pacing of each story could have been adjusted to allow a better flow. Some scenes felt rushed and yet there were also stretches where I wished to Holy Hell that they'd just get on with it. Conversely, had this movie been only one or two stories, it wouldn't have been as interesting. That thdre are so many stories in the movie helps sell the concept of the city being as important as the people; this would have been lost had only one story been told, or if the stories were extended beyond their original length.

I'm also surprised that the stories were (mostly) shown in their entirety, without cutting back and forth between them. At first I thought it might've helped the pacing problem to keep the stories running simultaneously but, in retrospect, that would've led to jumping from one over-the-top fight scene to the next, which would've been even more disjointed, and the sginal-to-noise ratio would've been even worse.

What a bizarre experience to see a comic so faithfully, adoringly, lavishly reproduced on the big screen. I've rarely seen a movie so simultaneously rewarding and dissapointing. I hope never to experience that again.