Nerd Noir

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

This is a bad time of year if you love the movies. Ever since the Oscars in February, there have been literally no American movies of note worth seeing. Pieces of junk like Sahara, Miss Congeniality 2, and Guess Who are the only attractions in the local multiplex. I thought the drought would end (if only temperarily) with Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. Boy was I wrong.

Sin City is crap. Beautifully conceived, beautifully acted, beautifully rendered crap. As much as I want to like Rodriguez as a director, he has that annoying habit of making movies that aren't really very good. Desperado, The Faculty, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the Spy Kids flicks; no one is going to be sitting around the table in twenty years talking about the first time they saw them. He can be a dazzling director of action, but he has no clue what to do with actors. He seems to no little more than to put them in front of the camera. His flicks are decent excuses to sit in the dark and eat popcorn, but little else.

Boy did I want to like Sin City. I've never read the comics, but I love the world. I like almost every actor in the film, especially Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen. The problem is the whole thing is just so phony. The dialogue isn't noir, it's what comic book nerds think noir dialogue should sound like. And the mixture of ultra-violence is a complete disaster. The New Yorker said it best as Sin City and films like it "know everything about violence and nothing about suffering." I have no doubt these elements worked in the comic. Whatever thrill was there on the page just didn't make it in the translation.

But is it sure is beautiful. It's too bad the only way to do a black and white movie nowadays is to make it part of the special effects gimmick. The world Rodriguez has created (or rather lifted directly from Frank Miller's imagination) is stunning. Hard to believe 99% of it was computer generated. But it has the same problem the Star Wars prequels have: it is completely airless. The characters look like toys dropped inside a doll house, not like living breathing human beings. Great special effects do not make a good movie, they make a good trailer.

So the drought continues.