Sin City

"Once you got everyone agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true, you got ’em by the balls," says the evil Senator Rourk (Powers Boothe) as he taunts good cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis) in Sin City, a collaboration between comic book writer Frank Miller and under-budget director Robert Rodriguez. While the senator’s words reflect real life, Sin City lives entirely in an unreal world, where it takes 100 bullets to kill a hero, and all the women are so beautiful that they must, by law, walk around in nothing more than fishnets and latex. Sin City is based on Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, which filtered ’50s film noir through the exaggerated lens of the comic book, ramping up the violence, sex and power of the heroes. When Rodriguez and Miller took the story to the big screen, they didn’t return it to cinema-size, but rather captured perfectly (sometimes even mimetically) the look of the comic. It’s a stylistic triumph, and, though the stories are a bit simple, it also works as a narrative. It’s even occasionally moving. It’s also intensely offensive and brutally violent, so don’t take the kids or Michael Powell to see it, but for those interested in what can be done when cinema as art is combined with the action film, it’s well worth checking out.