Posted by lon [ 69.28.6.12 ] on November 03, 2005 at 16:56:32:
Maybe I should make an outline:
Sin City as a cartoon movie
Sin City chiaroscuro: the use of light and shadow
Sin City, the fantasy fulfillment of Ralph Bakshi's
animation.
Sin City: 13 year old-style jerk off film
Sin City: cartoon as story board for an actual shoot.
I'm over in windows now. i don't normally lose posts in
Windows like I do in Linux, I lose mail. :-/
We wanted to talk about something different and I have
recently seen Sin City-- twice. Got it on loan from the
local library and so it's taken a while for me get hold of
it.
After blowing off one long review type piece (the oner you lose
are always the best) I thought of Dark City with relation to
this film because, you know, they're dark: dark in story and
dark as in nighttime. For this reason and unlike Dark City,
the world of Sin City is incomplete. We know why it's dark in
Dark City.
Where does Marv get his hair cut? This started to bother me.
The characters are so narrow you can't really see them as
having lives of their own. Would marv take an ax to his barber
if the barber did not get his flat top just right?
things like this never bothered me in Dick Tracy with Warren
Beatty.
Next the chiaroscuro. That's a term from painting which
means light against dark. This is the true art of Sin City.
I recall over and over one scene of Bruce Willis whose eyes
were just 'slits' that the light has captured just so...
cartoon eyes like at the beginning of a Pink Panther film.
It's likley that Sin City will and has been written about
extensively for capturing that netherworld between
animation/morphing/live action.
Ralph Baskshi was the first mainstream animation filmmaker to
explore the desire to see what is under the cloths of cartoon
characters-- to sex them up beyond what is available to
underage readers. So that desire remains dormant until---
well, I can't say mine has ever been satisfied. Sin City is
not a cartoon.
What I put at the end of the first piece I wrote on this was
the look of Sin City as comic made into storyboard for
film and how that framed storyboard image was just on the
edge of perception by the viewer in Sin City. This wasn't
an artifice or maybe it was. To me, I saw "this is the
end of that board" in a way that violated the normal
willing suspension of disbelief.
Robert Crumb and the film that was made about him called
"Crumb" also came to mind after seeing Frank Miller himself.
I got the idea that that ol' Frank was having more than
a little Freudian compensation and displacement if not pure
"transference" with his male characters.
Well, it all turned out better the first time I wrote it, but now
it's open for discussion.
Wait, I forgot to mention "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"
as another all digital feature film and how what worked well
in that as opposed to Sin City.
Ok, here it comes before I lose it again...
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