2008 Woodie Awards
It's Slick, It's Beautiful, But is it Good for Our Kids?
Menachem Wecker
Issue date: 4/18/05 Section: Arts & Culture
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Sin City (2005)
Directed, Created by Frank Miller
Dimension Films
http://www.sincitythemovie.com/
..it's one thing to draw something with a brush on a flat piece of paper and another thing to take a real flesh and blood woman or man and make them look like that.
--Frank Miller
What's black and white and red all over? If you answered a Yeshiva student who spilled the cafeteria tomato "soup" all over his clothing (after walking by a skunk run over by a car), then please send a cover letter and resume to the Commentator Fall 2005 Arts and Culture Editor Selection Committee, c/o Mel Gibson. If you answered Frank Miller's "Sin City" (2005), the movie that mocks Humphrey Bogart and Film Noirs in general while finding time to juxtapose downright brilliant cinematography with fairly inane and derivative forms, then you peeked.
"Sin" is seductive, dangerous, romantic, slick and all around Noir in most of its mannerisms all at once. It recalls Snow White with all of its dark blacks and bright whites, with an occasional spattering of eye-catching red, highlighted by its coloring cast in a world without color. It pays homage to Gary Ross's 1998 film Pleasantville and its meditation on color; it brings back memories of Arnold Lobel's 1968 book "The Great Blueness." I can go on and on with the clichés, but I do it to point out that "Sin" sets itself up to be compared with clichés, it relies heavily on clichés in its execution and it is a cliché already even before it has left the spotlight.
Noir, after all, is completely formulaic. Literally "black film," the style developed in the 1940s in America. It is hard to call it a style; it might as well be an ideology, a coincidental template that later became self conscious, a genre, an aura, a tint. Almost any word would complete that predicate of the previous sentence. But if you can't yet notice a Noir here are a few tips: it is always raining, there is always a detective sort (whose partner is usually dead), there are always beautiful women-usually femme fatales-and the overall temperament is a mixture of Western shootouts with mysteries, and the pot is usually not stirred enough to remove the lumps.
Directed, Created by Frank Miller
Dimension Films
http://www.sincitythemovie.com/
..it's one thing to draw something with a brush on a flat piece of paper and another thing to take a real flesh and blood woman or man and make them look like that.
--Frank Miller
What's black and white and red all over? If you answered a Yeshiva student who spilled the cafeteria tomato "soup" all over his clothing (after walking by a skunk run over by a car), then please send a cover letter and resume to the Commentator Fall 2005 Arts and Culture Editor Selection Committee, c/o Mel Gibson. If you answered Frank Miller's "Sin City" (2005), the movie that mocks Humphrey Bogart and Film Noirs in general while finding time to juxtapose downright brilliant cinematography with fairly inane and derivative forms, then you peeked.
"Sin" is seductive, dangerous, romantic, slick and all around Noir in most of its mannerisms all at once. It recalls Snow White with all of its dark blacks and bright whites, with an occasional spattering of eye-catching red, highlighted by its coloring cast in a world without color. It pays homage to Gary Ross's 1998 film Pleasantville and its meditation on color; it brings back memories of Arnold Lobel's 1968 book "The Great Blueness." I can go on and on with the clichés, but I do it to point out that "Sin" sets itself up to be compared with clichés, it relies heavily on clichés in its execution and it is a cliché already even before it has left the spotlight.
Noir, after all, is completely formulaic. Literally "black film," the style developed in the 1940s in America. It is hard to call it a style; it might as well be an ideology, a coincidental template that later became self conscious, a genre, an aura, a tint. Almost any word would complete that predicate of the previous sentence. But if you can't yet notice a Noir here are a few tips: it is always raining, there is always a detective sort (whose partner is usually dead), there are always beautiful women-usually femme fatales-and the overall temperament is a mixture of Western shootouts with mysteries, and the pot is usually not stirred enough to remove the lumps.
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