Cody Hamman discusses Sin City, his father's favorite movie, for Film Appreciation.
In 1991, legendary comic book writer and artist Frank Miller was inspired by his love of film noir and hard-boiled detective novels to create Sin City, a series of graphic novels set in fictional Basin City, a place where life is a constant film noir detective story... and a place that exists in an enhanced reality where everything's a bit over-the-top.
Miller drew his stories with incredible style, presenting most things in black and white but occasionally dropping in some color to make it pop. The art on the pages of Miller's Sin City books was so stunning and unique that when Robert Rodriguez took on the task of making a film based on some of those books, he endeavored to make the movie look as much like Miller's artwork as possible. The Sin City film was shot digitally in front of green screens so Rodriguez could turn the image into a living representation what Miller had drawn on the page. The result looks fantastic, and Rodriguez had such strong material to work with and assembled such a good cast to bring Miller's stories to life that Sin City turned out to be a really cool, entertaining movie.
The film is so impressive that my father even considered it to be his favorite movie during the last decade of his life. Maybe I'm too ruled by nostalgia, but I wouldn't expect it to be common for someone's favorite movie to be something that came out when they were 51 years old. But, knowing my father and knowing Sin City, it made sense for him to be drawn to this movie. He liked action, action heroes, and most of the people in the cast, and the look of the movie appealed to him in a major way.
The film consists of four stories, although the stories The Customer Is Always Right and That Yellow Bastard are split in half so they can serve as book ends together the running time together, with the other two stories - The Hard Goodbye and The Big Fat Kill - occurring between their two halves. Unless you watch the extended unrated cut, which just presents all four stories as complete, standalone short films.
The two halves of The Customer Is Always Right only amount to a few minutes, focusing on a smooth hitman played by Josh Hartnett as he earns his living by killing two different women (Marley Shelton and Alexis Bledel) who both bring a little color into the film in their own ways. I remember seeing the first Customer segment online long before the movie was released, as it was released to give people a sample of the style Rodriguez was capable of bringing to the film.
As the title implies, the most colorful character of all can be found in the That Yellow Bastard story, which stars Bruce Willis as Detective John Hartigan, who is being forced into retirement due to angina and spends his last day on the job saving an 11-year-old girl from Roark Junior (Nick Stahl), the homicidal, child molester son of the powerful Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). Hartigan puts Junior down by shooting off one of his ears, one of his hands, and putting a bullet into his crotch. Eight years later, Junior resurfaces to get revenge on Hartigan and the girl, Nancy (Jessica Alba), now a 19-year-old exotic dancer with a disturbing sexual interest in Hartigan. I really don't think that "romantic" aspect needed to be part of the story.
When we see what Roark looks like eight years after Hartigan shot him, it's way over-the-top. The character has undergone experimental procedures to regenerate his lost body parts, and the side effect is that he has turned yellow. He even bleeds yellow. This is solid proof that the world Sin City takes place in isn't quite our own. Roark Junior is disgusting, but the fact that there is a yellow mutant in the film is one of the great things about it.
One of the greatest things about it is Mickey Rourke as a Marv, a simple-minded, mentally unbalanced (his psychiatrist quit because what's going on in Marv's head was too scary for her), hulking bruiser who has superhero level strength and endurance. After falling in love with a woman called Goldie (Jaime King) during a one night stand, he finds himself framed for murder when he wakes up with Goldie dead beside him in bed. With the police after him, Marv sets out to find out who killed Goldie and why. This quest involves him killing and/or beating the hell out of a lot of people over the course of a story that's called The Hard Goodbye.
Along the way, Marv stops at Kadie's, the same bar where Nancy of That Yellow Bastard dances, and indeed she's dancing there during The Hard Goodbye. One of the patrons is a fellow played by Clive Owen, who gets a quick voiceover talking about how Marv was more suited for the gladiator days than modern times. It's kind of jarring that we get a complete stranger's opinion on Marv, and we won't find out why this character is of any importance to the film until the next story.
Marv is my favorite character in the movie, and I'm sure he was my father's favorite as well. Although he's quite messed up, he's a very likeable guy and the people he bashes his way through tend to deserve it - but he won't hurt animals or females. Well, he tries not to. Rourke gets some strong support from King, Carla Gugino, and Rosario Dawson in this segment, and crosses paths with a nasty, agile cannibal played by Elijah Wood. We also find out there's another nasty Roark out there, this one a man of the cloth played by Rutger Hauer.
In The Big Fat Kill we find out why Clive Owen is hanging around. He's playing a character named Dwight, who finds himself stuck in the middle of a domestic dispute between Kadie's barmaid Shellie (Brittany Murphy) and her cop lover Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro acting through facial prosthetics). Sin City was filmed around the time when a lot of film fans online were pushing hard for Owen to be the next James Bond. He'll never be Bond, but he is pretty cool as Dwight, wearing bright red Converse, driving a bright red convertible, and introducing himself to Jackie Boy by holding a razor to the guy's face and saying, "I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind."
Murphy delivers one of my favorite performances in the film, the emotions of her character and her line deliveries are so pitch perfect for this movie. Murphy was awesome, and now I get sad whenever I see her in a movie because she passed away way too young.
Humiliated by Shellie and Dwight, Jackie Boy and his lackeys head into Old Town, a part of the city where the police have agreed to allow a group of gun and sword wielding women played by the likes of Rosario Dawson and Devon Aoki serve as their own neighborhood patrol. When Jackie Boy threatens that girl played by Alexis Bledel, the women handle it by nearly severing his head. Then they realize he was a cop.
Dwight has to dump the body, and while he drives Jackie Boy's corpse to the nearby tar pits Rodriguez's friend Quentin Tarantino steps in to earn a special guest director credit. Tarantino's scene consists of Dwight driving through the stormy night and imagining that Jackie Boy's corpse is speaking to him. A pattern of blue, red, green, and yellow lights with no apparent source flash over the black and white image, and the only reason for this is because Tarantino was drawing inspiration from Dario Argento's Suspiria when he directed this scene.
Then mercenaries, mobsters, and a character played by another actor we lost too soon, Michael Clarke Duncan, get involved.
Rodriguez took the four fun, stylish, violent stories Miller had written and turned them into one of the best films of his career. Sin City held great promise for a franchise, but unfortunately everyone involved dragged their heels too long and when a sequel finally did come along nine years later the audience wasn't craving it anymore. And some questionable decisions went into the making of the sequel. But I'll discuss that in a different article down the line. This Sin City works from beginning to end, it provides copious amounts of eye candy and is packed with badass characters. It was my father's favorite movie, and I totally understand why it would be someone's favorite.
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