Sin City vs 25th Hour

So, everyone is talking about Sin City, and mainly what they're saying is how closely it resembles a comic they've never read. Movies often look like crap, so I'm not going to pretend it's easy to make them look beautiful. And Sin City does look beautiful. But since commercials and music videos and video games all look beautiful now, I think the greater achievement of Sin City lies in its genuine collection of bad-ass.

Harder than making a movie look good is finding realistic hard-asses, dames and heavies. Also, bullies, thugs, sluts, gangsters and assassins. Oh, and whores, cannibals, and corrupt, evil politicians. Don't forget them. Quentin Tarantino likely went through dozens of names before he brought the Reservoir Dogs together, but he got it just right. There's an art to choosing your bad-ass. One wrong move, and before you know it you've replaced Harrison Ford with Ben Affleck.

Sin City boasts the most authentic collection of toughs and sluts I've seen in a movie in quite some time. True, they're mostly movie stars playing dress-up, but it's in the service of cool and awesome, and let's face it, sometimes that requires a costume. On the surface, Sin City, which tells three separate-but-related stories and looks like it was filmed inside a chalkboard, would seem to be a cross between Pulp Fiction and Dick Tracy. And that's partly true. But unlike Pulp Fiction, there's not much deeper than the surface style, and unlike Dick Tracy, the surface style never outwears its welcome.

The principle characters of Sin City are Marv, Hartigan and Dwight, played, respectively, by Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Clive Owen. All three of these guys fit the style and tone of Sin City perfectly with their noir voiceovers, scarred faces and shady pasts. Rourke's Marv gets the first portion of the movie, hunting down the killer of his true love: a hooker named Goldie. Marv only spent one night with Goldie, but she was nicer to him than any woman ever had been. Marv goes all over the city, asking questions and busting heads, looking for answers. His adventure takes him to a church confessional, and to a farm patrolled by Kevin, a serial cannibal played by Elijah Wood. If you were skeptical about Mickey Rourke in the lead, then you're surely even more so about Elijah Wood playing the villain. Let me ease your mind: Mickey Rourke is the baddest bad-ass in the movie—and this is a movie featuring Benecio Del Torro, Michael Clark Duncan and Michael Madsen, as well as the aforementioned Bruce Willis and Clive Owen—and Wood is the most terrifying movie villain since Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. He's a four-eyed mute monster in Converse sneakers who needs to cut his fingernails, and I cringed every time he was on screen.

It would do little good (and take up way too much space) to rehash all the plots of Sin City, because nothing matters much in Sin City other than style. Like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it's not so much what's happening as what it looks like. There are tremendous performances in Sin City, but even those are all about style. Bruce Willis finds moments of genuine emotion, but he didn't have too. Willis has a cool enough movie persona that he could have just posed and strutted his way through Sin City and I wouldn't have cared. Come on, if you have a character who can save himself from hanging by using the muscles in his neck, you pretty much have to cast Bruce Willis.

As in too many comic book movies, the female characters in Sin City get the short end, dramatically speaking. Sin City remedies this as much as possible by casting about a dozen female actors, although some are silent throughout the movie, or serve one-notedly as victims, bitches or the object of desire. They're hot, though. It'd be a challenge to find better femme fatales than Rosario Dawson and Carla Gugino, although both are given slight parts (and even slighter costumes). Brittany Murphy and Jessica Alba fair a little better, although Alba reminds me of Britney Spears to the point of distraction (and not just because she plays a stripper who keeps her clothes on.)

Sin City is actually titled Frank Miller's Sin City, and it's his black and white comic books we're expected to consider the true star of the show. I think the key player here is director Robert Rodriguez. It's one thing to draw Marv getting flipped around by a convertible again and again, or to color a cowardly child molester bright yellow and name him Yellow Bastard. It's quite another to bring these things to life in a way that is believable, exciting, and true to the source material. And Mr. Rodriguez, it's more than a little bad-ass, too.

Sin City is overwhelming in the best way, but it's overwhelming nonetheless. I think a good companion movie is Spike Lee's 25^th Hour. It's as deep into the world of crime as Sin City, but deeper into the world of human relationships and emotion. I have to admit I'm a little pissed that more of you haven't seen it.

25^th Hour stars Edward Norton as Monty, a drug dealer going to prison tomorrow. 25^th Hour follows him as he lives his last day of freedom, saying goodbye to family and friends, while trying to figure out which one of them might have turned him in. Surprisingly, we learn Monty's life is fairly ordinary and happy, especially for someone with ties to the Russian mafia. But, Monty's got loyal friends (Barry Pepper and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) the Hottest. Girlfriend. Ever. (Sin City's Rosario Dawson), a tough-love dad (Brian Cox) and even a Hard Knock Life stray dog. Monty's friends all seem to have a seen-it-all attitude about him, as if, well, some of your friends are gonna be drug dealers, so what are you gonna do. Most of them are sorry to see him go, and most know that there's no use in feeling sorry for him since, you know, he's guilty. Edward Norton, in what I think is his strongest performance, leads a brilliant ensemble cast through a long New York night in which director Spike Lee finds moments of humor, excitement and sadness, most notably: Monty begs his friend to pummel his face so he'll appear dangerous on his first day in prison; Monty and his friends go out to a club, with Dawson in a tight silver dress, dancing up a sweat with jailbait Anna Paquin; and especially Monty and Frank (Pepper) having a heart-to-heart looking out over Ground Zero. The scene is long, filmed in one unbroken take, and is one of the most powerful of Spike Lee's career. The man knows a thing or two about style, but also knows that once in a while the story can move, even when the camera doesn't.

Sin City: A-
25^th Hour: A