"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Sin City (20th anniversary revisit)

Would you believe Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller’s SIN CITY had its twentieth anniversary last month? I mean yes it kinda seems like a long time ago, but 20 years ago? That’s a bunch of years. I’m against it.

(Here’s my review from the time.)

Let’s consider how times were different. Rodriguez was well into his career, having just completed his EL MARIACHI trilogy, with FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, THE FACULTY and three SPY KIDS movies snuggled in between them. He was still in his digital photography evangelist period, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO having convinced him of how a movie like this could be made affordably at his Troublemaker Studios in Austin. Miramax (before being cancelled) were still surprisingly cool about letting Rodriguez (like Quentin Tarantino) do the type of movies they wanted without much interference. The Ain’t It Cool News (also before being cancelled) were still a player with their breathless reports from Hall H presentations and also sometimes some reviews.

Harry and Moriarty were (it seems to me) the loudest voices promoting the idea of “geek culture” and the potential for great comic book movies if they were made by people who really loved the source material and were faithful to it. Possibly even made for adults.

SIN CITY is the movie that took that idea the most literally. Rodriguez wanted not only Miller’s permission to adapt his interconnected anthology series of noir-inspired crime comics – he wanted him to co-direct it with him. The legendary cartoonist was skeptical, but Rodriguez got him to come shoot a test scene – the opening starring Josh Hartnett (HALLOWEEN H20) as a dreamy stranger who woos a heartbroken woman on the balcony at a party (Mary Shelton, WARRIORS OF VIRTUE) but turns out to be hired to kill her. Miller was hooked and they had footage to show other actors what it would look like. When all was said and done the DGA would only allow one of them to be credited since they weren’t an established team (huh?), so Rodriguez resigned from the guild.

By design the movie is close to a straight up word-for-word, panel-for-panel translation of several Sin City comics stories, so much so that there’s only a “based on” credit, not a “written by.” The comics visually alluded to film noir by being drawn in stark black-and-white, occasionally with spot color (a red dress, a yellow bastard), which led to some colorization gimmicks in the movie version. Much of it was shot on green screen, and a few characters (like Mickey Rourke [DOUBLE TEAM] as Marv) use elaborate latex makeup effects to mimic the way Miller drew them, making this a very stylized world, like a hard-R, digital age DICK TRACY. We’ll get back to that.

The stories are set in fictional Basin City, an amped up pulp novel hellhole full of macho self-mythologizing criminals, corrupt authorities, and maybe no civilians? The men think in hard boiled narration, waxing worshipfully about “dames” who are goddesses and angels and warriors and valkyries. They reference Lancelot and Galahad and know they’re going to die but think it’s worth it because of the deep love they feel for the woman they spent one night with or the little girl they rescued from a sicko.

There’s a built-in anti-establishment attitude and preference for underdog deadbeats as long as they have some street smarts and know how to use a fist or a gun. There’s no justice besides the poetic kind. There’s a child killer who’s the son of a senator, whose brother is a cannibal (and a cardinal). Of the two protagonists who go after them, both are framed for the crimes – one does eight years (then shoots himself), the other gets the chair. Most of the cops are corrupt woman-beaters; one of the three main heroes is a cop who gets tortured by other cops for being “by the book.”

There’s a Titty Twister-esque strip club called Kadie’s Club Pecos, lots of dingy hotels, some docks to meet at of course, some farm land owned by the power brokers, tar pits with dinosaur statues where you hide the bodies, and a red light district called Old Town that’s run by deadly warrior prostitutes (one of them an actual ninja). Pretty cool little neighborhood.

One of the stories, split into two parts, stars Bruce Motherfuckin Willis (NORTH) as Detective John Hartigan, who manages to pull off the old timey trenchcoat look, and has a cool facial scar. In the first part he rescues eleven year old Nancy Callahan (Makenzie Vega, SAW) from a serial killer (Nick Stahl, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR), and shoots the latter’s dick off. Trouble is he’s Roark Junior, son of Senator Roark (Powers Boothe, RAPID FIRE), so Hartigan’s corrupt partner Bob (Michael Madsen) shoots him and frames him for Junior’s crimes. In jail he gets weekly letters from Nancy until they stop and it’s implied she’s been hurt, so when he gets out on parole he goes looking for her.

She’s now Jessica Alba (IDLE HANDS), and he finds her dancing dressed as a cowgirl at the aforementioned strip club, but he’s followed by Junior, whose injuries turned him into a bizarre monster with yellow skin (and, we later find out, blood).

This story seemed the most deranged at the time, moreso now that I’m as old as Willis was (and I think he’s playing older). Hartigan knows Nancy as an 11-year-old victim, then a 19-year-old dancer he describes as “traumatized,” who leaps off the stage directly into kissing him, tells him she loves him.

He’s very uncomfortable with her advances and says he could be her grandfather, then gives in to passion for a long kiss, and ends the story saying he loves her. I don’t know, it makes me embarrassed thinking this is supposed to be very honorable and romantic that Hartigan tried to resist a couple times but she kept insisting.


Another story is about Marv, a hulking, ugly lug who has a one-night stand with beautiful Goldie (Jaime King, PRETTY PERSUASION) only to wake up and find her dead, with police outside the motel blaming him for it. The killer is actually Cardinal Roark’s ward Kevin (Elijah Wood, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND), a silent dork in glasses (usually depicted as a pure white reflection) and a sweater but with deadly kung fu moves and flesh-slashing fingernails. Things don’t go well for Marv and his spectacular lesbian parole officer/friend Lucille (Carla Gugino, SNAKE EYES) but at least he gets to decapitate Kevin and say some of the toughest last words of all time when they execute him.


The other main story is about Dwight (Clive Owen, CROUPIER), the most John-Cusack-like of the protagonists. His Kadie’s-waitress girlfriend Shellie (Britney Murphy, DRIVE) is being harassed by abusive ex-boyfriend Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro, BASQUIAT) and pals. He follows them to Old Town, where Jackie Boy threatens a young prostitute named Becky (Alexis Bledel right before SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) and is killed by resident ninja Miho (Devin Aoki, 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS), and then they find out he was a cop. The ladies of Old Town are led by badass Gail (Rosario Dawson, HE GOT GAME), also a special friend of Dwight, so he helps try to cover up the murder to preserve the truce between Old Town and the pigs. This involves fighting over Jackie Boy’s severed head with ex-IRA mercenaries, and sometimes he imagines the head talking to him. The scene in the car is “guest directed” by Tarantino, but it’s not his best work.

It’s funny that the opening scene was the proof of concept that got Miller and some of the cast on board, because it does look good (except for the silhouettes) but it’s a different view of the city, a different world, elegant rich people shit, not sleazy. It feels a little out of place as an introduction, but pays off at the very end when Becky, who betrayed Gale and friends, gets into an elevator with Hartnett and we know that means she’s reached the end of her story.

There’s plenty to like or even love about this oddball endeavor. We maybe take this for granted now, but it’s a hell of an ensemble cast of the type Rodriguez and Tarantino had made their trademark. Rodriguez had already worked with Rourke, Hartnett, Gugino and Wood. Bruce and Madsen had of course been QT’s guys, but Rodriguez got Dawson and Shelton before DEATH PROOF. In fact, you could include Rourke in that list too, since he was cast as Stuntman Mike before dropping out. I always thought Rodriguez deserved some credit for Rourke’s comeback – ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO and this really showcased his charms at a time when he’d been somewhat floundering, a few years before THE WRESTLER. But I guess Tony Scott using him in MAN ON FIRE and DOMINO could’ve been most of it, I don’t know.

I remember I saw SIN CITY twice in the theater. I really liked it but also had real problems with it. That persists but it’s also aged worse than I thought it would, and the Marv makeup is a major factor. It was an interestingly audacious thing to do, trying to turn a man into a drawing, but it just looks goofy. He seems less like a real guy than Hellboy (whose first movie came out a year earlier). It was distracting at the time and seems worse to me now. This is also true of the undeniably bold visual style.

Don’t get me wrong, some of it looks beautifully artificial. I’ve used some screengrabs here that I think look great. There are only certain parts that look crappy, but they drag it down. You’re trying to fall into this world, trying to leap over the hurdle of stylization to make your mind believe in this place, and then you get a half-assed shot like this.


Maybe it was different projected on film, but the opening credits, with comic panels and aggressive typography, now look like a cheesy DVD extra. The phoniness of the green screen car driving is mostly fun and old timey, but sometimes laughable when they switch to CG wide shots where Marv looks like a little Happy Meal toy. There’s a shot where Hartigan pulls up to the docks that I think might be the only on-location shot in the whole movie…


…and it reminds me that god damn, I wish they’d just done this as a gritty black and white movie like BLAST OF SILENCE instead of taking the comic book shit so literally. I still think there’s room for an adaptation of Sin City that involves some adapting. I would love to believe in this place, feel like we’re wandering around in it. When you read the comic books you imagine a real guy in a real place, you don’t imagine a guy who looks like a drawing standing in front of a drawing. In a way it’s too true to the comics to be true to the experience of reading the comics.

Think about the use of white. On the page it’s negative space – it’s the page itself. In a movie it’s light. It moves and remains pure white so it appears illuminated. Honestly I like the gimmick: bandages, jewelry, even blood that glow white. It looks pretty cool, but it’s a totally different thing.

Let me ask you this. Did Marv become tiny here, or does he just have massive novelty sized blinds in his hotel room?


It’s funny, in those days movies were timid about using comic book visual cliches. Most super hero movies switched any colorful lycra to armor or black leather. There were widely held assumptions, even by the “geeks,” about “Oh jesus, you can’t do that in live action, you’d be laughed off the screen.” Sin City didn’t seem to have that issue, the risk it took was being one of the small subset of comic book movies glorying in sex and violence. But because Rodriguez and Miller did such an exact translation of the books – drawn by a veteran super hero guy in the style he’d developed – it does end up having some of those tropes. The dudes all have trenchcoats that blow around like Batman’s cape, they drop off buildings and glide in Batman-swinging-on-a-bathook poses, land crouched in Batman poses. They perch on ledges of buildings, look up to giant statues in the rain, look to the sky in anguish clutching dead loved ones. Also because Miller likes drawing the bottoms of Chuck Taylors we get a couple characters wearing them, and since they gotta distinguish some of these coats they made Dwight’s leather, and let me tell you, a leather duster with red Converse does not look as cool on Clive Owen as it might in a drawing.

Is all this adorable, or misguided? I don’t know. Like the comics that inspired it it’s just such an unlikely mix of artistry and adolescent boneheadedness that you can’t deny its novelty. Sometimes I can get into the spirit of it. I always loved Murphy’s little part in this, especially the old timey way she said “Dwight, ya fool… ya damn fool.” She knew how to talk in this, how to smile, how to lean out the window.

Intellectually I feel like I should respect a movie being so fearlessly dedicated to its visual fetishes, to creating its own artificial world, like POPEYE, DICK TRACY, THE FLINTSTONES, SPEED RACER or BARBIE. And yeah, there are some film-noir-by-way-of-comic-book-by-way-of-restaging-in-Rodriguez’s-studio shots that look fuckin cool.

But I don’t know, man. On this viewing it felt like much of it was too distancing, made the whole thing too much of a put-on. Maybe it’s also me growing out of the whole Frank Miller voice. The exaggerated machismo, the free basing of old timey crime movie aesthetics, the simultaneously empowering and misogynistic portrayal of women (think of the lusty awe in Dwight’s voice repeating “deadly little Miho”) – these are all intentional and I do not entirely disavow their appeal, but they feel more hollow and forced to me than they once did.

When Miller made this movie he was slightly younger than I am now. When he made That Yellow Bastard in comics form he was still in his thirties. When he made The Dark Knight Returns he was still in his twenties. So now it seems kind of funny to me that he was so into old guys stumbling and pounding their chests and trying to walk off massive heart attacks because they’re so intent on giving a guy a knuckle sandwich. He just thought it was such a cool thing to imagine doing when you’re aging – being so manly you can scratch out a win against your own frailty.

I’m no Hartigan. I’m pretty healthy and still think of myself as young, cool(ish), not a grown up. Every time I get a hair cut I see the pile of clippings and remember that I’m greyer than I think. But I do have days every once in a while when I have some weird sensation and start thinking “Is this a heart attack? Is this a stroke? Is somebody gonna find me on the floor?” I guess the romanticization of chest pains and downing a jar of “heart pills” like a shot of whiskey seems sillier after that.

Some things haven’t changed, though, including my overall assessment of SIN CITY from 20 years ago: “What this is is a very ballsy and ridiculous experiment, like Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO. Like most experiments in science, it’s a big failure. But you gotta fuck up in order to invent cancer or whatever. I’m glad these guys did it anyway even though it really doesn’t work.”

So the question is what, if anything, did this important research lay the groundwork for? Would IRON MAN have made it to the screen without movies like this proving the power of the so-called geek community, showing up to this way more niche comic nerd shit? Maybe, maybe not. A more important question might be where such movies would have ended up without this test case of taking the things way too god damn literally. Maybe SIN CITY shifted the Overton window of comic book adaptation far enough that they could find today’s happy medium, not trying to exactly re-create each panel, but generally being true to the spirit of the thing.

Now that I look at it this it’s a pretty interesting time, this mid-aughts period. Film was beginning to transition to digital, opening up possibilities for larks like this. The now dominant super hero genre was still finding its form, some veteran directors were trying out new styles, and popular music and television were absolutely terrible, because I was turning 30. With more curiosity than nostalgia I’ve chosen 2005 as the subject of my summer movie retrospective this year, starting tomorrow with one of the May releases. I don’t have grand plans for this one, it will be a somewhat loose and slapdash affair, but hopefully kind of fun, like the higher end of Robert Rodriguez getting some celebrity friends to come over, put on costumes and shoot some stuff real quick.

P.S.

Other 2005 comic book movies: FANTASTIC FOUR, ELEKTRA, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, CONSTANTINE, V FOR VENDETTA, BATMAN BEGINS

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2025 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Reviews, Bruce, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

17 Responses to “Sin City (20th anniversary revisit)”

  1. Something must’ve been in the air, because the movie was on my mind recently and I was planning a rewatch. ONe thing that recently dawned on me though without having seen it in at least 10 years, is that it might be the closest thing to another HEAVY METAL than we ever got. HEAVY METAL 2000 failed to recreate the feeling of the 80s movie, while SIN CITY is a similar venn diagram between proud low-brow entertainment that might cross certain lines, but wants you to have fun with it instead of trying to make you leave the room offended and traumatized, a certain niche appeal with “underground” credibility, while also being a star-filled major motion picture. And just like HEAVY METAL it was for a while the coolest shit ever, before it became oddly irrelevant.

    Oof, a 2005 retrospective? I’m absolutely on board, but better prepare myself to mentally buckle up. 2005 was more or less “The beginning of the end” for me. At one hand everything seemed good, but on the other hand the cracks started to show and ever since then I’ve been stuck in a place that seems to be impossible to escape, no matter how hard I try. Oh well. I’m gonna focus on the movies this time and look absolutely forward to the nostalgia ride.

  2. Sin City — the comic — caught on because it was so stupidly audacious. It was buying $100 worth of $5 Good Times Video “Classics of Film Noir” VHS tapes and creating a supercut of the most awesome/ridiculous/overwrought moments of the lot, then committing them to print.

    (In Whiplash, when Dane Clark’s pummeled prize-fighter hero finally has Zachary Scott’s wheelchair-bound, slimy, sadistic, supervillian at the end of a gun, and instead of — y’know — shooting him, he kicks his apparently brake-less chair down a ramp and into traffic so he can get squished by a truck, then immediately takes Alexis Smith into his arms so she can suck on his bruised, bloodied mug? That’s Sin City in 45 seconds)

    So Sin City — the movie — was going to be making a film about a book about films. So it’s starting from a weird place. Add to that, Robert “Wait, we’re still shooting this? This is getting old. Can’t those computer guys just do the rest?” Rodriguez (who’s idea of ‘adaptation’ of this weird thing is apparently to do absolutely nothing), and somebody’s genius idea that it should be like two and half hours long. Yeah…

    But, it’s not without some pleasures here and there. Unfortunately, you can randomly watch any 10 minute stretch of the movie, and have essentially seen the entire thing.

  3. Seeing this review pop up made me smile. The movie was a mixed bag for me, but as you note, a lot of what’s mixed in that bag is good shit.

    Frank Miller has always intrigued me. The guy put out several all-time classics, redefined some of the most worn out characters in the zeitgeist of their time, and managed to reinvent himself a few times along the way. I’m fascinated by his ability to break into Hollywood and faceplant HARD, at least twice decades apart, and still be a presence that has to be considered. You had guys like Tim Sale and even Jim Lee trying to ape his crazy chiaroscuro style from Sin City, it was such an innovative look at the time for comics, and the natural progression of his style (though I think he owed a debt to his long time inker Klaus Janson for it.) Doing 300 was a perfect blend of his insane bombast and the most distilled version of his “macho guys getting killed in legendarily martyrish but also totally psycho manner” and to put that out in the middle of Bush’s middle east crusade was unbelievably relevant timing. It was dripping with so much subtext of the beginnings of this current “macho crisis” that it’s still relevant, and even Snyder couldn’t fumble the themes (like he did with the other genre defining 80s grim n gritty comic book) because it was so elemental.

    He’s not kidding about that hard ass macho shit image either, despite being a bit of a dweeb about it. I saw him do a Q&A at some comic con in the 90s, he says all that same “real men eat nails and shit excellence until you die” stuff in real life too. Some kid was like, what’s your suggestion for a professional work schedule? And his answer was essentially, I guess you can wait until the sun comes up to start working, if you want to do the bare minimum. And he gave what I feel is STILL the most stirring call to action in opposition to a rating system for comics, at one of those Diamond distributors conventions, where he pointed out that real books/authors wouldn’t submit to a ratings system, and how cowardly it was for the people in that room who write stories about heroes who prefer death than subjugation to be voluntarily talking of the need for surrender/capitulation at simply the threat of censorship. Then I think he put on a leather jacket and sunglasses and accepted an award on behalf of Neil Gaiman.

    But then you have the dipshit who wrote Batman calling Robin the R-word and “I’m the goddamn Batman” in the most cringe version of hardass Batman that ever existed, along with a series of Dark Knight Returns sequels that got increasingly more “get off my lawn” and eye-roll worthy as it went. Don’t even get me started on Holy Terror.

    My favorite glimpse of his more contemplative, measured side comes through in a book I got that compiles his conversations with Will Eisner towards the end of Eisner’s life/career. They talk about art and the medium of comics and the industry and their philosophies on storytelling. You get to see him in a more vulnerable and less guarded light, as he knows better than to play “tough old bastard” with a legend like Eisner.

    And if anyone wants a lesser-known example of Miller at his best libertarian writing, look for a one-shot oversized page comic he did with Simon Bizley (of Lobo fame) called BAD BOY. It’s no Martha Washington but the combination of Miller writing and Bizley art absolutely sizzles and it’s short and to the point, with a few one-liners that still make me re-evaluate my position on bigger societal issues through his framing of that story.

    Sorry for the digression, but this review just tapped into a lot of old brain storage items I hadn’t dusted off in a long time. As for the actual movie being reviewed- this came in the middle of my AICN fever dream talkback era, and was a perfect storm of hype for everything I wanted- or thought I wanted. We hadn’t seen this level of adherence to source material from comic book movies yet, and it was so ripe for a filmatic treatment. And the “everything is green screen” technique seemed like it was coming of age at the same time this would have been a hot property that could showcase it. But I’ll admit, much like SPAWN, when the lights went down and the first scene with Bruce and Michael Madsen commenced, I got the feeling “this is like watching a high school play” and my stomach sank. It was too slavish to the comics, and all that noir stuff felt like the Max Fisher Players doing Serpico, even though it was literally John McClane and Mr. Blonde up there doing it. Mickey Rourke was the reason this was as good as it was, imo, because Sin City has never been as good as it was with the original mini series of Marv’s story. And that story feels like it works entirely because of Marv being this ridiculous leather faced giant with that distinctive side profile. I think Liam Neeson was the most common fan casting, but I can’t imagine he would have channeled that same gleeful affinity for ultra violence treated as just another boring Saturday night like Mickey did. That queasy kind of problematic “he just had the rotten luck to be born at the wrong time in history. He’d have been ok if he’d been born a couple thousand years ago. He’d be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging am axe into someone’s face. Or in a Roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him. They’d have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.” I’m glad this movie exists and came out when I was the exact target audience for it. That doesn’t happen too often.

  4. At the risk of showing my age (or lack thereof), IIRC this was the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater without adult supervision. At the time I thought it was the coolest shit ever, though upon revisit some years later it just didn’t hold up– mostly because of the clunky dialogue and sexism. I still kind of dig the visuals. It really felt like that all-green-screen thing was the future. And I guess it was– but at least this movie did it to prioritize stylistic visuals, as opposed to the uninteresting visual mud seemingly every big-budget blockbuster movie does these days.

    Your DICK TRACY comparison is quite apt, but I also love the visual stylings of DICK TRACY. For years I wanted a Tracy reboot done in this style, all stark black and white except for Tracy’s yellow coat. I guess the closest we came was Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT.

    For what it’s worth, I remember this as the beginning of the short-lived Rourkessaince.

    Happy to hear there will be a summer series.

  5. “For years I wanted a Tracy reboot done in this style, all stark black and white except for Tracy’s yellow coat”

    So did Warren Beatty. The last time when he actually talked about another DICK TRACY movie as if it could actually happen soon, was shortly after SIN CITY came out. He was so impressed with it, that he talked about shooting the next movie in the same style.

  6. Oh shit, I said “starting tomorrow” and then (since I usually don’t post on Fridays) I totally forgot to post the first 2005 review today. I guess we’re starting Monday. Sorry about that.

  7. I don’t know if now or your next review would be the more appropriate time to “go Griff” and talk about 2005/the 00s and what they mean to us, or if anyone wants such a thing at all, but I’ve got a little time now, and I kind of feel like it, so I’m gonna do it! Indulge me or skip, with my permission.

    I turned 13 on 5th December 1999, so I was very much a teenager of the 00s (Summer of 2005 specifically I was 18 and about to go to University), so the era does loom large in my psyche, whether I want to or not.

    I think, very broadly, there are two reactions a teenager has to the pop culture of their era
    a) It’s fantastic, and becomes the foundational bedrock for everything they ever like going forward, and they regard it as a golden era
    b) It’s the pits, they burry themselves as much as possible in the pop culture of previous eras, and they become an utter bore forever after about how awful “the XXs” were

    I haven’t quite grown up to be a full-time “anti-00s bore” the way so many were anti-80s bores at the time (remember when it was cool to hate the 80s? Even Vern did!), but I was very much in the later category. I remember toward the end of 00s saying on a forum (very 00s) that I would “never” feel “any” nostalgia for the era. Obviously, I’m human and I was pretty wrong about that. Time passes, fondness grows, a lot of the aesthetic objections I had at the time were rooted in teenage ignorance or pettiness or over-estimations of my own intelligence, or just things I don’t really care about now. But even now I still think of the era as something of a low point for modern (i.e. since the start of Film) Popular Culture.

    That’s not to say it was all bad. Like all eras, there were positive trends, and things that we took for granted at the time that are missed now. It’s hard not to look at the Box-Office Top 10 most weeks back then and not at least miss the variety of films that could be something of a success or have a moment in the pop culture sunshine, without necessarily feeling a great deal of affection for the specific movies. And I don’t have that strong a feeling on the film vs digital debate if I’m honest, but they certainly seemed to know how to shoot night-time scenes where you could still see what was happening as far as I recall (or when they didn’t, eg AVP REQUIEM, it was certainly noticed). But largely I feel it’s an era dominated by bland, stupid, tacky and obnoxious movies, much of it supercharged by tabloid-driven cruelty and Maxim-era douchiness (I don’t like that word, but there’s no other word quite so apt). There’s a certain, naïve, decadent, er, charm(?) to the first few years, love it or hate it it’s hard to imagine a FREDDY GET FINGERED coming out in any other era for example, but after a while the post-9/11 cynicism choked that out too.

    And I’m just sticking to movies here; British TV was pretty thoroughly gutted over the course of the decade, and something seemed to go very wrong with our music industry by the end too (or maybe that was a few years into the 10s).

    And man, has ever a culture been so smug in its own mediocrity? Feeble wank mags creating lists of the Worst Bands/Songs ever, and somehow being taken seriously. Programme after programme where mediocre comedians you never heard from again sneered at earlier performers for the crimes of having long hair and singing power ballads. A very small part of 00s I’ll grant you, but to me it says a lot about it.

    Of course I’d have probably like the 00s more if I had myself been happier, and 2005 was something of a low point for me, I was sleepwalking through life in a way that wasn’t destructive, but has I think somewhat affected my life ever since. Compared to much of the planet I’ve always been fairly lucky, and I do appreciate that, and I think I’ve done OK with what I’ve got since, but I do feel a little miserable and guilty whenever I think back to this era.

    Still, I did discover this website, so it wasn’t all bad.

    So Thumbs Down on 2005, the year. But Thumbs Up to 2005, the retrospective.

    Oh, and SIN CITY. Was never my scene even if I kind of wanted it to be. Seem to be quietly de-canonised. Whatever its relative deficiencies, A DAME TO KILL FOR making around ¼ of the first movie does point to the needle ultimately sticking closer to “amusing novelty” than “beloved classic” in the long-run, and even that was over a decade ago now.

  8. For me, a guy in his late twenties at the time, it was an era with a lot of promising developments that didn’t all pan out. CGI was still exciting, with bold filmmakers figuring out new and interesting things to do with it seemingly on a weekly basis. There were superstar directors whose every new release was a major event. Horror movies were back in a big way after the doldrums of the 90s, mixing the gory geek shows of the 80s with the hardcore depravity of the 70s. Genre films from all over the world were more accessible than ever before. DVD brought old movies to life and into our homes. Film comedy actually existed. It’s an era that dared to be big and brash and to entertain unapologetically.

    A lot of these strains of cinema ended up being roads to nowhere. CGI has turned out to be a double edged sword; by making anything possible, it made the impossible mundane. Those superstar directors became the last of the breed, making way for anonymous journeymen eager to get absorbed by the franchise machine. A lot of 2000s horror now seems garish and try-hard. Foreign genre films often now play as generic and unflavored as American product. Film comedy is dead, and so’s home video. Entertainment now takes a backseat to subtext.

    The mid-00s aren’t an era I thought I would look back on fondly, but I guess I kind of do. It was a time when I was exited about new movies, when I went to the cinema nearly every week. When I still looked at that screen and hoped to see something I’d never seen before. I doubt I’ll ever feel that way again. I suspect when we feel nostalgia for the past, we’re really longing for a version of ourselves we’ve moved on from.

  9. Well-said. I feel a lot of the same, though I recognize that a lot of it is just the world moving on without me. I head video games are more popular than movies and some people only want to watch reaction videos and tik toks, and I guess I am on some level judgey of all that, but on another level I guess I have to let the world move on. I am encouraged to see some signs of theatrical life in recent weeks, where there are actually several things I would like to get out and watch at the movies, plus a pretty robust set of streaming options. It’s certainly not what it used to be, but I’m feeling a little more hopeful that the theatrical world will go on and won’t be exclusively Disney/comic books and legacy IP. But I, too, year for the times where I could go to a 24-screen theater, there would be at least 10 distinct films playing, and there’d bet at least 3-7 that I could imagine myself watching without too many complaints. I spent a whole summer watching dollar-theatre movies (some many times) just to be in the air conditioning. As recently (not that recent!) as JACK REACHER 1, that was one I discovered at the dollar theatre. Now that’s gone and so is the Redbox that was outside my Kroger for many years. Time is undefeated.

  10. There has a head that should’ve been heard and a year that should’ve been yearn in that post.

  11. I thought Hellboy when this first came out too.

    I think it’s biggest influence was 300 being able to do an all green screen movie.

    So weird how by the time they made a sequel no one cared.

  12. So how did we get from there to here? How did we lose our way? I have some thoughts.

    First, judging by the comment threads over the years I would guess that most of us regulars here are Gen-X-ers with no kids. Which means that not only have we partly aged out of pop culture as older people have always done, but we also don’t have the “my daughter likes Taylor Swift / my son thinks Skibidi Toilet is funny” connection to keep us plugged in. Our generation is mainly passionate about movies, and we are possibly not as passionate about TV/streaming or online spaces (TikTok, Twitch etc) even though a lot of the cultural discourse seems to have migrated to those spaces and away from movies.

    Conversely, we have won more than we realize we have. Most of the sci-fi/fantasy adventure worlds that our generation might have grown up watching or reading in the 70s and 80s (Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, DC, Marvel) have had massively successful live-action revivals in the 21st century. And 1980s popcorn cinema in general remains very popular (and if anything has grown in popularity since the 1990s when it was a much safer target for film buffs to criticize). Through legacy sequels and/or streaming series and/or remakes, there have been modern installments of (among others) THE KARATE KID, GHOSTBUSTERS, TRON, BLADE RUNNER, THE DARK CRYSTAL, DUNE, PREDATOR, BILL & TED, BEETLEJUICE, and soon THE NAKED GUN. Unlike the boomers, we have so far not experienced a major backlash from younger generations against our culture, because so much of modern youth culture is our culture.

    It’s tempting to say that 9/11 made our culture more pessimistic and cautious. But if anything, the most bullish period for Gen-X genre cinema was in that post-9/11 era. So many of the things we’d been pining for (the Star Wars prequel trilogy, a live-action Lord of the Rings adaptation, Doctor Who coming back, a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, a non-campy Batman movie) were finally happening or being announced. By 2005 we had had such AICN-friendly movies as SHAUN OF THE DEAD, KILL BILL, SKY CAPTAIN, the MATRIX sequels, and the pre-MCU movies such as BLADE and SPIDER-MAN whose success would pave the way for the world we’re in now.

    In the shadow of all that, there was still lingering excitement over independent filmmaking, particularly with the rise of digital video. The miniDV format looked ugly but it democratized media production and its visual grubbiness maybe gave it an underdog authenticity, planting the seeds of the modern world where everyone has a pocket camera with which to document their lives for public consumption.

    When the DVD format was new, studios were eager to show off the medium’s potential, so beloved cult classics would be packed with features and rare archive material. But it was maybe difficult to be sure which new releases deserved the same treatment, and eventually the bean counters decided that not every mid-budget frat comedy needed a 2-disc special edition with multiple commentary tracks, however much novelty value these things might now have in hindsight.

    I guess with most of these things, either the bubble burst or it became successful and overdog enough to be taken for granted. Eventually the rise of streaming took away the joys of both physical media and physical spaces (Blockbuster, Media Play, Borders, FYE).

    The 2008 financial crisis and the 2016 election are two tempting places to mark the end of the golden age that we will presumably be exploring in this retrospective. But my personal view is that the rise of social media (specifically Twitter) drove a stake through the heart of film culture. The most hostile and contrarian opinions always have the most power to derail the discourse. We’re a long way from the age when it seemed like audiences wanted something smarter or edgier but the studios were afraid to provide it. Now it seems like the opposite – if you make anything the least bit unusual or challenging (even if it’s just by non-traditional casting) then a huge chunk of the audience will be mad enough to create bad publicity.

    People with strong political opinions of whatever stripe are generally hostile to Hollywood and eager to provide vicious takedowns of whatever movie or TV show is current. And while it’s good that behind-the-scenes abuses are now taken more seriously, the unfortunate side effect is that scandals, accusations and even ill-advised public statements are much more damaging now – not just to careers, but to the art itself, either by forcing casting changes or by causing the finished work to be made unavailable. Add to that the tendency of streaming giants just pulling things on a whim, and you have to wonder what it must be like to labor on a Hollywood movie with one eye on the possibility that your work might never be shown.

    And then of course there are the economic challenges that Hollywood has faced in this decade – the pandemic, the loss of residuals, the strikes. That’s got to be making the creative climate more cautious also.

    Finally, I recently saw an online post asking why today’s culture (entertainment and fashion) had such muted colors. One of the first responses is that this tends to happen under fascism – either the rulers don’t like anything not grimly functional, or the people have lost their optimism.

    So it will be interesting to revisit 2005 as a bygone era of brash youthful confidence, when film grain was still common and our DVDs still used rock music and a jagged font to tell us not to pirate them.

  13. Being as I recently turned over to my 55th year circling the sun, I have lived through the entire reign of both Frank Miller and the now multi decade long run of ‘comics aren’t just for kids.’ I have some thoughts.

    I like how vern refers to this using the term ‘translation.’ Because I think more than any other films based on a comic, that is what is going on with this movie – it’s not an ‘adaptation’ so much as a ‘translation.’ It’s very deliberately trying to mimic some of the visual language that exists solely in comics. Visually, to me at least, the biggest difference in the language of film vs. comics is that a comic panel/frame of art contains no inherent time element, a viewer/reader of a comic can spend any amount of time looking at each panel/frame. In film, this is of course impossible, it advances relentlessly at 24 frames/second. This creates interesting challenges/rewards for both the illustrator of the comic and the reader, as well as in film for the director etc. Comics also contain no actual movement, all movement must be implied through other means (panel placement, repeated images, perspective shifts being common techniques an illustrator uses. Of course film thrives on movement within the frame.

    It’s interesting because Miller’s art in Sin City makes extensive use of negative space (much more sophisticatedly than most other comic illustrators – a Miller strong point artistically.) SIN CITY replicates this as well, it’s also one of its strongest visual elements.

    Miller esques a lot of traditional comic illustrative modes in the graphic novels, thriving on dynamic ‘splash page’ graphics and deliberately obscuring detail with black and white contrasting shadowing. The film follows this, a character moves through a panel by holding a ‘power pose’ and dropping down etc., again very comic book, not movie.

    Ultimately I think SIN CITY is an interesting failure, about 1/3 works, 1/3 is janky and 1/3 a complete flop. But still, credit Miller/Rodriguez for going for it. It’s definitely rare to see a film play around with a new visual ‘language.’ I mentioned in another movie comment about how Ann Lee tried some of the same thing in HULK, trying to translate the feeling of turning comic pages during reading the comic by using the frame with a frame transitions. Zack Snyder certainly lifted the collaring and tonal look from 300 for the movie (and did sort of the same thing in WATCHMEN) but he still stuck pretty much with using film language in telling the story visually. To my mind Sam Raimi has the best luck at mixing the 2 forms in his Spider-Man movies (where in really captures the unrestrained dynamic freedom a comic has, with his flying camera work.)

    As for Frank Miller – it’s hard to think of a person who has had more of an impact on mainstream pop culture than Miller. He really was the centre of the comic world in the mid 1980s when comics when ‘adult.’ His original THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS comic literally set in motion the entire run of cultural domination that comics and comic movies are only now maybe finally running out of gas. That comic was the spark that got us the first BATMAN movie and every comic film since then. And it’s funny, because ultimately both it and the Sin City comic are in no way his best work. His masterpiece is his 6 issue run on Daredevil – Born Again. This is an exceedingly dense, beautifully written crime story/redemption story. It features dozens of distinctly voiced characters (including some of the only sensitively, perceptively written female characters of his career.) It also integrates standard superhero action in a smart, sophisticated way, some how providing bing bang boom action that still plays as grimly possible. 40 years later it still stands up. Other really solid work was in Elektra: Assassin and Batman: Year One (like Born Again a downbeat crime story low on superhero dynamics and shaped by a true love and affection for early noir and hard boiled crime novels – also like Born Again featuring stunning art from David Mazzucchelli, maybe the most gifted stylist in comics history.) it’s interesting that Miller’s best work was drawn by others. Vern readers might also really enjoy his series ‘Ronin’, pre dating this work, it was his first try at a more mature work, from 1983, it melds Kung Fu movies, manga, samurai and cyberpunk fiction. Miller also did the art for it, and you can see he early appearances of his later artistic leanings in both his Batman and Sin City art, but I find this even better, because he’s pulling in asian influences and traditional comic artist as well, all fighting for dominance at the same time. It’s a more ‘wild’ and extravagant art than later stuff, ‘funnier’ I guess. Also worth mentioning that Ronin and The Dark Knight returns benefitted enormously from the contribution of colonist Lynn Varley (and TDKRs had the invaluable Klaus Jansons involvement.)

    I met Miller a couple times in the mid 1990s, the last time in 1997. (I worked behind the scenes at a few conventions.) I got some stuff autographed. He was very nice to everyone, very accommodating and even surprisingly soft spoken and ‘gentlemanly.’ This was still an era when he had the time between signatures to knock off quick doodles on the title pages of books he was signing etc. The last time, in 1997, I was just getting a couple items autographed (original issues of Born Again and the rarest limited edition HC of The Dark Knight Returns.) I kind of was a bit of a dick – everyone was fluffing him up about Sin City and 300 and I couldn’t help mouthing out that his best stuff was still Born Again and the earlier work. He kind of gave me the stink eye.

    Lastly – I have a good friend who to this day absolutely loves his film THE SPIRIT. God bless her, I can’t hold it against her – she also loves Sam Raimi. And props to Miller for getting Hollywood to give him 60 million bucks to make a movie. That’s god mode shit.

  14. Thanks Curt and Miguel, great insights. The one small thing I would push back against in Curt’s post is about the effect of social media on film culture. I can’t disagree with your description of the negative side, but it’s also how I’ve kept abreast of so many people writing on film, it has helped some of them survive the near-extinction of the professional criticism world I never knew how to crack, and connected so many people with older films. I’ve never really gotten into Letterboxd because it doesn’t jibe well with the way I work here, and the popularity of snarky one sentence joke reviews rubs me the wrong way, but I’m also positive that it has really spread knowledge to younger generations of film buffs, who tend to be more versed in canonical films of the ’60s and ’70s than I still am in middle age. When I meet a 25-30 year old film person now they seem to be into POSSESSION, SUSPIRIA, EL TOPO, PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and HAUSU in addition to JENNIFER’S BODY and PERFECT BLUE or whatever. That might be better than those of the Ain’t It Cool era who didn’t tend to stray very far from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and BACK TO THE FUTURE.

  15. It’s up to society how it uses technology – for good or bad, positive or negative. I’m actually not at all online except for this site and BlueSky, never Facebook etc. I worked in technology for 25+ years and immediately grasped the dangerously addictive qualities, and privacy concerns of it.

    However – on the woodside – BlueSky is how I just found out details about initial releases of John Woo’s films from Shout Factory – on demand starting in a few weeks! That means BluRays soon to follow. That is a total positive.

  16. Vern, I appreciate the feedback. There are some good film blogs and podcasts and YouTube video essays, and I especially enjoy reaction videos in which a younger person gives their spontaneous responses (usually positive) to an older movie. I think my main grievance was specifically with Twitter, which seemed to very quickly become a crowdsourced Razzies as well as a more general tool for abuse and harassment. Almost everything terrible during the last ten years seemed to have its roots on Twitter/X, and to me the occasional share-worthy jokes have not compensated for that.

    Perhaps Letterboxd is not so bad. My knowledge of it is limited to tongue-in-cheek memes about it on Instagram.

  17. Gonna be the odd one out and say I still think this movie fucks pretty hard. But also I love the Spirit so maybe my taste is just bad?
    Miller has a lot of issues as a writer but I’ll hold firm that he’s one of the best visual story tellers in comics alive. Even at his worst (Fucking… Holy Terror jesus christ) it still includes some page layouts and story telling choices that are just astoundingly creative and effective.

    I love seeing the choices he made transitioned to film, even if they don’t super hold up. I love the look of this era of CG and effects that doesn’t quiet work and looks janky. I think I’m younger then a lot of people here by a bit but to me this is the same as seeing like old animatronics and fx makeup that doesn’t quiet hold up but is still charming. Shit like this or the weird impossible digital body doubles in Blade 2 are like some of my favourite aesthetics in films.

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