I admire the hell out of Director Robert Rodriguez, but I don’t much care for his films. Mr. Rodriguez’s gonzo, go for broke style of filmmaking inspires me and makes me want to be a director myself. He demystifies the process for us laymen and tries to go out of his way to try and encourage new filmmakers by example. And come on you have to admire a man who, even though he has millions to work with, he still acts like an Indie filmmaker.
But then with all the tools and creativity that he has at his disposal he gives us dreck like “”Spy Kids 3D”” or frankly the entire “”Spy Kids”” series.Now that I’ve got my love of Rodriguez out of the way, let’s talk about a man that I use to admire and love, writer Frank Miller. I like to say that I discovered and loved Frank Miller before he became cool. Yes, I was one of the first couple of hundred thousand people to read and be blown away by his work on “”Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,”” back in the day, I received that mini-series as part of my regular monthly fix and was stunned by it’s dark tone, grit, and just shear violence. It was the mini-series that changed and rejuvenated the entire comic book industry. He followed that up by doing excellent and amazing work on Daredevil.After his stint with Daredevil, I lost track of his work, and stopped collecting comic books in 1990. The $2 per issue price tag, all of the multi-cover gimmicks and the crappy stories just finally soured me on the industry. When I heard that Miller and Rodriguez were teaming up to bring us “”Sin City”” I was certainly intrigued. I knew nothing about the comic book, but I knew Miller’s work, and I like Rodriguez so I thought that this could be a really cool film. Boy was I wrong. There is a reason that comic books are changed to work on screen, and this film is a textbook case.Rodriguez does an almost literal shot for shot translation of the book to screen. Now you may ask yourself, if I didn’t read the book how could I possibly know that it’s a literal translation? I’m glad you asked. Most of this film is CGI, shot in stark black and white, with splashes of color. While watching the unique visual style, Rodriguez obviously was going for a direct graphic novel translation. All of the sets and visuals just SCREAMED “”I’m a moving graphic novel.”” At times you can almost see the brush strokes in your mind’s eye. Visually the film looks amazing. It’s dark, grimy, and dirty, just as you would expect from a Frank Miller project. I kept expecting Batman or Daredevil to show up.From the moment Sin City starts, you know you are in for a different film going experience. The film opens with Josh Hartnett’s voice over, he’s attempting to explain what he’s doing, when he kills a woman for no apparent reason. There is no real story to Sin City, or there is one, but it’s paper thin, and it’s actually a multiple story film. It tells several separate stories; the first one involves John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) a hard as nails detective with a severe heart problem who is a few days away from retiring (talk about clich