Well, I just got back from catching a mid-week viewing of "Sin City" and coming back to the real world was tough.
After nearly two hours of depravity, it was hard to leave the confines of Basin City (the actual town name) and come home to a place that didn't smell of cigarettes and a city where hookers don't rule the streets while wearing sexpot outfits that look they were bought with a deep discount at some sort of bondage vigilante superstore.
It also doesn't make it easier to leave when every female in the city looks like Jessica Alba or Rosario Dawson or Brittany Murphy.
The movie looks and is flat-out cool, and although the dialogue takes getting used to (it felt like a parody of hard-boiled banter for awhile) the experience was a good one.
It seems that everyone in Hollywood appeared in the film at some point or another, and most handled themselves quite well among the squalor of the city. Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, and surprisingly enough Elijah Wood all thrived in the film, but it was Mickey Rourke who dominated everyone.
Rourke was almost unrecognizable as his head looked like silly-putty that had been pounded with a meat hammer, but he held the screen for his entire section of the film and left an impression long after he was gone.
When he briefly re-appeared near the end I was hoping he would get back into the action, but I was pacified with a gyrating Jessica Alba, her trusty lasso and an extremely lucky pair of leather chaps.
My main problem with the movie was the way it bookended itself with Josh Hartnett.
For once, Hartnett didn't appear that he would start weeping uncontrollably at any given moment, but his smooth features looked out of place in the mean city and the contention that he would be a contract killer was laughable.
There's simply no room for actors like Hartnett in "Sin City" - it might be a place full of perverts and wineheads and killers but you have to draw the line somewhere.
-BDS
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