Movies I Have No Intention Of Seeing, #2
Unlike all my other posts, this feature--all of one week old today--is already proving to be a pain in the ass. I have to track shit down, open up a bunch of windows, collate and organize information, all in an effort to entertain you insufferable ingrates. In many ways, this feature is my anti-blog. I hope you all appreciate the nearly 90 seconds of pre-writing effort I put into this. No doubt it will fail to show up in post-quality.

I'd like to give a special shout out to loyal Bucketeer SJ who made my already taxing charge just this much more of a pain by (according to her own admission) blatantly ripping me off and pre-reviewing the movie I was already planning on reviewing today.

Hmm, I'm linking to a post that links me on another blog where the entire post is borrowed from an idea of one of my earlier posts. Can we get any more meta than this? Have we breached the fourth dimension yet? Why is my nose bleeding?

Anyway, I guess it's my own fault for being so goddamn effective. I guess I can't blame SJ for being so overwhelmed. Does the rain begrudge the flood? Of course not. This is my burden and I bear it in long-suffering silence.

Well, not total silence.

So before I begin I say to SJ: Anyways...

...


Sin City

starring a whole shitload of people including Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Elijah Wood, Nick Stahl, Benicio del Toro, Mickey Rourke, Carla Gugino, Todd Bridges, Michael Flatley, Nancy Reagan, Terence Trent D'Arby, Oscar Wilde, Ricardo Montalban, Erin Brockovich, Sparky the Wonder-Horse and Madonna.

directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller

This is an adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book series of the same name. Usually when something is adapted, critics pounce. Either a film is too faithful to the source material (then they get to use the word "slavish", a critics-only original) or it strays too far, in which case they bitch about how the film fails to capture the source material's "soul" or some shit.

Since this is a comic book, we don't have to worry about that since we know the only thing critics read is stuff like the collected works of Molière so they can chuckle to themselves between sips of 100-year-old cognac in their tasteful red-velvet drawing rooms. Roger Ebert is more than happy to admit his penchant for porn, but no comic books. Those are for the masses, which is exactly the opposite of the critic's imagined audience as they fight to establish and aristocracy of cinematic taste in this country.

And yet somehow The Pacifier still was able to open at #1 in the country.

So they've got their work cut out for them.

I would like to congratulate the people at Dimension for their ad campaign. I couldn't turn my TV on (after 8 pm, of course) without being bombarded with ads for this film. I feel sufficiently pummeled, but strangely un-annoyed. This is what advertising is supposed to do. If I'm bored with your movie just from what I see in the 20-second TV spot, you're in trouble. Not the case thus far with Sin City.

The newspaper ad critic-quotes are all appropriately orgasmic, and the sources are only somewhat iffy. There's a Newsweek guy, someone from CBS radio and... UPN TV. That's the banner quote across the top of the ad, the UPN TV guy.

Normally this would be trouble. I mean, at least I've heard of UPN, but still these are the people who put Moesha on the air. Their judgment is automatically suspect.

Luckily for Messrs. Rodriguez and Miller, the full review included in the paper (my local paper doesn't have an in-house reviewer so we get national news service and syndicated feeds) practically hyperventilates. The lead review is by Betsy Pickle from Scripps Howard, who--as far as I know--does not have her own TV review show. How good could she be, then?

They do include a sampling of other reviews, though and Ebert says it's good.

Also good: I hear just about everyone gets naked in this movie including Rosario Dawson and Carla Gugino. From what I understand, the men aren't spared completely either. Boobies and penii ahoy.

The only negative I can think of is from the Entertainment Weekly article on the movie that appeared a few weeks ago. In it they described shooting a scene where one character literally takes a big wet bite out of another and then spits out a hunk of flesh. Look, I'm an American. I love violence. But there are limits. Anything that interferes with my ability to enjoy my Milk Duds (Family Size), medium popcorn (the 300 oz. barrel) and small soda (128 oz.) is a problem. I paid somewhere in the region of $48.75 for my movie food, I want to be able to keep it in my stomach. I'm pretty sure the person sitting next to or in front of me (depending on which way I'm facing when I hurl) would also wish that for me.

But yucky graphic violence isn't enough to turn me away, no sir. That job belongs to my children and their inability to care for themselves.

The existence of this film and my inability to see it causes me no small amount of consumer-anxiety. I have no choice but to rate it a 3 (out of 3) on the Hot Babysitter Scale:





Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:20 AM