Wednesday 13th 2005f April 2005

« « Million Dollar Baby| Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy » »

Sin City

A , posted by Anthony during lunch time.

Sin City Poster

I have been quite excited to see this movie since I first started to see trailers a few months ago. It looked different and cool. I had vaguely heard of the graphic novels on which it was based, but despite being a little bit of a Frank Miller fan I had never actually gotten around to checking them out. I decided to read as many of them as I could before seeing the movie. It only seems fair – the movie makers knew that many of the audience will have read the books and could prepare accordingly, but Frank Miller presumably had no clue while he was creating them that someone might come to his comics having seen the movie first.

They’re pretty awesome. The quality varies quite a lot, but when he hits his stride it’s almost as good as Dashiell Hammett. It has the same bloodthirsty, reckless forward motion as Red Harvest – the drama of nobility in extremities. The best of the graphic novels that I’ve read so far is the fourth one, That Yellow Bastard. From the opening moments, the first couple of pages, it grabs and pulls, dragging you headlong into the depths of it’s deeply nasty story and it’s highly heroic main character. It loses it a bit about two thirds of the way through, but it picks up again for the climax. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

Sure enough, it’s one of the three stories they’ve incorporated into the film. They’re very faithful with the look. They’ve gone to great pains to exactly reproduce some of the more outlandish characters with elaborate make up and stunt casting. In fact, many of the frames from the comic books are recreated exactly. This is really why it all falls apart.

The first thing I noticed when the lights went down and the characters started speaking was how bad it sounded. The dialogue just sounded atrocious. As a sound editor I sometimes do notice these things where most people wouldn’t, but I soon get caught up in the movie and forget about it. Except I didn’t.

I started to come up with scenarios. I guess most of the movie was shot in the same room against a green screen, so that must be why the same irritating whine kept cropping up in scene after scene. Maybe there was a buzzing HMI that they just never changed out. No, it was too consistent for that. I came to the conclusion that it was the camera – the movie was shot on HD and I’ve heard the same whine on other HD footage. I don’t know if they couldn’t notch it out or if they just didn’t bother; they just applied a harsh gate, making everything sound extremely choppy. I guess they didn’t have access to a Cedar box. Looking at the credits I saw that Robert Rodriguez, in addition to being the director, producer, “cutter”, “shooter”, composer and visual effects supervisor, was also one of the the re-recording mixers. So it was just incompetence.

Anyway, there are two points to be made here. The first is that the movie never succeeded in wrenching my attention away from this minor irritation. And frankly, it wouldn’t have been hard – I’m really not that interested in dialogue mixing. The second is that close examination of Rodriguez’s bewildering list of credits reveals that he’s not claiming to be the writer. In fact, nobody is. There is no credited writer.

Essentially, he’s treated the source material graphic novels as storyboards, right down to the original dialogue. The only changes have really been in intercutting the stories and shortening them to make the movie be the right length for marketing. Unfortunately, movies and comic books – although they do have certain superficial similarities in that they are both a combination of words and images – are fundamentally different media.

It’s all about time. It’s all about pacing. On a page the comic book artist controls our eye. They control the speed at which things appear to happen through the relative sizes of the frames, their shape and placement on the page, how busy or otherwise they are with detail. A moment can be extended by being rendered as an entire page, or shortened – eliminated even – by having taken place between two frames. In the cinema, all the frames are the same size, and the amount of time they’re up there for is regrettably the amount of time it takes for whatever is being shown to happen. Or, even more catastrophically, for as long as the words that accompany it take to say.

So it’s flat, dull, plodding, unbalanced, unintegrated, rhythm-less. It’s well cast, and it looks cool, but that’s really not enough. It’s doing well, though. It reminds me a little of Kill Bill in it’s diregard for conventional narrative, although it has infinitely less wit and general talent about it.

I guess it’s an original approach to this kind of adaptation – just don’t. An appropriate response would be the same ridicule that greeted Gus Van Sant’s attempt to do essentially the same thing to Psycho, but this hasn’t been forthcoming. This is more violent and action packed, I guess. And the trailers are great.


Movies I have seen and not bothered reviewing:

  1. Cursed. Not that scary, not that funny, not that well put together. Christina Ricci has some good moments, but not enough to make it all worthwhile.
  2. Hitch. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Charming and forgettable romantic comedy, if you like Wil Smith, which actually I do. The most interesting thing about it is that a lot of it is set around where I sometimes work, and there’s an entire scene set in the place I usually go for lunch.
  3. Melinda and Melinda. A pale shadow of the weakest imaginable imitation of a bad memory of all the uninteresting bits of the worst Woody Allen movie I had seen up to this. The most interesting thing about it is that Marilyn worked on it.

Comments on "Sin City"

  1. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 2721

    At 8:49 pm on Wednesday 13th 2005f April 2005, Andrew Bellware stated

    I too was appalled by the dialog of Sin City. And although they were going for that kind of wooden noir-ish deliveries of dialog in performance, I think that most people though the performances were just dumb because of being subconciously irritated by the sound quality.

    Only if they were recording onto the HD camera would that whine have shown up. HD cameras are acoustically much quieter than 35mm cameras. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past them to have done that.

    And yes, any kind of decent filtering should have got rid of it, it was higher-pitched than the dialog. At first I thought it was from a video monitor. I dunno. It was pretty icky.

  2. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 2723

    At 6:11 pm on Thursday 14th 2005f April 2005, Anthony was inspired to add

    I guess it could have been a video monitor, but I’m not sure that I buy HD cameras being quiet – I’ve heard them! It was certainly icky. I can’t help wondering if DPs and visual effects supervisors all over the world are having the same reaction in their own speciality. Jack of all trades…

  3. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 2744

    At 9:20 am on Friday 13th 2005f May 2005, Ivan said

    Its still not out here, damn it, I thought the dialogue sound on Mexico was preety dodgy aswell. Thats the problem with control freaks, there is usually one area they don’t get quite as well as they should. And yes that yellow bastard is the best of them. And just like Digi-beta cameras etc HD cameras make noise, most of the time it is insignificant. It sounds like it could be anything electrical such as a battery charger?? i dunno i havent seen or heard it.

  4. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 2758

    At 11:51 am on Sunday 15th 2005f May 2005, Anthony said

    The reason I say it’s the camera is because I heard the same sound a lot on “Headrush”, another HD movie. Which, I might add, had probably less than 1% of the budget of Sin City.

  5. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 3145

    At 9:32 pm on Thursday 08th 2005f September 2005, Ivan asserted

    Its been a while but i thought this was good enough to see twice, actually its amazing, a new world. And the sound… I didnt notice and i was trying, maybe you saw it in a dodgy theatre? I recon the percentage was closer to 2%.

  6. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 3146

    At 10:01 pm on Thursday 08th 2005f September 2005, Anthony announced

    No, I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Maybe you saw it in a bad theatre! And that wasn’t what made it a bad movie. A new world? Please no!

  7. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 3154

    At 1:58 pm on Saturday 10th 2005f September 2005, Ivan announced

    Yes a new world, trust me it takes a lot 4 me to admit that a HD movie was the best looking and most interesting looking movie of the year. The music was exellent and maybe the sound was dodgy, i didnt notice just like most people didnt notice that private ryans dialoge scenes had perfect sound but the pictures didnt match.

  8. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 3159

    At 2:23 pm on Saturday 10th 2005f September 2005, Anthony testified

    It did look good. That doesn’t make it a good movie. Just like having bad sound doesn’t make it a bad movie. That’s just a coincidence.

    As to Saving Private Ryan, what you have there is a fundamental disagreement with Hollywood Film Sound Aesthetics, not a problem with the quality of a specific soundtrack. In it’s own terms, that movie sounds incredible, although it’s true that those terms don’t include fidelity between dialogue and image.

  9. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 4113

    At 6:14 pm on Sunday 16th 2005f October 2005, JIMI attested

    I haven’t seen Sin City and I’m in no real hurry to see it although if it were on TV I’d definitely give it a scan. However, I’d just like to say that if I had any political power at all in the USA (which I don’t by the way), I’d pass a bill or an act or whatever to ban all cokeheads from making movies (admittedly there mightn’t be any film-makers left). I’d use Robert Rodgriguez as my main example when fighting my case in the Senate or Congress (I don’t even know the difference between the two – that’s how politically impotent I am). Although I’m against the death penalty I’d have Rodriguez executed. Just for my own amusement. I hope you find this comment useful.

  10. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 4114

    At 6:16 pm on Sunday 16th 2005f October 2005, JIMI realised it was important that we all should understand

    And Anthony>> might I suggest you take some time to learn the difference between and . If you look at the last line in your last comment, the first should be an and the second one is correct. Again, I hope you find this comment useful, informative or at least entertaining.

  11. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 4115

    At 6:19 pm on Sunday 16th 2005f October 2005, JIMI imparted

    Whoah! What happened there? my last comment got butchered by accidental HTML encoding. Basically I was saying your use of it’s and its is occasionally inaccurate. If you look at the last line of your last comment, the first it’s should be an its and the last one is correct…

  12. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 4116

    At 7:56 pm on Sunday 16th 2005f October 2005, Anthony opined

    Thank you for commenting three times on a review for a film you haven’t seen in order to point out a grammatical error on my part. I hope and trust that you will now comb through all my previous entries and leave a comment on each one detailing the errors contained within. Perhaps in the unlikely event that you come across a post without errors you could leave a simple comment, perhaps containing the single word “checked”, so that I can feel secure in your scrutiny.

  13. Gravatar

    Comment ID: 4122

    At 2:07 am on Monday 17th 2005f October 2005, JIMI stated

    I’m assuming you will trawl through all your entries and remove the offending (and I daresay, offensive) errors..

    Warmest Regards

    JIMI

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: