There is no settling down! This is blood for blood and by the gallons. This is the old days, the bad days, the all or nothing days. They're back!

I started drafting an Evite for a Sin City movie night on Friday night, and just kept on writing. I easily blew away Evite's 3000 character maximum, and thought I should share those musings with the world. If you're in Seattle Friday night and would like to be invited just let me know, I'll add you to the list. That said, here's my preview for Sin City:

Minor Spoilers: But nothing you don't see in many previews or press releases

Sin City is a series of graphic novels (comics in book form, for those of you who aren't geeks) by the great Frank Miller. Miller has done a lot of ground breaking work, most notably the Dark Knight Returns Batman books, and many people see the Sin City books as the best work of his career. They are sadistic, dark, twisted, and very stylized. All indications are the movie is just the same way.

Robert Rodriguez, one of Hollywood's most creative directors, took on this project because he's a big fan of Miller's work. He's such a big fan that he heavily involved Miller and is sharing a directing credit with him (note that he got kicked out of the Directors Guild of America for that move too, the guy's a true believer.) Rodrigues likes to make his movies with small digital cameras and in an ambitious move this entire movie was filmed on them with no real sets, they've all been drawn in with a very comic book feel. The trailers show off how stylized this movie is. If you haven't seen the trailers in the big media blitz they've been putting on, I suggest you go watch them here.

The movie is actually structured as three smaller stories, each from one of Miller's books. In the original Sin City Marv, a tough guy, meets the girl of his dreams. After they consumate his love (she's a hooker) she is killed in bed next to him. He then goes off on a murderous mission to avenge her. In That Yellow Bastard Hardigan, a veteran cop, rescues an 11 year old girl but goes to prison in the process. He gets out eight years later and is determined to make sure she's ok. Sadly, she's now a stripper with some unpleasant admirers. In The Big Fat Kill a client gets disrespectful with a ring of prostitues and they kill him. Unfortunately he was well connected, starting a gang war in the streets between the prostitues, the mob, and the cops. This is dark stuff, you can open a Sin City book to any page you like and you'll see something unpleasant - and the movie is sicking closely to the books.

The good news is the it appears to be very well made. Right now on Rotten Tomatoes there's only one review that doesn't like it. But here's a quote from that review:

Film noir on steroids; a movie so cool you’re not supposed to be concerned about its total lack of moral grounding. Nor its profound sexism. Nor its misanthropic nihilism.

There's a lot of talent involved here as well. Besides Rodriguez and Miller, Quentin Tarantino is listed as a guest director (he likely directed an intro or a flashback or something, but possibly as much as one of the three sub-stories.) And there's enough cast here for three movies, which makes sense, since it really is three movies. The cast includes: Bruce Willis, Rosario Dawson, Elijah Wood, Benicio Del Toro, Jessica Alba, Michael Clarke Duncan, Josh Hartnett, Michael Madsen, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Nick Stahl, and Alexis Bledel. As Roger Ebert noticed "How is it possible that Tom Sizemore is not in this thing?"

All of that should be enough for you to know if you're interested in this movie or not, which I guess is the whole point of a preview (in my world, in Hollywood's world it's to make you interested whethere you should be or not in order to inflate opening weekend box office numbers.) If you go see this movie be prepared for a relentless, sadistic, and ultra-stylized experience that has no redeeming value what so ever. I personally can't wait.

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