FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

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Black, White, and Red
Greed, Lust, and Violence Do It Again for Frank Miller and Robert Rodriquez

Oozing with more hard-boiled wit than a dozen Dashiell Hammett novels and more visually compelling than every comic book movie Hollywood has put out in the past three years combined, “Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is an action-packed feast.

Graphic novelist Frank Miller once again shares directing credit with Robert Rodriguez in creating a sequel that is every bit as narratively gripping and visually stunning as their original “Sin City” (2005).

Though its perfunctory 3D treatment leaves much to be desired, the film’s noir atmosphere is beautifully lush. Ink-dark blacks reflect against stark whites to give Sin City and its bold characters a place for their many gray shades of seething violence and sex to exist. Precisely situated splashes of color emphasize the visual dynamic on display. A blue dress, emerald green eyes, and a candy-apple red convertible with fins conspire to set your imagination reeling.  

Four intertwining tales of lust, revenge, corruption, and wanton violence play out with a gallows humor as razor-sharp as it is delightful for audiences attuned to the pitch. The movie is all about panache, and it has plenty to spare.

“I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character Johnny has the hardened perspective of a card shark who never looses. Slot machines dump out their coins like vomiting drunks to Johnny after he insures his luck with a kiss on the coin from a girl he picks up for the night. Her blonde hair cuts across the black-and-white surroundings like a banana peel on asphalt. Johnny’s primary objective is to clean out Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) in a backroom poker game where he’s warned he’ll be torn apart. Johnny’s agenda to humiliate Roark by taking him to the cleaners at poker has a personal motivation. Roark is Johnny’s estranged father. No love-loss sits between them. Johnny may be smart, tough, and mean but Roark covers his bets with goons, guns, and [notably] pliers. Ouch.

One-handed card shuffling is one of Johnny’s impressive tricks of his trade. The movie revels in details like these to give the audience little delights with every sequence. Still, Johnny bites off more than he can chew. It’s a dilemma that every character in the story suffers from at one time or more.

Mickey Rourke returns from the first movie as Marv, a hulking badass who lives to kick self-righteous butt whenever he gets the chance — which is pretty frequently. Marv keeps busy in the punch-‘em-up department, coming to the rescue of Jessica Alba’s revenge-seeking erotic dancer Nancy, and backing up Josh Brolin’s private detective character Dwight.

Eva Green’s Ava is a femme fatal few men can resist, especially Dwight, whose body and soul Ava owns. Layers of noir-inflected shadows do little to hide Ava’s nude body that she uses to flaunt, taunt, and screw her way up the ladder of financial supremacy. Not even Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” had anything on Ava’s hot-and-cold personality. When Ava takes a midnight swim in her mansion pool, the filmmakers take full advantage of the opportunity to frame Eva Green’s sensuous body from above and below the water’s surface. The erotic effect is spellbinding.

Blood spills like so much spilled milk — sometimes white, sometimes red, sometimes black, blood is the all-encompassing bodily fluid that connects the doomed citizens of Sin City. Miller and Rodriguez conspire to create a contained adult play land of sleaze and brutality where greed, lust, and revenge lead to spasmodic episodes of climatic eruptions. All lives are destroyed. All sins are paid. Sin City soils all those that live there. You know, it’s a place just like the one a lot of people are in; it’s called America.   

Rated R. 102 mins.

DON MCKAY

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Low Motive
Thomas Haden Church Goes Dark
By Cole Smithey

More a black comedy than the intended "neo-noir" that newbie auteur Jake Goldberger aspires to, "Don McKay" is a droll little independent flick for audiences with dark tastes.

Thomas Haden Church is commanding as the poker faced title character who takes time away from his job as a high school janitor to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart Sonny (Elizabeth Shue) in their hometown.

Sonny is allegedly dying of cancer when Don shows up at her rural home where Sonny's strict nurse Marie (Melissa Leo) keeps a close eye on Don. With a femme fatale glint in her eye Sonny wants to marry Don before she expires, but Sonny's doctor (James Rebhorn) doesn't cotton much to the couple's intimate acquaintance. One sudden murder leads to an unraveling of lies and promises that almost come together in one neatly packaged puzzle. The performances rise above the material in this roughly hewn debut experiment by a filmmaker who still needs to master the form of his chosen genre before he steps behind the camera again.

There's a line of thought in screenwriting that it takes about 25 scripts for a screenwriter to master his or her craft. Jake Goldberger liberally sites the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple" as the "slowly paced little film noir" that inspired him to write "Don McKay." Already, we start to see the holes in Goldberger's thinking. Where he views the Coen Brothers' 1984 suspense masterpiece as "slow" and "little," I would proffer that it is confident and methodical — two key ingredients missing from "Don McKay."

Goldberger also sites Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, David Mamet, and even Douglas Sirk as influential touchstones, completely missing the enormous depths that each of these filmmakers went to in preparing each of their films. In his impatience at attempting what it took those masters years to develop, Goldberg rushes into and through scenes without giving proper attention to building character, plot, and theme lines within the necessary win-or-lose constraints of dramatic narrative structure.

That said, Jake Goldberger gets very lucky for a first-timer. Casting M. Emmet Walsh ("Blood Simple") as the taxi driver who brings Don to Sonny's house, and later gets hustled into the film's rushed climax, gives the story an illusion of noir atmosphere. That Goldberger doesn't know what to do with such a gift comes with diminished rewards, but by then you're already happily seduced by Walsh's effortless ability to create a sense of off-kilter humor and subtle menace even if it never pays off. 

By far, it's Thomas Haden Church — executive producer on the film — who compensates most for the film's numerous narrative shortcomings. The same actor who elevated Alexander Payne's "Sideways" (2004) to comedy of sublime proportions, here exerts an ingrained seriousness for his hapless character to fill the narrative void with palpable interest and curiosity.

"Don McKay" is a drama about a lonely man who carries a terrible mistake he made as a teenager with him through every minute of his daily existence. It's a condition that makes him involuntarily unable to avoid certain emotionally baited traps regardless of how poorly they're laid. Herein lies the opportunity for dark humor and imminent bloodletting that such a diabolical plan would allow. If "Don McKay" is an overly simple plan, it is at least a dramatic vacuum filled by an actor capable of making you want him to prevail regardless of his character's lowly motivations.

Rated R. 87 mins.

MEMENTO

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Looping Short Term Memory Loss

Puzzle Movie Plot Falls To Pieces
By Cole Smithey

Cleverness and pretentiousness collide in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s souped up neo-noir thriller "Memento."

Based on a short story by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, "Memento" is a crime-revenge story that relies on its one big gimmick: a split-and-cut-reverse structure that will have you checking your pockets for your house keys after you leave the theater.

Time moves backward in chunks for Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). He's an woefully bothered ex insurance fraud investigator with a bloodlust for the man who raped and murdered his wife.

Leonard must constantly refresh his ever collapsing memory. Leonard’s biggest problem is that his wife’s killer knocked him on the head during the episode, giving Leonard the memory span of a flea. Leonard makes notes to himself, gets reminder instructions tattooed all over his body, and takes endless Polaroid photos, all in an effort at keeping his memory together long enough to track down and kill a man with the initials J.G.

Leonard’s one-minute amnesia loops rewind in reverse order after Leonard murders a guy (who may or may not be his wife’s killer) in the film’s opening scene. As the story backs up and replays all over itself, Leonard makes a lot of one-sided phone calls to a non-disclosed cop feeding him unreliable information. You will likely get an urge to make some calls of your own.

Christopher Nolan recently won the coveted Waldo Salt screenwriting award for "Memento." I personally have always considered screenplay awards to be a suspect device for a handful of wanna-be screenwriters to beat their chest about some script they wished they’d written.

"Memento" is a movie that beats its own chest before an audience ever gets to it. Every ten seconds of the film reminds you that your life is ticking away while you’re watching it. When Leonard repeatedly warns people not to take it personally if he doesn’t remember who they are from one minute to another, it just reminds us that the scriptwriter is busy monkeying around with logic and narrative form to hold our attention.

The trope wears out its welcome. Nolan spoon feeds plot information in forward retrograde. Things like character motivation audience empathy dissolve rather than emerge. It’s like watching a glass of water repeatedly evaporate and refill itself. Each time it refills, there’s less fluid than it started with.

Guy Pearce saturates his performance with an appropriately masochistic kind of self-examination that you might imagine a person with his character’s memory loss condition would develop. He’s the only thing keeping the movie afloat because you sense his urgency as an actor.

You want the story to pay off for his sake as an actor, but not for the doomed character he represents. That’s why its all the more contemptuous when the story’s ending fails to fulfill its promise of giving a closure to Leonard’s repeating plight.

Leonard’s condition screams out for people to take advantage of him. He lives in a dodgy Los Angeles motel where the owner cheats him by moving Leonard to a cheaper room while charging him more because he knows the poor guy can’t remember which room he usually locks his keys inside. When bartender Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) spits in his beer to see if Leonard will remember it a minute later, the waitress isn’t just playing a dirty trick on Leonard, she’s rubbing the audience’s nose in Leonard's character flaw.

Because Leonard stays constantly pumped up to kill the guy who raped and killed his wife, he makes for a perfect patsy of a hit man. Nolan flirts around this sub-plot possibility with the Natalie character cooking up her own vengeful murder scheme for Leonard to carry out. But most of the grist for Leonard’s predicament comes from Teddy, (a sleazy undercover cop played by Joe Pantoliano).

Neither Natalie or Teddy are fleshed out enough to give anything more than passing reference points to the puzzle movie’s tangled plot. Teddy is presumably the detective on the other end of the line for incessant phone calls, which Leonard repeatedly asks the motel clerk not to send through. If this seems confusing and frustrating that’s because it is. "Memento" is a shifting maze of plot sequences that momentarily make sense before reverting to a kind of visual white noise long before the movie hits the halfway mark.

Leonard drives a sleek new Jaguar that seems appropriate for his slight muscular build, but it begs a question of how he ever remembers where the notoriously unreliable car broke down last, or which auto shop he left it in for repairs. Like so many unanswered questions in this story, there’s no way to tell.

 Rated R. 113 mins.  ZERO STARS