SIN CITY

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"Sin City" is a high concept tour de force rendering of Frank Miller's wickedly sexy and grotesque graphic-novel-homage to the hardboiled noir style of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane.

Director Robert Rodriquez collaborates with Quentin Tarantino to create a personalized format of dark animated expression.

They use negative imagery with accents of color (especially blood-red) to emphasize character traits, and show the cartoon action exactly as Miller originally drew it.

Frank Miller’s participation with Robert Rodriquez in the film’s production speaks to the clarity of vision on display. The filmmakers’ dynamic use of green-screen technology to flesh out the story’s urban terrain is stunning. Black-and-white characters bleed bright white blood from black bullet wounds. This really is eye-candy.

Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen, and Jessica Alba pop from the screen as iconic black-and-white characters of a fetishized criminal underworld. The vice-riddled narrative weaves together three Frank Miller stories ("The Big Fat Kill," "The Hard Goodbye," and "That Yellow Bastard"). The ink-black shadows that splay across the screen corroborate its characters’ cruel and kind intentions.

Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is a honest cop who does eight-years of hard time for a crime he didn't commit in order to protect a little girl named Nancy after she's kidnapped by the serial-rapist son (Nick Stahl) of the town's corrupt Senator (Powers Boothe). Corruption drips from every lamppost.

Mickey Rourke steals the show as Marv, a virtually indestructible hulk addicted to violence, booze, and pills. "Marv was born in the wrong century. He belongs on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face."

Marv's taste for blood is piqued after the murder of a hooker named Goldie (Jamie King) who showed him one "night of kindness." Marv sets off on an ass-kicking investigation that finds him torturing guys, like the man Marv drags facedown on the street as he speeds along in his car with the door open. Once Marv locates his serial-killer prey (played by one very tweaky Elijah Wood), it's all about amputation and decapitation.

Clive Owen is the most normal of the baddies on display as Dwight, an all around badass who gets caught in an apocalyptic battle between the cops and the mob as the result of a mistaken cop murder performed by the gun-and-sword wielding prostitutes of Old Town. Girly fetish fantasy goes softcore with the sizzling BDSM gear Rosario Dawson wears with pride.

"You've got to prove to your friends you're worth a damn. Sometimes it means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lotta people." That's how Dwight explains his philosophy. It's a sentiment that provides a common bond between Hartigan, Marv, and Dwight, while imparting a rough-edged view of the nocturnal world of Frank Miller's deadly protagonists.

“Sin City” lives on in your memory like a fantasy nightmare where living people morph into super-action visions of beguiling brutality.   

Rated R. 124 mins. 

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

  Welcome!

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Cinema Snooze
Only Angelina Jolie Will Wipe Sleep From Your Eyes
By Cole Smithey

This overwrought CGI snoozefest visually brags about how painstaking it was for its filmmakers to construct its lush imagery. But the visuals only serve as so much cinematic wallpaper for Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and Giovanni Ribisi to stand in front of.

The hollow script will leave you cold. You can check off references to movies like "Planet Of The Apes," "Metropolis," "Star Wars," and "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" as they pass by under a gauze of vintage modern trappings in a grungy deco design.

Jude Law plays an uber pilot savior to a sepia tone world attacked by giant robots. Gwyneth Paltrow plays an ambitious journalist and arm’s- length love interest to Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan (Law). Planes fly into the ocean to transform into submarines while some unseen scientist (read deceased) attempts to put two animals of every species on a giant silver rocket before destroying the world.

Every time a director uses Computer-Generated-Imagery to a greater extent than it has been used before, critics and filmmakers clamor about how the technology will irreparably transform cinema. The threats never come to fruition—see George Lucas’s "The Phantom Menace."

In this regard "Sky Captain" is no different. Writer/director Kerry Conran filmed "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" entirely against a blue screen, and digitally created the actors’ surroundings after filming their performances. Conran’s clinical approach is evident too in his script, which feels cold and over-sampled. While it’s true that the special effects and period costumes compensate for some of the monochromatic visual drone of the movie, the story is strictly one-dimensional.

The ever-vacuous Gwyneth Paltrow is a perfect blank slate for Conran’s ‘40s-styled cartoon version of idealized womanhood. Polly Perkins (Paltrow) becomes a damsel in distress after a secret meeting at Radio City Music Hall with Dr. Jennings (Trevor Baxter). The doctor is an imperiled German scientist seeking her help. Polly suddenly finds herself running from giant iron robots as they stomp their way down Manhattan streets, crushing every Packard in sight.

Sky Captain gets the SOS call on his airplane radio and before you can say "911" he’s playing ace-fighter-pilot in his P-40 Warhawk to rescue New York. Polly and the Captain have a torrid romantic history. It seems that Captain Sullivan dumped Polly three years ago in China when she sabotaged his plane.The blueprints she possesses are just the ticket to rekindle their strangely asexual affair.

After Sullivan’s airbase is attacked by bat-like planes, his good-guy mechanic Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) is left to fight off the evil foes while Sullivan and Polly fly off in search of an evil Dr. Totenkopf, the man responsible for the mechanical combatants. The centerpiece of the movie, and the only reason to see it, is when the couple arrives at Angelina Jolie’s air-floating Royal Air Force station.

Franky (Jolie) is a black-eye-patch wearing dominatrix who shares more lust with Sky Captain Sullivan than Polly ever will. To say that Jolie steals the movie with the few scenes she has is an understatement. Angelina Jolie is the movie. Once her character shows off her bravado flying skills to make an opening for Mr. Sky Captain, the movie slips down a slippery slope of childish serial cartoon fetishism that resides in a Michael Jackson brand of geeky naïveté.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is a war movie without subtext. Its deliberate lack of moral coding and pandering effort to please audiences with a bogus vintage cotton candy pulp is more than a little nauseating.

Rated PG. 107 mins.