Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - Review

DIRECTED BY: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
WRITTEN BY: Frank Miller
STARRING: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joesph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liota, Jamie King, Christopher Lloyd, Jamie Chung, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Meloni, Juno Temple

*SPOILERS AHOY!*

I don't know what it is exactly, but there's something I find kind of endearing about Frank Miller and his...Frank Millerness. Who really knows what caused him to topple off the deep end like he did. I think some people think it was 9/11, though I'm partial to the idea that maybe it was something that was there all along and just manifested itself recently. Whatever the case may be, Frank Miller has become this sort of poster child for that time around the 90's where pretty much everything in comics had to be dark, gritty, and bursting at the seams with musclebound machismo. It's something I think a lot of comics fans are content to forget, or at least put firmly behind them. Frank Miller, on the other hand, represents the remaining vestiges of that dark age of comics still grasping for a serious audience. His comics seem to be stuck in this endless loop of repeating themselves to the point where I honestly can't tell if his work is meant to be taken seriously or as satire.

For all the crap I give Frank Miller, though, I did genuinely enjoy the first Sin City. Not for the story, mind you, mostly because of its unique style and sense of atmosphere that came from shooting it almost entirely on green screen and making it black and white in post. Because of this, it really did feel like the first time a comic was brought literally straight from the page and to the screen and then put into motion, and co-director Robert Rodriguez has said that this was his intention from the very beginning. A Dame to Kill For looks just about the same as the first one, with seemingly little improvement on the technology even ten years later. It might not be using its color splashes as sparingly or effectively as before, but for the most part we get more of Miller's iconic high contrast visuals. It doesn't look bad, mind you, and it does look really good from time to time, but it does feel like more of the same, and in more ways than just the visuals.

Though there isn't a bookend story like the first one, we do get a brief opening that introduces us (or rather re-introduces us) to everyone's favorite square-jawed, scar-riddled psychopath Marv, played by Mickey Rourke in all his musclebound glory. Again, like the first one, the meat of the narrative is made up of three separate but vaguely connected stories that take us into the seedy underbelly of Basin City. The first of these stories focuses on Dwight (here noticeably NOT played by Clive Owen) as he gets embroiled in a power play scheme centered on an estranged but seductive former lover. The second story has a cocky gambler (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) getting in trouble with the wrong people on the wrong night, all the while harboring a dark secret that makes him a target to someone very powerful. The final story centers on Nancy, four years after the end of story in the first film, still mourning for John Hartigan (appearing briefly as a ghost so Bruce Willis can collect his check) and struggling with her desires for bloody satisfaction against the man responsible for his death.

While watching the movie I just kind of went with this setup and didn't think much of it, but after leaving the theater and thinking about it for a while I got confused as to how exactly the timeline here is supposed to work. From what I understand, most of this is actually a prequel to the events of the first film, seeing as Marv is, you know, still alive. Problem is one of the sequences takes place nearly four years after the events of one of the first film's stories, and Marv plays a prominent role in it. If that's true, does that mean that the stories of the first movie take place years apart? Two of the stories here are made entirely for the film and aren't based on any of the existing Sin City comics, so we can't really use the framework of those to judge how time works here. Bah, who cares!? Any excuse to have Rourke chew the scenery a bit more, even if his presence in most of the stories is completely shoehorned, is fine for me as long as it gets us away from the less interesting characters.

In a way that's kind of endemic of another problem the film has. A lot of attention paid to what are probably Miller and Rodriguez's favorite characters (i.e. Marv and Nancy) and not enough to the new or supporting ones. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, especially, gets the shaft in this regard. While his introduction is interesting and gets us invested in his story, the rest of his time on screen is repetitious and ends with an unsatisfying whimper that leaves the audience wanting more, and not in the good way, either. We have cameos from famous actors all over the place, but they're really not given all that much room to shine. With the first film it really did feel like an ensemble cast, and while you may have found one character more interesting than the others, attention was divided up fairly evenly as far as their overall importance. Here its just all so disjointed and unfocused, like Miller and Rodriguez just had a bunch of really cool ideas and just slapped them together into a vague story-shaped package.

However much I wish anthology movies were more of a "thing", watching this its easy to see how building your movie around separated stories can royally screw with your film's structure. Say what you will about the original, but at least that had a measure of cohesiveness and uniformity in its quality. Each story not only told its own story, but each one in turn gave us a broader, singular look at the world in which it took place. With Dame to Kill For, we spend most of the stories revisiting characters and locations we saw in the first one. Motivations fall squarely in the categories of either revenge or sex (or revenge and sex). Lots of people die in stylish ways, A character shoots a character and...that's it, roll credits. The ending is so abrupt and jarring that it left me feeling hollow and unfulfilled, like there was more to it but they decided to cut it out at the last minute. It's not like I'm looking for a deep, meaningful conclusion or whatever, but really, would a bit of a denouement be too much to ask for? The most fulfilling of the three stories is the title one, and while that one actually does have an ending, it also ends about halfway in and has little bearing on the rest of the stories after the fact.

If anything what probably kills this movie more than its weak story and flat characters is that, like Miller himself, it feels like a creature of its era, temporally out of place, appealing chiefly to teenage boys who like sneaking into R rated movies to see Eva Green strut around naked. Maybe if this movie came out five or six years ago there would have still been an audience for it, but audience tastes have changed over the past ten years. Good on Rodriguez for pursuing his passion projects, but again, like Miller, his inability to branch out from his usual schtick is causing his work to become stale, almost to the point of self parody. Its not like there's nothing to enjoy here if you're the right audience for it, there were flashes here and there of enjoyable madness here and there that kept my interest. For the most part, though, the good stuff in this movie just made me want to go back and watch the original instead. With how meager its box office is, I doubt we can expect any more stories of grit and noir from the world of Basin City, though that may be for the best. Better to leave the good memories of the original intact than drive them further into the ground. Some franchises still haven't gotten that message yet.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - Review

DIRECTED BY - Matt Reeves
WRITTEN BY - Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
STARRING - Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russel, Toby Kebbell, Kodi Smit-McPhee

*Some minor spoilers ahead, ye have been warned!*

Before I begin, lets just appreciate the sheer unlikelihood of this movie even existing. It's the sequel to a reboot of a prequel to a movie that was remade, but is a different remake than this one, based on a book. By all accounts this should not be as good as it was, and yet here it is. Maybe that's just a testament to how flexible the core concept is. The whole idea of an intelligent society of apes interacting with humans is an easy shorthand for such a wide variety of topics. The apes are essentially "different" than humans, but they share enough characteristics with us that we're still able to empathize with them on a fundamental level. The fact that they are "other" allows the audience observe the flaws of their society detached from the baggage of strict societal allegory, while still allowing us to detect the aspects that are familiar.

I've never understood how people are able to segregate sci-fi as something "lesser" than other forms of fiction. Among other things, science fiction has always had this ability to contextualize relevant modern day issues in a way that allows us to explore them without being inhibited by the limiting bounds of the modern day. If I sometimes have a problem with genre, it's when the story is more about the message than about...well...the story. The science fiction stories that work best for me are the ones that are able to blend high-concept ideas with good narrative and characters. The Planet of the Apes series is no stranger to exploring ideas, and not averse to being "about" something, but sometimes that lends itself to being focused on the world and themes rather than pushing for greater depth in its characters. Don't get me wrong, I love the original 1968 film, but its safe to say that the later entries haven't always lived up to that film's lofty standard.

In this entry, though, there's a much greater sense of clarity as to what it's "about" that sets it apart from the rest of the series' broader social commentary. What qualities make a good leader. Whether compromising your own morals is sometimes necessary in order to prevent greater loss of life. How people cling to the lives they once had or try to recreate them instead rather than move forward. How even when we try to move forward our past can still define who we are and how we react to others and the world around us. It shows how misunderstandings between different peoples can breed distrust, and distrust hostility. How that hostility can turn into all out war with just the slightest push. How even with the best intentions the desire for self-preservation can ultimately lead to one's own undoing.

In other words, it's a story about peace and the things that people do to f*ck it up.

Now this isn't exactly a new concept, especially for science fiction. As they say, though, it's not so much what it's about as it is how you go about it, and "Dawn" goes about it with style to spare. Through fantastic production design, cinematography, and direction, we have an apocalypse that's very different the usually wastelands we so often get. This film differs visually from "Rise" in that it has a far more stylized choice of color palette, using mellow blues and greens and dark oranges to evoke a greater sense of mood and atmosphere than its predecessor. Though we get the usual urban overgrowth setting, there's just something about it that feels more...alive, like it hasn't gone so far that there's no chance of going back. Ten years really isn't that long a time after all. Any glimpse we do get into the old world feels almost alien, which is weird because the old world is our world. In a literal sense, it's that feeling after a long power outage when the lights flicker suddenly back on, and while it's familiar you've gotten so used to the darkness that it still kind of feels foreign to you. It's a different visual approach that's woven into the story the film is trying to tell, and sets it apart from its bleaker cousins.

Another unorthodox visual choice for a summer blockbuster was the film's choice of the narrower 1:85:1 aspect ratio as opposed to the usual 2:35:1. Every other Apes film has gone with the latter, so that makes me wonder where the decision for this change may have come from. I'm not complaining, actually the opposite. I'm so sick of blockbusters using 2:35:1 and similar ratios to artificially make their movies seem more "epic" when really, they don't need all that extra space. The fact that this movie chose to go such a non-traditional route shows that the filmmakers were confident in their ability to create something visually enticing with less horizontal space. It shows that they valued intimacy and character over spectacle, because even with the stunning special effects it's clear that the real heart of this film comes from its characters

At the center of all of this is Caesar, who, no exaggeration, is one of the most fully formed, well conceived characters in any science fiction film. There's been some debate as to how much of the performance is Andy Serkis's motion capture and how much is the animators. Whatever it is, I'm sure it wouldn't have been possible without either, and the fact that special effects have gotten to the point where we can create computer generated characters with this kind of nuance, this level of expressiveness is just astounding. Our antagonist, too, is compelling even in his own right. It isn't Gary Oldman, as the trailers would have us believe, but Koba, Caesar's power hungry second in command. He elevates himself from his archetype by having a motivation that's both. His motivation is spelled out in one of the movies standout scenes, which I won't spoil, but it involves the repeated use of the phrase "human work".

If there's a weakness its that the human characters aren't nearly as compelling as the ape characters are. Malcolm, the movie's other protagonist, acts as a human counterpoint to Caesar. He's not as strong or inspiring as Caesar, but his desire for peace and a bright future forges a connection between the two that illustrates the surprising amount of optimism in a film with such a forgone conclusion. Ultimately, though, his character lacks the sense of inner conflict and moral shades of grey that would make him interesting in his own right.

Gary Oldman, underused as he is, is probably the most interesting of the human cast. He eschews the usual paranoid war-monger type character we're used to by framing all of his actions in a way that makes is reasoning seem completely rational from his own point of view. That's the thing about this movie, it frames all the conflicts in the movie as the product of rational decision-making from a certain point of view. It shows that looking past prejudice and your own strict sense of self-preservation that makes the possibility of peace even remotely tangible. Caesar knows this, Malcolm knows this, but the problem comes with convincing everyone else. It's particularly potent in this day and age where our greater interconnectedness brings cultural boundaries closer and closer together, forcing us to consider whether we all really can "just get along".

Like The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight, this is a movie that does what any good sequel should do: act as an extension of the original rather than just a retread, push the themes and characters further instead of stagnating in repetition. It forgoes obvious references to the original 1968 film, which even "Rise" couldn't seem resist the temptation of doing, and forages its own narrative path. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes shows that sci-fi cinema doesn't have to sacrifice intelligence for the sake of emotion and thrills. It can stand on its own two feet (so to speak) and be its own thing while still honoring the legacy of the films that came before it. We've still got a few more big ones left to go, but at this point I'm willing to call it and say that this is definitely my pick for best blockbuster this summer. Guardians of the Galaxy's got a lot to prove now to top this.

So what did you all think? Did you like it? Love it? Hate it? Are you somewhere in between? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.