Buffista Movies 4: Straight to Video
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Make tenet #1 of Jessicaism "Thou shalt not dive headlong into a Fashion Apocalypse."
Done and done! Does this mean Mischa Barton is going to hell?
Just got back from Sin City, which I liked about as much as I expected to. I don't think much of the writing in the comics -- too much adolescent machismo for my taste, and that's saying something -- so the uber-faithfulness didn't do much for me. Clive Owen was the only actor I thought was really any good. (And Benecio del Toro, in that one scene.) Bruce Willis was okay. The first third of the movie bored me to the point where I was in physical pain. Alexis Bleidel is freaking adorable, but she has no range. Especially the scenes where
she's talking to her mom on the phone
had me laughing hysterically at adorable little hooker Rory. I just couldn't see her as anything else.
Alexis Bleidel is freaking adorable, but she has no range. Especially the scenes where she's talking to her mom on the phonehad me laughing hysterically at adorable little hooker Rory. I just couldn't see her as anything else.
Heh. I felt exactly the same way, especially the first time I saw it. Polter-Cow and I actually had a discussion about it over at my LJ, sort of. My words were
Sadly, Alexis Bledel's Becky left me a bit more cold, mostly because, well, she plays Rory if Rory were a gun-toting whore with a terrible southern accent, to the point of calling her mother twice over the course of the movie.
On second-viewing re-evaluation, I decided she was better that I originally thought, with a lot of the Roriness probably being directed (that character IS Rory, in a lot of ways, and they probably knew that when they cast Alexis, after all. Easier to direct her to "be like Rory here" than to start from scratch to build a very similar character) Still, I mostly agree that she's not so much for the range. Hopefully her Lena in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants won't be Rory, because those characters are pretty different.
I liked
Sin City,
and, surprisingly, my 76-year-old never-heard-her-swear mom liked it too. She found the Noir/crime homage lots of fun, and said the adolescent viewpoint reminded her of comics she and my uncle read voraciously as kids, so it worked for her. My feeling was basically, Clive Owen, rowr.
and said the adolescent viewpoint reminded her of comics she and my uncle read voraciously as kids, so it worked for her.
Heh! She must've been reading those hardcore EC comics in the 50s.
My feeling was basically, Clive Owen, rowr.
::sets watch to Scrappy's Clive-oost::
The comics themselves are a fascinating stylistic mix of Alex Toth's fantastic high contrast black and white work, coupled with the blocky dynamic, brutal power of Jack Kirby.
I need to answer some of Nutty's noir commentary, but need to go re-read it first. However, I strongly concur with Vonnie's assessment that it had more in common with Sam Fuller's brutalism. In fact, many Noir films specifically critique violent male revenge. In
White Heat
Glen Ford goes after the mob after they murder his wife and kid. In doing so, he winds up also destroying every woman who helps him in the movie. In
Touch of Evil,
Charlton Heston's righteous violent anger, winds up leaving his wife alone and vulnerable and subsequently kidnapped, raped and drugged up. In Noir you can't solve your problems by being a hardass. It just makes other problems more profound.
The comics themselves are a fascinating stylistic mix of Alex Toth's fantastic high contrast black and white work, coupled with the blocky dynamic, brutal power of Jack Kirby.
You need to give Chester Gould more credit. Actually, Gould was a major stylistic influence on Noir in general.
You need to give Chester Gould more credit. Actually, Gould was a major stylistic influence on Noir in general.
I love Chester Gould, and yeah, it's in the grotesquery. But Toth is the absolute master of the b/w composition that Miller does. And those beat up male faces? Orion taking off his helmet in New Gods, and all those other raw, howling beasties Kirby drew.
Sin City
thanked my BF's uncle, Joe Kubert, in the end credits. He has an email in to the uncle to find out why. Joe is a comics artist from way back, so we think that's the reason. Still, very unexpected and cool.
My feeling was basically, Clive Owen, rowr.
Oh, absolutely. My sister turned to me after it was over and said,
"I want Clive Owen to kill lots of people for me."
Mainly, I just wish all the actors had been given more direction. The
Quentin Tarantino "guest directed" scene was instantly recognizable because the acting suddenly came to life, and the visuals were really used instead of the only goal being to make it look like the comics.
Mainly, I just wish all the actors had been given more direction.
Yeah, I got the sense that the actors were a little neglected in the process. Some of them got it stylistically, but others seemed to be acting in different movies.
