The sources for the first full length movies were The Bible, plays, and novels. Comic strips and comic books were soon discovered. Cross pollination between radio, television, and motion pictures soon followed, and is still common. Video games adapted to films assure marketing tie-ins for action films, and that also is a two way street. Remember the arcade version of STAR WARS?.
The graphic novel is a natural in this evolution, providing a ready-made blueprint for scenarists, production designers and directors. Films like THE ROAD TO PERDITION and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE dramatize the graphic novel source in a "real," though stylized, world. But now, digital technology permits movies to be utterly faithful to the source, wholly re-created by the computer graphic artist.
The material world is completely discarded. Now the digital effects world is the entire milieu, the dark graphic novel the storyboard. Actors, who began life in film as silent pantomimists, now are models, playing in front of green screens on bare stages.
Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino combine their adolescent nightmares and wishes for apocalyptic anti-heroes and femmes fatales in this movie which one critic called “film noir on steroids.” Their art draws from many obvious sources: pulp novels of the Mickey Spillane spitting blood with dialogue school, Japanese anime and martial arts cut-em-ups. There are homages to Bogart (Bruce Willis) and Robert Mitchum and Victor Mature (Mickey Rourke) and Ralph Bakshi’s COOL WORLD. There are hard-core porn tease references, depictions of cannibalism, child molestation, castration and other amusing forms of dismemberment, corrupt police, and priests.
Stylized is not a strong enough word for the look. The world they create is spectacularly vivid, so loyal to the look and feel of Miller’s graphic novels that it is simply a moving picture book of the novels, lacking only balloons for dialogue. Considering how bad much of it sounds, that might have been a better choice.
The cast of actors, freed from constraints of sets or other connections to a real world (like human motivations and emotion), create abstract images of characters. Actors like to be tools in the hands of directors and production designers who will put them into a world long after their scenes are done. They like to give long speeches, whether in voice over narratives with a flat hard-boiled cynicism that is supposed to sound like pop poetry, or in tough sounding dialogue of threat and vitriol, using the 40's noir patois. They all want to be Bogart and Mitchum.
Really good actors are drawn to the project in addition to those mentioned. Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, Carla Gugino, Jessica Alba, Michael Madsen, and others. They have a great over-the-top time play acting. Actors after all are also kids playing pretend games.
I have long since given up howling the complaint that some critics keep up: that this is heartless entertainment that has given up any pretense to edify, uplift, or even tell stories. The mood is all there is; gothic horror, film noir essence, repeated and pounded into us. Violence and mean spiritedness so stylized that its inhuman extremes are irrelevant.
Revenge and rage are all we have left, not at the edge of our society, but right in the center. Like Romans in the Forum, we watch and cheer the gladiators tear each other apart. Great fun. We’ve come a long way in two thousand years. Can’t wait for Sin City 2.
The graphic novel is a natural in this evolution, providing a ready-made blueprint for scenarists, production designers and directors. Films like THE ROAD TO PERDITION and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE dramatize the graphic novel source in a "real," though stylized, world. But now, digital technology permits movies to be utterly faithful to the source, wholly re-created by the computer graphic artist.
The material world is completely discarded. Now the digital effects world is the entire milieu, the dark graphic novel the storyboard. Actors, who began life in film as silent pantomimists, now are models, playing in front of green screens on bare stages.
Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino combine their adolescent nightmares and wishes for apocalyptic anti-heroes and femmes fatales in this movie which one critic called “film noir on steroids.” Their art draws from many obvious sources: pulp novels of the Mickey Spillane spitting blood with dialogue school, Japanese anime and martial arts cut-em-ups. There are homages to Bogart (Bruce Willis) and Robert Mitchum and Victor Mature (Mickey Rourke) and Ralph Bakshi’s COOL WORLD. There are hard-core porn tease references, depictions of cannibalism, child molestation, castration and other amusing forms of dismemberment, corrupt police, and priests.
Stylized is not a strong enough word for the look. The world they create is spectacularly vivid, so loyal to the look and feel of Miller’s graphic novels that it is simply a moving picture book of the novels, lacking only balloons for dialogue. Considering how bad much of it sounds, that might have been a better choice.
The cast of actors, freed from constraints of sets or other connections to a real world (like human motivations and emotion), create abstract images of characters. Actors like to be tools in the hands of directors and production designers who will put them into a world long after their scenes are done. They like to give long speeches, whether in voice over narratives with a flat hard-boiled cynicism that is supposed to sound like pop poetry, or in tough sounding dialogue of threat and vitriol, using the 40's noir patois. They all want to be Bogart and Mitchum.
Really good actors are drawn to the project in addition to those mentioned. Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, Carla Gugino, Jessica Alba, Michael Madsen, and others. They have a great over-the-top time play acting. Actors after all are also kids playing pretend games.
I have long since given up howling the complaint that some critics keep up: that this is heartless entertainment that has given up any pretense to edify, uplift, or even tell stories. The mood is all there is; gothic horror, film noir essence, repeated and pounded into us. Violence and mean spiritedness so stylized that its inhuman extremes are irrelevant.
Revenge and rage are all we have left, not at the edge of our society, but right in the center. Like Romans in the Forum, we watch and cheer the gladiators tear each other apart. Great fun. We’ve come a long way in two thousand years. Can’t wait for Sin City 2.
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