"Sin City depicts violence for its own sake. There's no purpose behind the violence -- it is simply presented as entertaining in and of itself. "

Like boxing? Or Kung Fu movies? Man I hate it when taste gets mixed up with morals, which is basically all the time.

I think Manohla Dargis' complaint in a review of another film is relevant here:

"...a good if trivial genre movie, no more, no less. There's no denying that Mr. Park is some kind of virtuoso, but so what? So was the last guy who directed a Gap commercial. Cinematic virtuosity for its own sake, particularly as expressed through cinematography -- in loop-the-loop camera work and, increasingly, in computer-assisted ornamentation -- is a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies. Historically speaking, the most interesting thing about "Oldboy" is that like so much "product" now coming out of Hollywood, it is a B movie tricked out as an A movie. Once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on
cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square.

The fact that "Oldboy" is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys... In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments -- much less philosophical and political inquiries -- are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence. As in, "Wow, he's hammering those dudes with a knife stuck in his back -- cool!" Or, "He's about to drop that guy and his dog from the roof -- way cool!" ...

I think "a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies" says it all.

As a kid that happened to pick up a new issue of Daredevil for the first time a few months after Miller took over story/pics- this all seems long past due...

Bring on the Dark Knight.

"shiny, meaningless movies" does say it all, but it tells me you haven't read Miller's work. He's not a fan of shiny, meaningless things either.

Art and literature are sometimes extremely dark and painful. Sometimes it's crap and sometimes it isn't. Not for me to decide.

Frank Miller pushed the boundries of both story telling and artwork to new places. He created things.

It's late, time to read a couple pages of Miller's "Ronin" and call it a night.

I saw Sin City on Friday, and while I was impressed with the visuals, wasn't impressed as a whole with the movie. I found many of the actors/actresses' performances for be laughable. I was chuckling to myself throughout Mickey Rourke's vignette and have come to conclusion that Michael Clark Duncan might have ruined his career. The voiceovers throughout the film ( "I removed his weapon; I removed his other weapon." ) were probably move effective within the novels than on the big screen. There this tactic was cheesey and outlandish.

There was a moral code implicit within this modern day noir, but it wasn't recognizable if compared to society's standards. If the National Enquierer publishes photos of Puff Daddy dragging Sug Knight out of the side while searching for Biggie's killer, I'll reconsider. Because the moral code was divorced from reality, for its target audience (white males in the 16 to 25 year old range), I just don't see it having any real effect on our actions or our thoughts. While you may argue borderline cases, there were plenty of other sources to push the demented over the edge. For the literary, Achilles kills more men with less reason than Bruce Willis ever did as Hartigan. The cinema buff might remember Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep shooting an unarmed man out the door in the full knowledge that the men outside of the door would be gunning for him. HBO had both The Sopranos and Oz, both of which are critically aclaimed and rightfully so.

Sin City's sin is that it stripped the dead husk of Hollywood morality off leaving us with just the violence. While Sin City was number one this weekend, I don't think that audiences will be strong enough to keep it up there. Pure brutality of man against man isn't very appealing.

Mark Buehner: "I hate it when taste gets mixed up with morals ..."

In school they warned me not to get taste mixed up with critical value. They never said anything about getting it mixed up with morals.

Agreed. The violence moreover, was cartoonish anyway, which makes it perfectly comfortable to stomach.

I am curious about the age of the little one. Mine are 11 and 14. The former immediately complained it was in black and white. The effect did grow on him. The latter I do not have a clear read on because the nudity was contrasted to starkly intially(Goldie and Carla(the actress' name) and then disappeared into male fantasy(Jessica Alba in chaps and a rope). "Sam you do know how to whistle don't you. You just out your lips together and blow", worked better for him.

The subject matter that caught me unawares was the pedophila. That I thought was too much and the punishment did not match the punishment found in a prison for that crime.

Loved Sin City, never expected it to be non-fiction.