New York Daily News - Unpleasantville
Unpleasantville
Welcome to ‚Sin City‘ – a film noir on steroids
BY HENRY CABOT BECK
Sin City, which gives its name to a virulent new crime thriller opening April 1, is a maze of shadowy corners and dead ends – a brutal ‚burg where life is cheap and usually short. It‘s a place you might not want to visit on your next cross-country tour, unless you like your bourbon straight, your cigarettes unfiltered and your dames sexy and dangerous. And you'd better pack a gun.
But before it was a movie starring Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Clive Owen, Sin City was a town in a series of graphic novels. They sprang from the feverish mind of comic artist and writer Frank Miller.
„Basin City, which is the real name of the imaginary place, is a combination of New York, where I lived for 14 years, and L.A., where I was living when I started the series, which is why you occasionally see palm trees in the stories,“ says Miller, who co-directed the movie with Robert Rodriguez. „Now that I'm back living in Hell's Kitchen, you can expect to see more concrete corridors and people on the stoops and on the street.“
Prior to „Sin City,“ which started in 1991, Miller was best known as the man who reconceived Batman as an aging, suicidal retiree in „The Dark Knight Returns“ (1986), a graphic novel that set the world of comic literature on its ear.
The new film interweaves several Miller stories: „Sin City: The Hard Goodbye,“ „Sin City: The Big Fat Kill“ and „Sin City: That Yellow Bastard.“
„You'd have to be blind to miss Mickey Spillane's influence on the Sin City stories,“ Miller says. „But the subtler strains can be found in works by writers like James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who created a place called ‚Poisonville‘ in his novel "Red Harvest“ – which is very much like Sin City in its modest size and corrupt morality.
„I should also mention the influence of [film director] Sam Fuller on "The Big Fat Kill“ – in particular his movie „Pickup on South Street“ [1953]," Miller adds.
Among the denizens of Sin City are Marv (Rourke), a hatchet-faced tough guy with fists and a heart bigger than his brain; John Hartigan (Willis), a retiring cop with a bum ticker; Dwight (Owen), who ran into some trouble with the law and had his face fixed, and Kevin (Elijah Wood), a smiling, good-looking killer with a taste for human flesh.
HOOKERS' 'HOOD
Most interesting, though, are the Old Town girls, a group of prostitutes who dress in wild costumes and operate on their own terms outside the law.
„Sin City is people, not buildings,“ Miller says. "Having said that, Old Town is the space that the hookers have laid out as their own, a city within a city. The police don't go there – not on police business, anyway. They don't bust the girls, and the girls don't shoot them. Everyone has an understanding.
„There was a revolution years back when the hookers rose up and killed all the pimps, and ever since then they've been running the show,“ Miller continues. „Gail [Dawson] is their commander. She's slightly older and has risen to the top through merit and strength of character.“
„The Old Town girls are probably the most fun you can have casting a picture because you have all these amazingly beautiful women coming in for these parts,“ says Rodriguez, who is best know for his „Spy Kids“ series. „I remember Rosario came in and I showed her the skimpy S&M costume that Frank had drawn and she said, ‚Yeah – I want to be that person because she‘s so different from what I am. I want to be that strong.' And she did an amazing job. She's never been this strong in a movie.“
Another Old Town girl is the mysterious Miho (Devon Aoki), a bloodthirsty martial artist who carries samurai swords and occasionally tosses razor-sharp ninja blades to devastating effect – as Jack Rafferty (Benecio Del Toro) discovers when he crosses certain moral and physical boundaries within Old Town.
„Miho is a creature of magic,“ Miller says. „She exists without any history, completely unto herself, whereas Becky [‚The Gilmore Girls‘ ' Alexis Bledel] is the one with a real back story. Her mother, who lives upstate or uptown or somewhere, has no idea that her daughter is a hooker, and so Becky is keeping this secret while she's looking for a way out, which is what leads her to betray the women of Old Town. And Alexis, I should mention, is stunning. She has the most piercing blue eyes I've ever seen.“
Rodriguez agrees.
"Alexis really stands out. And her eyes are so amazing I had to keep them blue in the picture, which is almost entirely shot in black and white.
„It really helped that all the women in the picture had a real sense of who their characters were, based on the stories and Frank's illustrations,“ Rodriguez adds. „They knew who they were playing specifically. It made them more comfortable playing these parts.“
The Sin City girl who has the biggest role in the picture is strip-club performer Nancy Callahan, played by Jessica Alba. Though Nancy is at the center of the Bruce Willis section of the film, she appears throughout the movie – most often as a silent topless dancer who wears Western drag and twirls a lariat. She appears nightly at Katie's Club Pecos, a Sin City dive.
„Nancy Callahan is Sin City's angel – the symbol of the town,“ Miller says. "She's scarred by life, certainly, but when she's up on stage, nobody else exists and she's pleasing only herself. She's an artist.
„She is the sweetest, purest girl in Sin City, and there's a reason she's up on a stage and not down in the pit. What's more, everybody knows that anyone who lays so much as a finger on her will answer to Marv.“
In an interview in GQ magazine, Alba, 23, describes Nancy as „a totally innocent and doe-eyed stripper who doesn't think of what she does as a bad thing, just a way to make money. She is the only one who is completely forthright and noble and honest, and she believes in love and soul mates.“
„At first, Jessica came in thinking that Nancy was just a stripper,“ Miller says. „I explained to her that the idea is that someone might come into the place thinking they're going to see some hard-bodied, sad woman. Instead, what they see is this honest-to-goodness angel. And Jessica worked hard to give Nancy the grace and magic the character required.“
Rene Echevarria, who produced Alba's TV series „Dark Angel“ in 2000, agrees with Miller. „Jessica was terrific: someone who worked – and worked out – constantly, so she could do her own stunts. And when you remember she was playing a genetically mutated person with all this feline super-athletic prowess, that was not an easy task.“
„Most importantly, Nancy is Sin City's true undercurrent, and that undercurrent is at the heart of it all – romance,“ Miller says. „Underneath all the gunplay and violence and everything else, these are all really love stories, about men who are willing to give everything they have for the women that they love, and they do.“
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