My Ponderings on Cinema

A film with style and substance

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Sin City (2005)

A really enjoyed Sin City. It falls just short of a perfect score for me, but only a sliver short. The only flaw is the overuse of gratuitous gore. Had a few of the splatter scenes been done off camera, the film would be on my all time favourites list. I suppose directors all too often forget Hitchcock's lesson on how effective chocolate syrup can be. I have a hunch that this is all the result of including Tarentino as a "guest director". I never liked Tarentino's films, precisely because the guy has no understanding of how to convey violence with any subtlety.

Aside from heavy use of blood and dismemberment, everything else in the film works fantastically. The style is original and unique. The recreation of the black and white with splashes of colours was risky. And, as we learned from films like A Scanner Darkly, it isn't enough to be different; a film that explores a new style has to pull it off amazingly well. Miller and Rogriguez recreated the comic's feel brilliantly. It was a daring experiment, and it worked very, very well.

And the acting was fantastic too. I've read a few reviews that complain of character-acting that is too flat, too two-dimensional. Well, comic books are on a printed page, they are two-dimensional. But it's not that the characters are flat, they're archetypal. Classic comic book characters are not about the depth of personality, but the breadth of symbolism and interpretation. Miller understands that and created and directed characters of that qualities. The actors were talented and smart enough to portray the characters in this non-standard way. Unlike other comic book movies (like the Spiderman and X-Men movies), the characters felt like they came from a comic book's page. As an avid comic book reader, I felt quite at home in this film.

I hope that this inspires more directors to make comic book movies and keep the comic book aesthetic in them. If we get really lucky, someone might be able to recreate Tim Sale's or Sam Kieth's styles successfully too.

Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 11:25 PM by smithco | with 0 comments

Not Nearly as Good as it Could Have Been

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A Scanner Darkly (2006)

I found A Scanner Darkly to be a bit of a disappointment. It should have been a really great movie, but at the end, it wasn't anywhere near what it should have been. Before I continue, I should note that I saw this one on an airplane -- not the best viewing conditions. So take this critique with a grain of salt for that reason.

I found that the story and the acting was very good. This is one of those rare instances where the presence of Keanu Reeves does not ruin the film. Heck, I was surprised to see that he actually turned in a decent performance, almost as good as the one from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. And the other actors were quite good too, all far better than usual. Though, it does speak to the quality of the casts' talents that they play stoners better than other roles.

However, it wasn't long into the movie that I started to get distracted by two things. Firstly, it seemed that the sound engineering was botched. The actors were often speaking in low, conversational and meditative tones. The voices came out all mumbled and muddy. This could just be the result of the poor audio system on the plane, but the other movies I watched did not suffer the same problem.

Secondly, I found the faked rotoscoping to be extremely poorly done. That distracted me a lot from enjoying the film. One obvious problem was that not nearly enough polygons were used. This introduced a lot of edge and texturing artifacts into the film and consequently made it look ugly. Then, there was the artistic choice of just using flattened colours sampled from the filmed scene as the textures. Due to that choice, there was no artistic creativity introduced into the movie through the rotoscoping. It was simply the filmed scene flattened out. Compared to other rotoscoped animations, it was boring. Considering how much hype was made about the style, I was severely disappointed on that front. If you want to see some really cool work done with rotoscoping, check out the animated series Delta State. Rotoscoping can be used well, but A Scanner Darkly shows that it can be used badly too.

In the end, had a decent job been done of the audio and graphics, this would have been a great movie. As is, it is barely worth watching once.

Posted Monday, January 01, 2007 7:11 PM by smithco | with 0 comments