Bruce Willis ending a partner’s sex life
A distributor for Columbia Pictures told me several years ago that the primary target for films these days is a 19-yeat-old male. I doubt that the maxim has changes since. He explained that this “person” was the median of the movie-going public, and also, that “he” was likely to make the movie-going decision for his “date.” In other words, young women were going to be “dragged along” to see action, macho, violent films because Hollywood had targeted the fattest part of the market. Certainly there are other “niche” films targeted to women, teens, etc., but I often think of what that distributor said when I go to the movies.
It is has been a long time since I was a 19-year-old male. Anyway, they didn’t make movies for my cohort back then. Where would you classify a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis picture? I could actually go to the movies (and often did) with my parents when I was a kid, at least until about age fifteen. Then things changed; but I’ll have more to say about that in another essay. For now, I take my theme from a film that has just been released.
Because I write about both cities and media I am all but obliged to see a film like Sin City . I say “obliged” because I had seen the trailer and my instincts and tastes sort of warned me off this one. (And you know what Ebert and Roeper can do with their thumbs.) I suppose that’s because I was never much of a fan of comic books and comic strips. And this film is an animated comic book, brilliantly animated, but still a comic book, based on Frank Miller’s comic series, and directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez and kibitzed by Quentin Tarantino.
But I needed to see Sin City because it used exclusively a “green screen” technique or what used to be called a “matte shot,” whereby actors and their actions and dialogue are filmed against a green screen background, upon which the film makers will place, by computer, the background. This is both economical in terms of time and production costs, and is ideal for films that are intended to be cartoon-ish in their look. Graphically, if not cinematically, Sin City is a finely rendered work.
Sin City is heavier on box office boys than it is in script. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Benicio del Toro, have their respective parts of the trilogy of somewhat interrelated stories. The common thread seems to be violence, and not a little of it played upon women (some if it by women). There’s a lot of comic book sound effects attending the violence (onomatopoeic words like Whump! Aarrrrghh! Crunch! and Thwack! come out of comic books). In the manner of film noir, from which this movie also liberally borrows, these are troubled, morally-compromised, protagonists doing first person narrations, who must use all forms of violence, from flinging people through windows, to an emasculation with a .44 Magnum, and torturing, putatively to counter the rape, abduction, and cannibalization of the women they “protect.” Violence begets violence; but we don’t need to pay nine bucks (which does not beget popcorn, another five bucks) to get that message.
Women viewers can choose to identify with the women being whacked around, or the likes fem-bot Miho, a Japanese martial artist who does, well, all the stuff that is done in Kill Bill movies. Or perhaps they can identify with the hookers and pole dancers who control and do battle half naked in the inner city that they control. Ergo, the plots are shallow and contrived to highlight the equal opportunity gender violence. There’s a sense that this is really a fantasy domain for 19-year-old guys who have spent too much time with one hand on their Game Boy and the other down their shorts. Rourke’s character, Marv, is perhaps the most “complicated,” mainly because he is a hulk with a face of scar tissue who can’t get over the death of the hooker who showed him some “real” affection. So much for depth of character.
The problem is that this is all so skillfully and even artfully done. Borrowing from film noir as well as Frank Miller’s (he co-directs with Rodriguez) comics, there is a high contrast, almost Japanese notan , rendering to scenes that seem to perpetually an ambiance of night and rain, that bend perspective and use color sparingly (mostly blood red) for effect. But, while entertaining, without much depth of plot, there seems little more here than nice visual tricks with pasteboard characters.
One detects the kinship of this cinematic form with video games with which, of course, it shares a fascination of action and violence, and with pornographic anime, and Japanese manga, also heavily focused on rough sex. Will it add to the ruination our generation of movie-going 19-year-old guys? That depends on whether they will prefer to stay home with their video games and get interactive with the sex and violence. It also depends on whether you think all this virtual killing and rough sex is causes actual killing and rough sex, or just reflects it. I worry that they’ll give the City a bad name.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.20.2005)