The Automatik

Sin City is an extraordinary film. It’s undeniably exciting, and so thoroughly engrossing, that while watching it, the film’s world becomes the real world. After leaving the theater, I felt discombobulated by reality, and could scarcely focus on remembering where I’d parked.

This is not a film for children. For this, I am grateful. Quite frankly, I grow weary of sharing my long-standing interests in things with the tweens of the world who often don’t even get it. Of course, they probably think I’m too old to appreciate The O.C., but that’s for another essay.

Sin City is at times, hilarious, but also nauseatingly gory and surprisingly terrifying. It’s that I hope I can sleep tonight terrifying that is often promised in modern films, but which is rarely ever delivered. For those who would cry “misogyny,” it’s not that it’s not a valid critique, but consider the staggering number of visual and verbal emasculations throughout the film and, despite the film’s entrenched Noir stylings, the lack of femme fatales, or at least the ones who screw the good guys for no other reason than that they were born to be bad.

I haven’t read any reviews of the movie yet, but the word on the street is that it’s being touted as a technical masterpiece. Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit about the technical mastery that has been achieved through digital technology. In other movies, yes, but in this one it’s basically irrelevant to me.

In fact, I haven’t even read the Frank Miller series, but I’m actually quite glad I haven’t, because I was able to enjoy the film on a completely different set of levels, undistracted by comparisons to Miller’s original graphic novels. Besides those and the obvious Asian film influences, this film probably could not have been made without the existence of the following:

• The German Expressionist film movement, specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, and Nosferatu
• Gregg Toland
• Citizen Kane
• Dracula and Frankenstein (the books, not the movies)
• Hammer Films
• Dario Argento’s Suspiria
• Jim Thompson and James Ellroy
• Raymond Chandler
• Jim Thirlwell’s Foetus composition “Bedrock”
• Kiss Me Deadly (the film)
• Still Life, edited by Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Sam Peckinpah
• Abel Gance’s Napoleon
• Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa
• American Psycho (the book)

It would be irresponsible not to applaud the astounding film geekery of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, and obviously Frank Miller himself, because although skeptics may roll their eyes and scoff that people don’t make films crammed with metacritical layers and subtext on purpose, film geeks KNOW that just ain’t true. You can’t fight pop culture history. Believe me, I’ve tried.

So if you’re some young upstart who thinks the world began with the Internet, Ipods, or Interpol, you’d better be educating yourself from the list above. Yeah, I’m arrogant. So what? I’m also damned smart and I know what I’m talking about.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.