Sin City and A Digital Cinema Realized

 

 

Much has been made of digital video and high definition, especially as a way to produce and shoot programming.  As a replacement for film, it has come up very short.  The Star Wars franchise began on film and has been going digital since the restorations of the original trilogy.  Animated CG features like Toy Story and Shrek are just alternately animated features.  Some live action work has been shot on digital HD, but nothing very memorable.  Then came Robert Rodriguez.

 

After shooting his Spy Kids franchise and third El Mariachi film Once Upon A Time In Mexico the same way, he saw an opportunity use the technology he previously had applied in a mostly effects-driven and standard way to bring Frank Miller’s graphic novel comic book Sin City to life.  The Hughes Brothers had already succeeded spectacularly with From Hell, though that was partly historical.  In an era when the Superhero genre has not hit its peak, but is having its greatest commercial and critical success yet, Rodriguez was taking on a classic and the result has finally forged an identity for digital cinema it never had before.

 

Free of being a film, feature-length animated program or visual effects garnish to a bad genre script, Sin City goes out of its way to be a synthesis of the black and white look of the original books with the clever touches of color throughout and bring it to life in a way that exceeded expectations.  Simply shooting it and making it monochrome with some color would have been stupid, but Rodriguez and Miller push digital into a new realm by having a tight screenplay, great cast, solid story laid-out in a complex order, take advantage of the freedom the R-rating offers, and put it all up on the screen with remarkable energy and pace.

 

The digital compositing is groundbreaking and three-dimensional (even without the fun of the glasses) in a way that celebrates the comic book’s artifice without going into the spectacular color schemes of traditional four-color comics.  The world is as real as an unreal comic world can get, which makes the violence and serious situations fascinating.  Is it blood when three colors are offered?  The exaggeration of how many punches, gunshot wounds, hit & run auto incidents and multi-story freefalls any given character can take is more preposterous than Sean Connery’s bleeding in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) could ever hope to be.  Rodriguez and company knows how ugly and brutal the world can be, so they use these exaggerations to wink at the audience and have fun with them.  That still may not make some viewers happy, but it will embarrass critics who go on one of their self-censorship moral crusades instead of actually reviewing the picture.

 

Francis Coppola imagined the kind of digital cinema Rodriguez has finally achieved here when he took his Zoetrope Studios and bet the house on the daring One From The Heart, which finally and briefly arrived in theaters 1982. That was a quarter-century ago, with a project that wanted to be “live theater” on film.  Not just feature films of plays, like Kino’s American Film Theater releases from the 1970s, but like the live TV of the 1950s John Frankenheimer and so many other great directors make classic.  The same look translated brilliantly onto film, most notably the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964) and the work of its cinematograph George T. Clemens, A.S.C., retained even in the four show taped experimentally in black and white when tape was new.  It also played a major role in the work of Frankenheimer and the great James Wong Howe’s work in their classic 1966 thriller Seconds.

 

That film is available in an exceptional DVD, while the original Twilight Zone is being reissued in digital HD-derived transfers from Image, but it is One From The Heart that you will have to go most out of your way to find.  It is not as readily seen on TV as the others and was assassinated upon arrival.  Read more about it here with our extensive review of the terrific 2-DVD set:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2082/One+From+The+Heart+(Coppola)

 

 

[From the early April 2005 home page letter.]