Sean Maher
03-17-2005, 06:44 PM
http://zealotslore.blogspot.com
Frank Miller’s vision of Sin City had its origins in Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett, sure, but he took only the barest elements from those inspirations and ran in a totally new direction. Sin City this comic was (and in the films it remains) an experiment in bleeding stories down to their barest elements, their most necessary ingredients, and then using style and flair to rebuild the content. The result was at once pulpier and grittier than anything I’d ever seen and yet seemed obvious when it was done; why hadn’t I read that before? Why hadn’t I seen that before? It was too familiar not to have been calling back to some memory of a movie I’d seen as a kid. Then it hit me: this was a memory. This was how I remembered movies I’d seen as a kid. But where children use inexperience, the things they don’t know and haven’t seen, as the fuel of their imagination, adults do the opposite; they make comparisons to what they’ve already seen and heard and experienced to shape the things they imagine. Frank Miller recreated that immeasurable make-believe of my childhood, and served it to me as an adult. Robert Rodriguez seems to understand that. There was never a comic or a novel or a magazine like Sin City, and there’s never been a movie like it either.
Frank Miller’s vision of Sin City had its origins in Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett, sure, but he took only the barest elements from those inspirations and ran in a totally new direction. Sin City this comic was (and in the films it remains) an experiment in bleeding stories down to their barest elements, their most necessary ingredients, and then using style and flair to rebuild the content. The result was at once pulpier and grittier than anything I’d ever seen and yet seemed obvious when it was done; why hadn’t I read that before? Why hadn’t I seen that before? It was too familiar not to have been calling back to some memory of a movie I’d seen as a kid. Then it hit me: this was a memory. This was how I remembered movies I’d seen as a kid. But where children use inexperience, the things they don’t know and haven’t seen, as the fuel of their imagination, adults do the opposite; they make comparisons to what they’ve already seen and heard and experienced to shape the things they imagine. Frank Miller recreated that immeasurable make-believe of my childhood, and served it to me as an adult. Robert Rodriguez seems to understand that. There was never a comic or a novel or a magazine like Sin City, and there’s never been a movie like it either.