Sometimes you want to watch a film to laugh, other times to be exhilarated by an action packed thrill ride. Still other times you just want to wile away an hour and a half by being whisked away to a gorgeous, far off land you'll never be financially capable to visit in person. Once in a while, you want to watch a heart wrenching true story or emotionally volatile tearjerker to reacquaint yourself with your... what are they called again? You know, those things you never use, but are led to believe by consensus reality are fundamentally integral to our species? Oh yeah, feelings. Every now and again, the intellectually starved part of us requires a challenging art film to force us to be pompous and endeavor to figure out what some spacey auteur may or may not have meant by the hour and a half of drivel we've just subjected ourselves to. Then there's those instances of pure nostalgic indulgence that, not unlike comfort food and reassuring articles of clothing, can satisfy and placate when seemingly nothing else will do.
I can pick apart pretty much any film watching exercise and relegate it to the correct categorical gratification shelf. I intimately understand the motivating factor for film selection and can scientifically ascertain the motivations of the most discerning cineaste. That having been said, I want to discuss a category I drunkenly stumbled upon late last night during a revelatory, bluray screening of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City. Pure Cinema. I don't give a blue fuck how poncy and self serving that sounds. I am a man, who after much soul searching, mental pathway opening and personal experience, has come to the conclusion that film is the total sum of humankind's artistic expression that it is self aware and wants to leave a record of how beautiful and terrifying that realization is. All the art forms we have created since the dawn of time finding a perfect synthesis within the framework of a singular technological achievement. Architecture, music, writing, fashion, hair, makeup, photography and the most human of all art forms, acting. Film is what makes God's of mere mortals. We suddenly are able to alter perspective and shape reality. With film we can write our own history and invent any future we want, so forgive me if I attach mythic import to the medium.
Anyway, back to Sin City and the potency of pure cinema. For those of you not in the know (and there's no way I believe anyone reading this isn't), Sin City is an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel. The art is striking and the writing is your basic juvenile male wish fulfillment, but goddamn if it isn't outrageously entertaining pulp nonsense! The film adaptation however, is nothing short of sublime perfection. The stories need no subtext or social relevance, they need only serve as a framing device for the visuals, the sounds, the splashes of color, the larger than life performances. Bruce Willis is a one dimensional actor with roughly two faces in his arsenal, but his granite carved face underlined by that glowing, shock white tie flapping in the Basin City breeze makes the histrionic exhortations of say, Daniel Day Lewis seem like buffonish exertions. Sir Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus comes across about as nuanced as William Zabka in Just one of the Guys when stacked up against washed up 80's hearthrob Mickey Rourke in Sin City standout segment The Hard Goodbye. The point is, in the face of a penultimate pairing of source material and execution, pretentious, overstuffed Oscar bait looks like the hollow garbage it truly is.
Of course a film like Sin City will never win Best Picture, but what movie do you think will be fondly remembered and lovingly revisited in the following decades, Miller and Rodriguez's paean to uncompromising tough guys and hard luck dames, or Paul Haggis' flaccid, obvious doorstop of a moral talking to, Crash?
I could, off the top of my head and entirely unprompted, give you a million moments from that masterpiece that make anything hanging in the Louvre look like a homeless person's turd sculpture. Marv walking in the poring rain, Hartigan seated in his improbably dimensioned jail cell, the incomprable Powers Boothe as Senator Roark at the end of that hospital bed, Benicio DelToro as "Iron" Jack Rafferty saddled with that comical fake nose delivering his lines with more maniacal menace than Satan himself could muster. The shadow's, the light, the blood, the jarring splashes of color, the beautiful women, the reflections in black eyes.
It is a film that need not explain itself. It just is. You could have a thousand viewings under your belt, come across it on cable, and after scant seconds watching it, need to pull it off the shelf and start it all over from the beginning. It will always pull you in, it will ceaselessly thrill you, amaze you, devastate you. It is, as a man wiser than myself once put it, "gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh". It is Pure Cinema. The holy grail, why we worship film, why we exalt cinema. You don't question it and you don't dare resist it. You revel in it and attempt to get like minded individuals to revisit it and see what you see in it. What the hell do you think I've been doing for the last 6 paragraph's? Seriously, watch it on bluray. Peace.
I can pick apart pretty much any film watching exercise and relegate it to the correct categorical gratification shelf. I intimately understand the motivating factor for film selection and can scientifically ascertain the motivations of the most discerning cineaste. That having been said, I want to discuss a category I drunkenly stumbled upon late last night during a revelatory, bluray screening of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City. Pure Cinema. I don't give a blue fuck how poncy and self serving that sounds. I am a man, who after much soul searching, mental pathway opening and personal experience, has come to the conclusion that film is the total sum of humankind's artistic expression that it is self aware and wants to leave a record of how beautiful and terrifying that realization is. All the art forms we have created since the dawn of time finding a perfect synthesis within the framework of a singular technological achievement. Architecture, music, writing, fashion, hair, makeup, photography and the most human of all art forms, acting. Film is what makes God's of mere mortals. We suddenly are able to alter perspective and shape reality. With film we can write our own history and invent any future we want, so forgive me if I attach mythic import to the medium.
Anyway, back to Sin City and the potency of pure cinema. For those of you not in the know (and there's no way I believe anyone reading this isn't), Sin City is an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel. The art is striking and the writing is your basic juvenile male wish fulfillment, but goddamn if it isn't outrageously entertaining pulp nonsense! The film adaptation however, is nothing short of sublime perfection. The stories need no subtext or social relevance, they need only serve as a framing device for the visuals, the sounds, the splashes of color, the larger than life performances. Bruce Willis is a one dimensional actor with roughly two faces in his arsenal, but his granite carved face underlined by that glowing, shock white tie flapping in the Basin City breeze makes the histrionic exhortations of say, Daniel Day Lewis seem like buffonish exertions. Sir Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus comes across about as nuanced as William Zabka in Just one of the Guys when stacked up against washed up 80's hearthrob Mickey Rourke in Sin City standout segment The Hard Goodbye. The point is, in the face of a penultimate pairing of source material and execution, pretentious, overstuffed Oscar bait looks like the hollow garbage it truly is.
Of course a film like Sin City will never win Best Picture, but what movie do you think will be fondly remembered and lovingly revisited in the following decades, Miller and Rodriguez's paean to uncompromising tough guys and hard luck dames, or Paul Haggis' flaccid, obvious doorstop of a moral talking to, Crash?
I could, off the top of my head and entirely unprompted, give you a million moments from that masterpiece that make anything hanging in the Louvre look like a homeless person's turd sculpture. Marv walking in the poring rain, Hartigan seated in his improbably dimensioned jail cell, the incomprable Powers Boothe as Senator Roark at the end of that hospital bed, Benicio DelToro as "Iron" Jack Rafferty saddled with that comical fake nose delivering his lines with more maniacal menace than Satan himself could muster. The shadow's, the light, the blood, the jarring splashes of color, the beautiful women, the reflections in black eyes.
It is a film that need not explain itself. It just is. You could have a thousand viewings under your belt, come across it on cable, and after scant seconds watching it, need to pull it off the shelf and start it all over from the beginning. It will always pull you in, it will ceaselessly thrill you, amaze you, devastate you. It is, as a man wiser than myself once put it, "gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh". It is Pure Cinema. The holy grail, why we worship film, why we exalt cinema. You don't question it and you don't dare resist it. You revel in it and attempt to get like minded individuals to revisit it and see what you see in it. What the hell do you think I've been doing for the last 6 paragraph's? Seriously, watch it on bluray. Peace.
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