Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Sin City & Only Human

Yesterday I attended two screenings back to back. I don’t do this very often these days. Since I don’t get paid much for my reviews and I have so much other well-paid stuff to do I’ve set myself a rule of attending only one screening a week. But these were scheduled right next to each other so I thought ‘what the hell’.

The first film was ‘Sin City’ the second was ‘Only Human’ [read my review of ‘Only Human’ here].

For those who don’t know, Sin City is a comic book series by Frank Miller, the man who created Elektra and brought us The Dark Knight Returns, one of the very great comic creators. His Sin City series has been running a good few years now. They’re hard boiled slabs of noir violence, all hard bitten heroes and gun toting dames, crooked cops, corrupt senators and shootouts by moonlight. They’re always narrated by the protagonist in a Chandler style, and he draws them in stark black and white with only single colour splashes, such as a yellow faced character, or a red dress, to liven up the page. It’s a distinctive and brilliant look.

Robert Rodriguez, the man who brought us ‘Spy Kids’, has now teamed up with Miller to transfer the world of ‘Sin City’ to the screen. And they’ve done it in such a way that every frame of the film looks like a frame of the comic book. In terms of cinema it’s a fantastic achievement. Every frame is beautifully rendered, all shades of gray and splashes of colour, white against black sketch frames and kinetic motion set against impossible angles and backdrops. They even contrive to make the rain look like a comic book page.

It’s hard to tell if it’s supposed to be as funny as it is. The hard boiled noir reads well on a comic page but when transferred to a cinema and voiced by real actors, it’s stilted and funny. Deliberate self-mocking pastiche or awkward pompousness? At times it’s hard to tell, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Mickey Rourke is fabulous – when was the last time anyone typed those words? – as a washed up boxer on a vengeance kick; Clive Owen is broody and fun as a murderer trying to prevent a war, and Bruce Willis is, well, Bruce Willis. Michael Madsen gets the award for most awkward delivery of a line in movie history with a piece of acting at the start that’s so bad it’s surely a joke. The babes are beautiful – Carla Gugino, wow – and Nick Stahl and Elijah Wood make unexpectedly good villains.

But.

It’s all so goddamn violent. Not ‘Die Hard’ violent, but ‘Kill Bill’, ‘Pulp Fiction’ violent. There’s cannibalism, dissections, mutilations, electrocution, shootings, stabbings, three separate castrations, severed heads, severed hands, severed everything else, there’s axes and bombs and guns and knives and razor wire and razor blades. There’s blood and blood and blood.

Admittedly because this is all hyper-stylised, mostly black and white, and often shot in such a way that it’s so far from reality that it’s arguable that it’s hardly even recognisable violence at all, but this is a blood-soaked tale from start to finish. And it made me uncomfortable.

I admit I found the film funny and gripping. I laughed, I cheered, I groaned at the gross bits. I marvelled at the visuals. But at the end of the day I spent two hours watching people pretend to kill each other in horrible ways for my entertainment, and I just don’t feel comfortable with that.

Compare and contrast this with the film I watched next.
‘Only Human’ is a Spanish farce about a Jewish/Spanish girl bringing her Palestinian fiancée home to meet her wildly eccentric family. Following an accident with a tub of frozen soup the fiancée believes that he has accidentally killed a man, and then comes to the horrified conclusion that he’s accidentally offed his future father-in-law. In this much it’s a black comedy, but it’s not too black really, and no-one gets properly hurt.

Where ‘Sin City’ was merciless and grim, ‘Only Human’ was warm and funny. In Sin City killing someone is often the best way to finish a sentence, in ‘Only Human’ it’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. A gun gets fired once in ‘Only Human’ and that’s an accident and it only succeeds in bringing down a little bit of plaster from the ceiling. In ‘Sin City’ they expend enough ordinance to retake Nablus.

In terms of artistic achievement in visual creativity and unique vision, ‘Sin City’ was one of the most stunning achievements in years, compared to which ‘Only Human’s largely single-set bound sitcom writ large was in the cinematic stone age, but I’m sorry, I’ll take unimaginatively rendered humanity against brilliantly envisioned brutality any day of the week.

‘Only Human’ was a warm, life-affirming movie about how easy it can be to get along with each other if we only try. ‘Sin City’ was a fabulously creative and artistic statement about how much fun it is to kill people.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb here, and really stretch my point to breaking.

It seems to me that these two movies tell us a lot about the two worlds we in the UK are poised between at the moment. America exports violence into cinemas in the affluent world, and exports violence into the streets of the poorer parts of the globe. It’s what they do. They send bombs and guns to terrorise people in some places and those places they don’t need to terrorize, well, they just export the blood and guts on celluloid instead. It’s the ONLY THING the institutional US has to offer the world – death, violence, carnage and a sneering, cynical quip from a blood soaked bastard when the slaughter’s done. When they’re not doing it for real they’re filming it and selling it to us for entertainment.

[The key word in the above para is institutional – I’m aware that Indie films come out of the US that are wonderful, life affirming and fab.]

Europe offers a different view of the world. Where America offers us fundamentalism, Europe offers us tolerance. Where Europe offers us families and warmth and humour and love, America offers us smart bombs and stealth bombers and economic exploitation. America offers us long working hours, few holidays, consumerism as the be-all and end-all of every single working day, whereas Europe promises siestas and belly dancing, wine and food and music and laughter.

So when you ask me why I’m a Europhile, when you demand to know why I want us to adopt the Euro and tell George Bush and all his cronies to get stuffed, I’ll just refer you to these two films and tell you watch them side by side and then you can tell me which world YOU want to live in.

I know where my heart lies, and it isn’t in the blood soaked gutters of a morally bankrupt imperialist charnel house, it’s in the rain drenched alleys of Madrid at three in the morning on a Saturday night, when the music flows from every bar and the dancing and the wine remind us that the meaning of life is far more complicated and subtle than anyone who’s ever fired a gun could ever begin to comprehend.

And that’s why, in the final analysis, ‘Sin City’, despite all its technical and creative genius, is a sterile and blasted work of no real value whatsoever when compared to ‘Only Human’, with its simple virtues of character and script and a bunch of people in a room trying their hardest to learn how to get along with one another.

[postscript: looking back on this post a few days later I stand by it but feel maybe it needs a bit of clarification.

Obviously Europe produces some very violent films; the US, some fluffy ones. I think it was just that the contrast between these two films was so stark – ‘Sin City’ was so completely, quintessentially American, ‘Only Human’ so entirely, unmistakeably European, both exist at the very far ends of the spectrum, far beyond the grey shades.

My conclusions, therefore, are predicated upon extremes, although I think they still have validity.

Also, do I really believe that violent movies lead to violent society? Not really. But they can reflect the state of the society that produces them. And a society the quintessential cinematic expression of which is ‘Sin City’ deserves closer examination and rings a few subtle alarm bells in my head.]

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