Sin City

Credit goes first to Robert Rodriguez, a tirelessly innovative director who thrives on doing things that the rules say he can't. When the Directors' Guild said he couldn't co-direct Sin City with Miller, he quit the guild, then rubbed salt in the wound by bringing in his pal Quentin Tarantino to direct one scene in a car featuring a talking corpse with a gun wedged in his forehead. Better yet, the creator of the child-friendly Spy Kids trilogy has now made an R-rated movie that no sane person should let a child near.

Sin City, shot by Rodriguez in black-and-white with the occasional splash of color from, say, a whore's lip gloss or a yellow-skinned rapist, mixes hard-boiled pulp fiction, 1940s film noir and the dazzling monochrome of Miller's graphic design to explore the dark night of the soul.

It moves quickly to the first and most exciting story, "The Hard Goodbye." Mickey Rourke gives a sensational comeback performance as Marv, an ex-con with a Frankenstein jaw line who wakes up next to a dead hooker (Jaime King) and vows revenge. All three of the overlapping stories involve voice-overs, but Rourke puts real heat into his as Marv searches for "a soul to send screaming into hell."

Bruce Willis nails the role of Hartigan, a cop with a bad ticker who saves an eleven-year-old girl from a pedophile rapist (Nick Stahl) by doing jail time for the creep (the son of a powerful senator). When Hartigan gets out, the girl has grown into a hottie (Jessica Alba) who's hot for him. One catch: The rapist has turned into a foul-smelling, canary-yellow demon, which makes Hartigan ball-ripping mad — literally. "I take his weapons from him — both of them," says Hartigan as testicles are flung at the screen and we wonder if the film escaped an NC-17 rating because the bastard's blood looks like cartoon custard.

I would show more images, but, you must really see this film and guess who is who in character.

A bold, uncompromised vision.

Both the DVD and the book about the making of the film are must-haves for the collector. And of course, the reprints of Frank millers novels would make this collectors triology complete.

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