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By JOSH KORR
Published April 13, 2005
Does anyone get squeamish at the movies anymore?
When The Passion of the Christ takes in $300 million despite -- or because of -- a filleted Jesus, when nobody blinks an eye at the Old Faithful arm stumps in Kill Bill Vol. I, is everyone all shocked out?
Am I too politically correct or channeling William Bennett in asking these questions?
Or maybe I'm just embarrassed that I walked out of Sin City halfway through. It's not that the violence was too much; I looked away a few times during the Kill Bills, but thought Quentin Tarantino showed me original, if disgusting, reasons to look away. I left because the violence had no point -- with hard-boiled dialogue that was beyond self-parody and one funny line in an hour, the movie had little to offer besides a neat visual style and blood.
Sin City seems different than other ultraviolent films because the endless brutality is an end unto itself. As one goon after another got shot a dozen times, as crotches got axed, hands got eaten, limbs got sawed off and innards got chewed by wolves, I felt like I was watching porn. Porn exists so people can watch sex; Sin City seemed to exist just to show us extreme violence.
Tarantino's movies are different. In Kill Bill, the violence itself is a creative and conceptual experiment. In one scene, a bird's-eye view of a character lying dead amid a whorl of colorful breakfast cereals looks like an impressionist painting. During the scene when the Bride fights the Crazy 88 Fighters, freshets of blood turn the screen into a Japanese print. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino used violence as a shocking counterpoint to his humor ("Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face!") and dialogue riffs.
That Tarantino's violence is funny and aesthetically pleasing -- pretty, even -- is morally problematic. But that moral squeamishness is also what makes his movies interesting.
In Sin City, the interesting stuff isn't what co-director/writer Robert Rodriguez put in the film, but how he made it: the digital tricks, the garish, limited color palette that turn the movie into a living comic book far more imaginative and idiosyncratic than the too-fake world of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
But Rodriguez's experiments with the way he shoots and presents film (digital video, really), while interesting, are just that: technical experiments he could have applied to any romantic comedy or schlub-and-a-chimp buddy picture. His violence isn't inherently tied to his method of presentation, and unlike Tarantino's violence, it isn't conceptual. So why is it there, in all its relentless glee?
You don't have to be an arch conservative to be troubled by such a blase attitude toward gore. More than that, accepting such violence without a second thought merely confirms the suspicions of the Hollywood-is-ruining-America crowd.
By all means, show us impalings and disembowelments and crushed skulls and squished eyeballs. But don't show them to us just because.
-- Josh Korr jkorr@tampabay.com
[Last modified April 13, 2005, 12:46:03]
| by Jeremy | 05/02/05 01:16 PM |
| Josh Korr has done it again with a right-on-the-money review of a film. I think that he should receive an award... maybe Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. | |
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