Hacker Cinema
Sin City
2005 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Welcome to Sin City. This town beckons to the tough, the corrupt, the brokenhearted. Some call it dark… Hard-boiled. Then there are those who call it home — Crooked cops, sexy dames, desperate vigilantes. Some are seeking revenge, others lust after redemption, and then there are those hoping for a little of both. A universe of unlikely and reluctant heroes still trying to do the right thing in a city that refuses to care.
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26 comments on Hacker News
Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.
2005 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2005_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States
2023 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2023_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States
Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.
> weren't as bad
that's one hell of an endorsement, and not a good one. pretty much sums it up. 300 and Sin City at least styled them to look like the comic they were based, but the Willy Wonka and Alice all just were a bunch of nope from me. these movies just look/feel uncanny valley, and we just expected to accept it.
compare Mad Max Fury Road. yes, there's some digital additions, but it feels real because so much of it was real.
>The MCU was the height of films because it managed to wrangle more than half-a-century of comic book lore (much of it previously deemed unfilmable) into a coherent and compelling multi-film epic that was both entertaining and (lightly) philosphical and political.
That's more of a parlor trick than art. "See how much simplistic comic book storytelling randomness I can fit in 30+ movies, and even live room for 70% of it be explosions and fight scenes".
>it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe
"Talented" is begging the question.
IMNSHO, not only is the writing, acting, and directing mediocre by-the-numbers blockbuster crap, but even what they supposedly do best (the special effects and fights and such) are shodilly made.
There are movies made from comics that are worth a damn cinematically (Logan, Sin City, Watchmen, Constantine) but 99% of MCU is not in that set.
Fun Sin City story...
https://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/301497-porsche-sypder-frank-millers-sin-city.html#post2785607
I'm the (formerly) young guy who rented the 550 to the production team for a few days. Pretty fun story to be tied to the movie.
The guy in the video is Stu, not only does he have an impressive resume (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ known for originality, e.g. he did Sin City's look), he is also the original author of MagicBullet, which is one of the most used software by people in the industry to do easy color work. If there's one person who knows about color work, LUTs in creative work, color encoding systems, etc., it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter without nonsense.
That's true.
But regarding nostalgia and colours I can tell you a personal anecdote:
I first saw Blade (1998, yes, that one with Snipes) on a pirated VHS copy on a not new Funai recorder on a 14" SHARP TV.
It was a dark, grainy film, blue on black, with occasional red and white splashes. Visually it was close to Sin City.
Years later I stuck on it on a public TV. It was so bright it's almost made sense for Snipes protagonist to wear sunglasses everywhere - it was bright as day even at night scenes.
I can't watch "a proper" Blade, but not because it's quite a shitty movie (it's fine for it's niche) but because I first saw a dark, noir-like action film.
And we watched Babe (1995) on that set too, but I needed to constantly correct the tracking because the video was out of sync all the time. Years later I found about Macrovision and years after that I put two and two together.
Depends. I can't tell you why you don't like monochrome :).
For me it's situational (and I would never call it "automatic improvement").
Both as consumer and occasional photographer, there are times when B&W feels right and great - it showcases shapes and contrast, and eliminates distraction of colour.
E.g. Recently I dressed my kids for a fun old-school photoshoot at abandoned old gas station I found, and my wife thought I was crazy because nothing matched but went along with me because she loves me :D. Then she saw them finished in 1920's B&W style and they were great - stripes and blocks were obvious, random colours weren't distracting.
I think Ansel Adams is still great. Some street/city photography is great in bw. And some portraiture is awesome in bw. And there are so many decisions and choices and and ways one can turn colour photo into bw! There are a dozen radically different mono shots in a single colour photo. Decisions of contrast and brightness and colour blend can make completely different results, so both the original subject matter and the choice/process have massive impact on result. Which at the end will always be subject to personal preference and impact.
At the same time, I can see a photo on Instagram and it's obvious it's a photo of somebody's breakfast that they pushed the filter button thinking it'll make it more interesting. There's a usage of bw that's clearly with thought of making it "more artsy! More artsy! Dial up the artsy!", always, regardless of nature of photo, possibly with little regard on how to make it bw. I probably have very very similar reaction to it as you do. But I still think some bw stuff is great - e.g. Sin City, when it comes to movies:).
I honestly could do with way simpler VFX if the end result at least had something like style or a vision to it. One result of this highly sophisticated and expensive pipeline seems to be that everything looks sort of generic. The superhero productions in particular, don't know how to describe it but visually they all basically look like the equivalent of what Material design is for apps.
i want something like Sin City or Hannibal (the tv show) again, I wouldn't really care if it's not the most technically sophisticated thing ever made.
I feel this article misses a lot of the historical context when RoboCop was created, it's themes and why it fit this time. I don't see how you can talk about RoboCop without mentioning the cultural climate at the time.
Rewinding to the 1980s.
Reagan was president for two terms, Giuliani was cleaning up the mob using RICO during these time periods. The War on Drugs was raging. Communism was still enemy #1 (See: Rocky IV). It was truly a very right-wing time. For whatever, themes around individuals taking power into their own hands to "Reform" corrupt systems (cities). Like Frank Miller's Sin City, these are absolutely right-wing themes. "Cleaning Corruption" is one of the most conservative motivations from a psychological standpoint.
Others here have mentioned the slate of 80's action movies but it felt like 100% of the culture was heading this direction. Frank Miller's Batman approaches at the time, for example, were strongly echoing similar themes: Vigilante justice in the backdrop of political deterioration. Rambo, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Scarface.
I think it all started with movies like Dirty Harry and Serpico and then just got more and more extreme leading into the 1980s.
You also cannot leave out Judge Dredd comics. There are similarities between Judge Dredd and RoboCop, I have a hard time believing there was no influence. Judge Dredd also had this magic gun that could do different tricks like shoot through walls etc, lived in a corrupt mega city of the future.
I feel in some ways RoboCop was almost like "Serpico + Dirty Harry if you turn everything up to 1,000." Serpico also had this theme of the good cop who is nearly killed and sent to the hospital due to corrupt system etc.
not sure if this is coming back anytime soon:
1. games are a much bigger market than movies, which makes hollywood even more risk averse than usual
2. superhero movies make most income, sucking up all the talent
3. huge emphasis on TV series in the last decade, again sucking up all the talent
for these three reasons i’m not sure if i’ll see another sin city/training day/etc in the near future
Good counterpoint. I mostly know films. And I was thinking in particular about "Sin City". And some Seagal film involving his toes and a hammer. Or maybe it was another action hero.
Movies for the large audience must always entertain, but you can entertain different ways. It's hard to describe what the 'Cinema' way is but it's easy to recognize when it's absent.
Here is a short list of things that make blockbuster movies not Cinema:
1. CGI and the visuals are technically pretty, but coming from the same standard tooling or pipeline. You can recognize that it's just more of the same. Examples of something creative: The Fifth Element (1997), Immortal (2004), Sin City (2005), Tron, ..
2. Action scenes are made from standardized sequences, postures and phrases. 5 minutes of action rarely matters for the plot and it's not fun to watch.
3. Dialogue and characters are extremely stereotypical. Power fantasy with some jokes and funny lines.
Some movies are just a part of a format. It requires talent to stick into format and not bore the target audience. Just provide what they want better. Changing director does not change the overall format. Directors are the to perfect the execution, not create something new.
Originality? Hah! Even remaking Frankenstein every 20 years or so brought a new take to it, whether Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Robert de Nero, they all brought something new.
More than any point I can remember before Hollywood now turn every movie and remake into the exact same movie. There was always some degree of fashion, but there's no contrast any more - it's all highlight, so it drags and drags by being boring and samey (but loud). Highlight is now just the dull background. The loudness wars, movie edition.
Doesn't matter what it is, a current film (or Netflix high budget, Game of Thrones etc) will have:
+ An absurdly overblown inspirational speech inspiring the troops (or children, or escapees, or office colleagues)! This will take 5-10 ear-bleeding, cringing minutes. If unlucky, you'll get two or three of these in one show!
+ An absurdly artificial, but highly 3D friendly chase scene with no production value other than hype. This will take 5-15 minutes. It stopped being interesting after Blues Brothers' piss take of chase scenes!
+ Ditto, ditto fight scene. Super slow motion. I always think of Adam West's TV Batman, complete with music - Zap! Pow! OWWW! Biff! 300 enemies die, town levelled, 342,000 rounds of ammunition spent, hero hasn't broken sweat. Just about the only recent exceptions I can think of are Deadpool and Sin City. Damn, the sequels were disappointing.
+ Ditto, ditto villain's death or capture.
I wait for them to land on Netflix, then go make tea, tidy the kitchen or watch some paint dry in all those "highlights". Independents with next to no budget can still do original though.
Wow, after all these years I finally learned the name of this phenomenon, constant bearing decreasing range.
I recall a scene in the movie Sin City where two cars crash and the camera was moving in CBDR to the perpendicular car as it zoomed into the impact site. I thought it was a cool shot.
Also I’ve almost hit pedestrians several times when they were obscured by my A pillar. Sometimes I wonder if I would have actually hit them if anyone would have believed I didn’t see them, now I know the proper term to describe the cause of such an accident.
I can say I would not want to live in a society that "accommodates" the needs of rapists, murderers, child molesters as well as the various petty criminals.
Sin City was a dark film, I never found it a model for cultural structure.
SES - Shoot, edit and share with friends!
A powerful and flexible photo editor is a 19 main tools!
- Improve photos with one touch with a tool "to improve" - Apply multiple photo filters - Select the appropriate photo frame - A huge set of a variety of stickers - Various overlapping effects - Cut the photo to achieve the best artistic effect - Adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and other image parameters - Adjust the sharpness of your photos! - Change the Focus - Apply artistic vignette effect - Change the angle and location of photos - Transform photos - Apply a stunning effect color stain! (As in the movie "Sin City") - Draw directly on your photos! - Add the desired text - Take a picture of a meme - Removes the defect with photos - Apply blur - Removes red-eye! - Use a tool lighten photos
+2 Amazing tool for you! - The effect of smoothing the skin - removes all the bumps and imperfections - The effect of polygons!
After the changes, you can easily share your photos!
Wow. That movie is so violent I wish I hadn't seen it. I won't watch Sin City 2. I can't imagine how I would have felt watching it at that age.
Indeed. I saw Sin City (an exceedingly violent movie) in a theater. A woman (presumably the mother) and two young boys (~8 and 11) were seated in the row in front of me. She didn't bat an eye at the violence, but yelped and shielded the boys' eyes when breasts appeared. I still don't really know what to make of that.
In India, we have mandatory breaks somewhere in the middle of all movies. Even for Hollywood Movies, it is just shut off, sometimes right in the middle of a fight or an intense scene. We pee, have snacks and make phone calls. :-)
My first reaction when I saw Sin City somewhere in Detroit was, "How long is this movie?" Then I realize why everyone had popcorns and everything before the movie starts.
I wrote a blog post about this back in 2005, when Hostel was coming out. It seems that's right about our fascination with torture on TV has started. While I cringe at my writing from 9 years ago, it seems like things have only gotten worse since then.
> With seemingly inevitable theatrical success of 'Hostel' and recent mainstream movies such as 'Passion of the Christ' and 'Sin City' reveling in accurately depicting violence and torture, I started thinking what does that say about our society and what horrors are next in line for the viewers, hungry for more blood and suffering. And then it dawned on me - almost this exact situation was already predicted, in a dystopian 1966 sci-fi story by Robert Silverberg called 'The Pain Peddlers'.
> 'The Pain Peddlers' depicts a scary, bleak and sarcastic view of the future - in the early 00's, television is king. And what brings most money to TV networks is live surgery. In the story, the main character is a TV producer who got a very promising prospect - an old man suffering from gangrene and a family, too broke to take care of the hospital bill. The old man needs to have his leg amputated, and the family agreed to do it on live TV. It's the producer's job to convince the family to have the amputation without anesthesia - for more money, of course. Nothing brings in the viewers quite like real human agony.
> Remembering this story, which I read long time ago, was a very scary experience for me, because... in 1966, when it was written, it was pure fantasy - the notion of something like that actually happening never occurred to Silverberg or his contemporaries. But does it sound that incredible now? With TV viewers getting tired of same-old reality shows and public's growing hunger for violence, how long until a new reality show depicting real surgery appears on, say, HBO? Probably not right away. But I can definitely see something like that happening, not too far away in the future.
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.
Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.
The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.
The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)
Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.
Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.
Of the top of my head I would recommend these:
* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.
* Requiem for Dream
* Evil (2003)
* Sin City
* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.
* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
Holy cow, the plot of Sin City (Politician's son builds a rape/torture chamber, and the son is protected from punishment because the politician wants him to produce an heir) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/) actually really happened in Milan?
Completely offtopic, and I don't mean anything negative about you when I say this, but I'm always interested in the response when people attribute a director to the success of a movie based on a book.
Did you know that the movie was based on Frank Abagnale's book (also entitled "Catch Me If You Can", or did you just prefer Spielberg's version?
Especially in this case, where the movie is so close to the book, it's questionable. Just like in Sin City, the adaptation is so true to its source material, if you liked one, you're pretty well assured of liking the other.
I'd like to see a movie like Sin City and House of the Flying Daggers :). Really neat idea, but tumblr might not be the best way to display the information.
>Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.
This is something that I'm disturbed by. Did they really have to kill off Charles Muntz in Up and Syndrome in The Incredibles? Those guys weren't that bad.
I would keep my kid away from as much violent anything as possible, and gradually introduce critically renowned and age-appropriate entertainment as they grow up. Kind of like how I was raised I guess.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an adult who enjoys good entertainment like Sin City and Blood Meridian. I had read a lot of Mark Twain and Dickens as a kid, and those were thoroughly entertaining too. I didn't feel deprived at all. Parents just kind of suck.
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?