I think I've seen a total of two movies in the theater this year, both of which I watched during the past few weeks. So here are brief reviews of them!
Sin City: I really wanted to like this one. Before I saw the movie, I checked out and read four of the original Frank Miller graphic novels (only one of which was used in the film, but that was all we had at the bookstore). I read up on the genre of film noir and rewatched D.O.A. and watched The World Gone Mad and The Amazing Mr. X (which has been described as film noir by some, though it lacks the familiar pre-1960s criminal underground connection). I can't remember whether I watched Mulholland Falls (another noish film) before or after I saw Sin City -- I'm thinking after -- but the point is that I was preparing myself for this film. I'd heard so many good things about it, read so many rave reviews from film critics whose opinions I respect, seen the trailers and comic comparisons -- it looked bloody amazing -- I was expecting to flat out love this movie.
I didn't. I didn't hate it, but I definitely didn't love it. It was just okay. Sure, it looked great, but having read the graphic novels I thought that something felt off. I think it has to do with how one reads -- while it might have felt like an extremely faithful translation of the comic to someone who flipped through the pages rapidly, reading the words without savoring them or thinking them over, but the pacing of the film felt rushed to me. As a result, Sin City had the noir look down but missed the mood -- the relaxed, slow pace that such films seem to have until the action picks up. Because the whole film moved at breakneck pace, the contrast that ideally makes the action all the more engaging was all but nonexistent. And there were other things about the movie that bothered me -- typical of book-t0-film adaptations -- things that were cut that could've been left in, decisions regarding what to show and what not to show. I thought that Marv's visit to his mother, for example, might've given the character an added element of depth that wasn't shown in the movie, and I wonder why they didn't showcase Dwight's first adventure instead. Manute's speech about serving a new master, the comment about Dwight's new face -- all meaningless, since the audience wasn't made aware of the incident involving Manute's old master or the events that necessitated Dwight's change of face. So I didn't much care for the film, but it did look pretty.
Kung Fu Hustle: Honestly, I kept falling asleep during this movie. Sure, I've been pretty tired this week, but I think it owed more to the fact that this movie was just fucking boring, or at least it wasn't engaging in that it gave me no reason whatsoever to care about the outcome of the outrageous battles that comprised the bulk of the film. Fight, fight, fight, fight, brief bit of insignificant backstory, fight, fight, fight. It got old pretty quickly, especially given that the action was of a cartoonish CGI nature -- it didn't even have the grace or poetry of the wire-fu battles of, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which, admittedly, I also found to be pretty dull). Kung Fu Hustle did have one saving grace, however -- the beautiful Shengyi Huang. That woman is bloody gorgeous.
So those are the reviews of the 2005 films I have seen thus far. Ja!