THE DUKE'S ADVENTURES IN
SIN CITY
It must’ve been somewheres in the middle of reading Interpretation
Of Dreams that I realised what the fuck Freud was getting at, after
all this time. He knew the score, man. Not only did my crippling
fear of spiders mean I must be some kind of raging homosexaphonic
madman, but also, all these stresses and anxieties I got in the
skull, all these doubts and uncertainties, all they really mean,
when it boils down to it, is that I got a very specific need that
must be met.
To wit;
I fucking must see Bruce Willis rip a fella’s balls off.
Only then, only when Bruce has grabbed himself a fistful of bollock
and yanked said nutules from ‘tween the legs of some low-down
psychopathic bastard, only then can I begin to heal in some way.
I’m healing like a motherfucker off his tits on back-alley
penicillin, is the truth of the case, and all because of a motion
flick by the name of Robert Rodriguez’s Frank Miller’s Sin City.
Prior to viewing Sin City, I gotta say, I was in something of an
emotional and physical rut, my brain being buggered senseless by
the thrusting pelvis of insanity. Get your filth out my brain
holes, I hollered, but weren’t no motherfucker fit to hear.
Lend an ear, I’d be saying. Lend an ear, for the love of god.
No ears, man. Weren’t no painters in the here or hereafter felt
like sawing off a lobe on account of The Duke’s done got himself
all mentalised.
Next thing I know, I’m two seconds away from giddily announcing to
the world that yes, most certainly I’ve gone totally fucking
demented and I doubt, to be honest, that I’ll be fit to walk the
streets from here on in, when all a damn sudden I’m sat there in
front of a motion picture screen, and Robert Rodriguez’s Frank
Miller’s Sin City is set to not only blow the cobwebs out a fella’s
head-bumps, but also blow the fuck out the bastard spiders
responsible.
Look here, you arachnid fucks!
Here comes Mickey Rourke as Marv, he’s got a face like a vagrant’s
scrotum and he’s set to grab you sons a fuck by the spindly legs
and tear your guts out your eyes. Look here! Clive Owen, looking a
bit like Geordie scallywag Jimmy Nail, and he ain’t got a thought
in his head other than how best to stomp a spider-beast into
pulsing spider gunk.
And look, just look. Bruce Willis with a handful of stinkin yellow
testicles. He’s got his hands on a man’s filth, but he’s got
spiders in his sights.
Sin City turned out to be just what a fella needed. Beautiful,
violent, debauched mayhem, and all so gorgeous in high-contrast
black and white that is, really, BLACK and WHITE, as opposed to
your “grey”.
It’s actually more BLACK than WHITE, truth be told. Sometimes a
fella needs to strain to see what the hell’s the cause of all that
screaming.
BLACK and WHITE and then a burst of RED, bright fucking RED, but it
ain’t blood, since that’s either WHITE or YELLOW, it’s a dress
wrapped around a dame on a balcony, or it’s her lip-stick, piercing
through the night, piercing through this filthy stinking grime,
this ever so pretty filthy stinking grime.
Yes, I was thinking, I dare say by the time this has came to a
head, a disembodied head yacking away by a fella’s side, there
won't be a damn worry left in the world.
Now, just hold up a second. I gotta get this shit out my fingers
before I relate another word;
I never once read the Sin City graphic novels, not even for a
second. If you asked me something along the lines of “So just how
faithful is this flick to the comic, anyhow?” I’d have to say “It’s
the most faithful adaptation I’ve ever fucking seen”, but I’d only
be saying it because I read it in some other review someplace.
I read Preacher, and I’ve read the League Of Extraordinary
Gentlemen. I’ve seen plenty Spider-Men and Bat-Men and Super-Men
and Fairly Impressive-Men, but I ain’t laid eyes on a Frank
Miller's Sin City.
Maybe I’ll read it sometimes soon. Who could hazard a guess, given
how I can barely see straight from lack of sleep and my flesh
appears to have taken on a vaguely sky-blue tint?
Given as how a fella’s eyes are sunk so far back in his skull
they're peering out from the wall forty feet back. Given all this
medical evidence and the like.
In fact, sitting down for to pen this incisive critique, I think I
can safely assume the following; If ever a man were to encounter a
fitting time for to wax critical with regards Sin City, probably it
would bear no relation to the time in the here and now when
The Duke finds himself falling asleep mid-sentence, waking up a
second later to a plethora of hilarious spelling mistakes all
underlined with the tell-tale Red Squiggle Of Death in Microsoft
Word.
It’s all a melancholic waking dream is what it is. Some folks dream
about filth with partners the size of a council estate and with sex-
organs and orifices of every colour imaginable. Some folks dream of
dashing adventures and zombie creatures and wolf-children raised by
pirates.
I dream of trying to write a review of these things.
But there’s a sense of urgency right here, a fear of some impending
disaster of some sort, like maybe a meteor crashing through the
roof of Mondo Towers and driving me thirty miles below sea-level,
splattered across the underside of a gargantuan space rock, and all
the while thinking, in brain sauce seeping through the Earth’s
crust, that fucking hell, I never even got to talk about how it’s
all so similar to Once Upon A Time In America.
Because it is, see, it is all just so fucking similar to Once Upon
A Time In America.
I the hell E;
Once Upon A Time In America is nothing if not a male wank fantasy
cloaked in genre trappings and given a loada good actors and
beautiful music and stunning cinematography for to keep the wolves
at bay.
But one time, you’ll be aware, The Wolves got in, and they looked
around a bit, and what they found was that, no, Once Upon A Time In
America isn’t some beautiful ode to corruption and friendship and
times long sepia-toned, but is actually a horrific delve into the
head of a fourteen year old with an erection from here till next
Tuesday.
I’ve never been a fourteen-year-old, but I sat beside one on a bus
one day, and still find myself screaming for no apparent reason,
only to remember that wait, I never actually stopped screaming
since that fucker sat his arse down.
Anyhow, you’ll be aware that Once Upon A Time In America spent its
time wrapping a belt around the upper arm of a classic genre, The
Gangster Flick, and injecting syringe-fulls of frenzied male
delusion.
Men are the folks who wander around with the big coats and the cool
guns and the cigarettes. Women are the folks who got their faces in
the pillow. It still baffles me why Once Upon A Time In America is
seen as anything other than wretched puke, considering not only is
Leone responsible for For A Few Dollars More, and so a
motherfucking genius who should know better, but also, it has maybe
the most offensive depiction of women to be found in any of the
“great” American classics.
It has a horrible, disgusting rape scene followed by a scene
wherein the victim jokingly picks out the assailant from a line up
of exposed penises. She laughs about it all. Ha ha, she thinks, I
got done in a violent and probably bloody manner by these fucking
cretinous bastards, but so what? I’m a dame, that’s what happens.
No big deal.
That scene with the penis line-up, it’s like if you’re talking to
this really attractive potential partner all night, and they’re
making you laugh, and even better, you’re making them laugh, and
then, just as they lean over for to bless you with the kinda kiss
illegal in three-quarters of the civilised world, suddenly they
cough up half a goats head onto your lap.
“Oh, I’m sorry about that, let’s just kiss anyway.”
“No! I can’t forget about this goats head right here. I can’t just
ignore it and remember how beautiful you were up till now. This
needs to be addressed, this goat’s head issue, and I’m sorry, but
it’s affected my drive somewhat.”
And worse, Leone, how many words did I just fling to the wind right
now, and all on account of your cinematic spunk? Roughly too
fucking many, that’s how many.
What it all means is that Robert Rodriguez’s Frank Miller’s Sin
City is very, very similar in many ways to Once Upon A Time In
America, except without the truly deplorable misogyny.
Sin City is also a male fantasy torn fresh out the id and flung
into a classic genre (in this case Film Noir). It has men who are
like what men used to be like in the films watched by men who
weren't much different to nowadays, most likely. It has women, but
whilst they inspire 90% of the action, fuck knows who they really
are, since they don’t get more than is absolutely necessary with
regards The Screentime.
The men all yack plenty about them, but who can trust these
maniacal bastards? Look at him, ten minutes ago he was cutting off
Frodo’s arms, now he wants us to believe him when he says “She was
an angel.” I’d sooner heed the character witness of a man dead
since 1897 than listen to you.
What Sin City is all about, is all about men. It’s a flick about
men and what they want to be in the same way Fight Club is a flick
about men and what they want to be. It’s arguable that Marla Singer
is responsible for every punch thrown in the flick about Brad Pitt
gets all bloody, but how often do you see her? Nowhere near enough,
is how much, and when you do, you probably pause it for five, six
minutes.
The women in Sin City are nothing but the women the men in Sin City
would like to assume all women to be. Virgins or Whores, just like
in the film noir classics Miller chewed on in the first place for
visual inspiration.
I was talking about this to a male escort just happened to be
waiting around on the street outside the screening den. Who the
fuck knows what he was doing there, under that streetlight,
masturbating over a golf club, but when he was finished, I knew the
only thing to do was to discuss film noir and Sin City with this
adorable character.
“The reviews been saying it owes a lot to film noir”, he said, and
then he did some shit with a handkerchief that I ain’t ever gonna
forget.
I couldn’t help but agree with these “reviews” this fella referred
to, it does owe a lot to film noir, but not as much as maybe you
might’ve thought back in the day, back when you were fresh out the
cinema and had yet to be dodging rent-boy gunk clinging to the kerb.
There’s a lot of corruption in Sin City, but the protagonists’
motivation ain’t corrupt. In Sin City, the only reason anyone would
be going out to look for a Maltese Falcon is if it was the only
thing could help a beautiful woman sleep at night. Sure, the fella
doin’ the searching may have some selfish motives, i.e., if the
lady wasn’t so pretty, if maybe she had three nostrils and teeth
like a shattered brick, probably he’d be less likely to go looking
for this fucking bird thing, but nonetheless, he’s doing it out of
love, is what.
He’s not doing it on account of she tricked him into it, but fuck
it, she doesn’t know that he’s been tricking her all this time, and
neither of them know the fucking Falcon has been tricking every one
of them since before they even started, by not really existing at
all.
They may be low-down sons a bitches up to the nuts in guts, but for
the duration of their stories herein, they’re honourable. Sin City
doesn’t share the cynicism of noir for a second. The world is
fucked, says Sin City, but there are still genuinely good people
who fuck up time to time, but they try.
In noir, the world may be fucked, but probably it’s just these
wretched bastards that been messing it up for everyone else.
But visually, y’see, it’s all about the light and the shade, with
emphasis on the shade.
It gets pretty dark at times out there in Sin City. Not least when
we’re in the company of Yellow Bastard, a hideously deformed
paedophile of superhuman size and strength.
I gotta tell you, folks, for about seven or six minutes in the
middle of Sin City, I started thinking along the lines of – How
many more paedophiles can cinema offer us? Every way a fella turns
he’s bumping into The Woodsman or Capturing The Friedmans. Bad
Education, too, has paedophilic subject matter. There’s that new
Todd Slondz number, and his Happiness from a while back had plenty
paedophile sequences. The new Gregg Araki flick seems to have some
sort of paedophilic undercurrent. Every which way a man looks
nowadays, there’s folks trying to force themselves on some child of
some sort.
If Sin City has any kind of connection to any of those flicks, it
would appear to be Happiness. In Slondz’s film, the paedophile was
just one more calculated shock in a film stuffed to the balls with
empty, cynical attention-grabbing bullshit.
Similarly, whilst Sin City is a far superior film, the paedophile
is just another low-down filthy motherfucker in a film filled with
the cunts.
Another threat on feminine innocence that must be stomped into the
dusty road.
Neither Rodriguez nor Miller want to bother too much about the whys
or the wherefores. As long as we know how depraved these bastards
are, that’s all that matters.
When it all came to a close, I think what happened was I put my
head back and closed my eyes for a time. I could feel the spiders
disintegrating back there, and can only hope that when I got up and
left, the camera didn’t linger on the empty seat, only to reveal
some sort of spider nest and a buncha tell-tale signs that holy
fuck, they crawled right back into his head, the sneaky bastards.
Certainly it would be an especially distressing turn of events,
like last night when I was looking for the DVD of The Blue Planet,
and found Andrew Lloyd Webber sitting behind the box set of
Sopranos Season Two.
I got that fucker out there in the blink of a Gungan whisper, is
the truth of the case.
And none of that is anywhere near as surreal as the moment in Sin
City when Marv is sitting in the confession box and the priest says
“Rourke?”
I think I fairly shat myself right there, but then no, wasn’t what
you thought. But still, the question lingered for a time; “Had that
priest seen Rumblefish? Did he recognise Mickey?”
Hopefully the sequel will clear this all up so as I can forget the
fuck all about it.
Thanks Kirsten, you’re my Dame To Kill For, except I wouldn’t,
cause you wouldn’t want that sort of thing going on in Your Name.
Thanks folks.
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