Well it’s Thursday night, the lottery came and went and I’m still not a millionaire. My fantasy of swimming in a 400 gallon tank of my own home brew while the Olsen twins of homicide (Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony) sun bathe on my porch, will just have to be put on hold until next week. So I’m in dark place right now and I need to watch and review a CBM (drunk of course) that makes me feel better about my life. What better movie to do this with than SIN CITY.
This a noir movie in the same vein as CHINATOWN or L.A. CONFINDENTIAL. The difference is that this movie decided to drink about a 100 gallons of LSD and then go out to the desert and eat peyote with Jim Morrison. The highly stylized black and white cinematography lends itself to the surreal setting in which this movie is set….Basin City. Every environment in the movie is grimy, dirty, and has a dead end hopeless feel to it. Characters and objects in the movie at times defy the known laws of physics and biology and yet the whole movie itself is really a testament to the second law of thermodynamics…. entropy. An over simplified definition of entropy is that everything in the universe tends toward a state of disorder unless an external force governs it. That is exactly what we have in this movie. Three separate stories of three men trying to reign in the madness that surrounds them.
We start off with detective Hartigan trying desperately to save little Nancy before a sick Senator’s son, who kills with diplomatic immunity, slashes Nancy to ribbons for pleasure. He succeeds but at a cost and in the process wins the eternal affection of Nancy. We then segway into the story of Marv, played by Mickey Rourke…you know this movie could’ve saved itself a few buck by just leaving Mickey’s face alone…it would’ve worked Rodriguez! Marv is supposed to be some jug-head, act first ask questions in another life bad boy who’s really got a heart of gold that’s just over flowing with gratitude towards a hooker because she gave him the on-the-house witching hour special… well, it works for this movie. Anyway the hooker gets killed and Marv sets out for revenge accompanied by his incessant soliloquies. He gets into a heads up match with Charlie brown’s evil mutant twin brother (played by Elijah Wood) and eventually works his way up the food chain until he comes face to face with a man of the cloth who apparently has the power to influence national elections and literally eats people at will. Naturally Marv gives him the long hard goodbye.
We then transition into a story that makes even less sense….THE BIG FAT KILL. Shellie finds a new boyfriend named Dwight (Clive Owen) and he never seems to be well adjusted mentally. But this is apparently better than what Shellie was dealing with before….her ex-boyfriend Jackie Boy ( Benice Del-Toro). The story starts out with Jackieboy banging hard and breath’n hot’n heavy at Shellie’s door. Shellie doesn’t want him in there for fear of an abusive episode but Dwight tells her that she should let him and all his drunken friends in because he’s going to show her what someone who’s truly mentally unstable as opposed to those posers who fake it with alcohol, can do. Faces inevitably get shoved into toilets containing bodily waste, JackieBoy leaves Shellie’s apartment out of fear, Dwight decides that Jackie is a menace to society and must be killed and the proceeds to jump off a twenty story building. Dwight chases JackiBoy into Old City, an area that is exclusively controlled by gun wielding, supermodel prostitutes….nice!. Jackie gets killed by a samurai prostitute, we find that he’s actually a cop, and all of the sudden everybody is crying and moaning about pimps and mobs coming back to Old City because the truce between cops and hookers has been violated. Dwight says he can take care of things before they get out of hand and proceeds to drive the bodies out to the tar pits. He hallucinates on the way, but he seems to be used to it and handles it with grace. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any wackier, a bunch of IRA Mercenaries, who obviously belong at the shameful end of a U2 song, show up and ruin the best laid plans of poor Dwight. Samurai hooker Miho shows up, saves Dwight, and the two of them run off to save Gail (Queen of the prostitutes) from the clutches of an evil mob boss. An exchange is planned – Gail for the head of JackieBoy. At the meeting that takes place in a narrow alley way (300 anybody?) Jackie’s disembodied head makes a few comments, Dwight ignores this and goes ahead with the exchange. Gail is returned to him but little does anybody know that JackieBoy’s head has been stuffed with explosives. Dwight subsequently detonates the bomb, a bunch of fish net stocking hookers with machine guns mow down the rest of the mob gang, and all is right in the world.
We now come back to the anchor of the movie….detective Hartigan. We pick up right where we left off with him. We find out that he’s not dead and that his inner monologue is working just fine. The father of the man that tried to murder Nancy (Senator Roark) stands over Hartigan hospital bed and threatens to kill his family if he tell anybody the truth. Hartigan takes the fall, ends up in jail, but almost never stops receiving letters from Nancy. Nancy’s letters end of course when one day a yellow stinky mutant shows up and sucker punches Hartigan in his cell. Hartigan gets out of jail determined to find Nancy because he believes the Senator and his ilk are still pursuing her. Hartigan finds he at a bar called Kadies bar….oh by the way this is the only place In the movie where everything is in color….he finds out that she’s now an exotic 19 year old dancer and that she wants to bear his children, but misguided moral convictions about age difference initially prevent him from indulging,So he stone walls for about 30 seconds before caving. We find out that Hartigan has led the yellow mutant…who turns out o be Senator Roark’s son…. right to Nancy and that she is subsequently kidnapped. Hartigan must now put everything on the line to save Nancy. He succeeds, she’s safe, but he decides the only way to keep her permanently safe is to kill himself.
So does this movie work drunk…you bet it does! It’s a perfect movie to lubricate the walls of the cavern while you descend into the abyss of functional alcoholism. 5 out of 6 empty bottles!!!