Jonathan's got a question regarding Sin City:
{...}What I want to know is, has anyone else out there actually read the comic books?Whatever else the Sin City comics may be, they are utterly unfilmable. They are page after page of murder, mutilation, torture, rape, beheading, cannibalism, and worse. L.A. Confidential is noir. Touch of Evil is noir. Sin City is Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho without the daintiness and restraint. Think Hannibal meets Faces of Death.{...}
Well, I've never read them. Nor had I ever heard of them. When I commented on the movie earlier, I was working strictly off seeing the trailer during one of my trips to Apple.com.
The thing that struck me was that it looks like an actual comic book. And for a movie in this day and age, well, that's impressive. While Ang Lee adapted the typical comic book layout for his own purposes in The Hulk (which, honestly, really isn't that bad of a movie) and M. Night Shymalan did the same with Unbreakable, neither really made you the feel as if the glossy, chiaroscuro-ed, cross-hatched pages were right beneath your fingers. This movie looks like it could do it.
Provided the plot doesn't suck. If the plot strays too far from the original source material, well, it's done for. The subject matter must match the visual style of the film. I'm certainly not expecting a film titled Sin City, and that looks as dark as it does, to be about Girl Scouts selling do-si-dos in the hood. In other words, what does the audience expect and what will Hollywood deliver---and shall the twain meet somewhere in the middle? I believe it can be done, but only if the people making the film have some faith in their audience.
It's funny that Jonathan should mention Hannibal because, ultimately, that's the best example to prove my point about not straying too far from the source material. When Hannibal---the book---was released, no one thought they could ever make it into a film. It was unfilmable, they said. It was too gory. Too sick. I didn't think Hollywood could manage it and stay true to the material. But Ridley Scott did---mostly. While Ridley did manage to tone down the gore a bit (well, we are talking about Ridley here) still, there was Ray Liotta, at the end of the movie, watching Hannibal cook his own brains. Doesn't get much ickier than that, does it? None of the problems people anticipated the production would have in adapting the book were apparent in the film. Ridley managed it.
The real problem resided with the ending.
It was completely different from the book, and it had been bastardized by Hollywood. And that pissed me off, not the gore. The gore I expected. The ending, however, was not what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the ending as Thomas Harris' had written it, and not the ending that we received which kept Clarice's morals intact. They apparently never thought it was an option to have Clarice go off the deep-end, because the "alternate endings" on the DVD revolved around whether Clarice and Hannibal locked lips---and nothing else. In the book, however, Hannibal does corrupt Clarice. But he doesn't play fair, either, because she's drugged when he corrupts her. That ending and subsequent beginning of the next Hannibal movie would have been much, much better, because it would have taken us someplace we haven't been before. As it stands now, any new Hannibal movie they come up with (which I've heard from the lips of Sir Anthony himself will happen), will be about trying to recapture him...again. Which shouldn't be too damn hard because he's missing a hand.
I'd gone to see Hannibal, mainly, because I wanted to see if they chickened out with the ending. And they did chicken out. No surprises there. Hollywood's need to drop everything to the lowest common denominator is what ruins films, not the depravity of the source material. If the source material was so unfilmable, why on earth did they bother buying Miller's options? What's the point? If you're going to go ga-ga over the original source material and then try to tame it, you're not going to have a satisfying end-product, are you? The problem should be solved by the studios and producers optioning material that works within their parameters, instead of trying to shoehorn a great book or graphic novel, as it were, into those parameters after the fact.
Ultimately, audiences can make the decision about whether they can handle the material. Why Hollywood has so little faith in their audiences still seems to elude me.
Perhaps Scooby Doo 2 has an answer somewhere in it.
UPDATE: Jonathan's sticking to his guns. Via email:
{...}I just picked them up a couple weeks ago and made my way through them. You and I should be forgiven for this oversight, but my point was that the higher beings at EW shouldn't.Also, Sin City makes Hannibal look like Snow White. I'm telling you, as
written: Unfilmable. (Or rather, filmable, but unwatchable.)
I trust Jonathan about the Sin City books, but I'm going to stick to my guns and hope they made the appropriate compromises when converting the source material. I don't want to pay yet another eight dollars and fifty cents to see a movie that might turn out to be least common denominator garbage.
If Hollywood's going to treat me like a child, I should at least be able to get the child rate at the theater.
At any rate, I'll look forward to Jonathan's review when it comes out in The Weekly Standard.
Posted by Kathy at March 9, 2005 11:52 PM