journal features

movie review - Sin City

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2007.08.07

This is an incessantly unpleasant and sexist movie based on a comic book series from the early '90s. The funny thing is that I was still a bit into comics at that time and recall that people who were into that series tended to be unpleasant and sexist (virgins). The male characters in this thing are usually exaggerated and are either macho-chatty or macho-silent. There are some sub-types that tend to the comically surreal and disgusting. The women are all sex objects.

The plots are loosely connected and generally OK. But I can't imagine watching this twice.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)