Fans of Frank Miller's series of graphic novels will be very pleased with the release of Sin City this Friday.
Sin City, the new movie directed by Robert Rodriguez and co-directed by Frank Miller, is based on the grimy underworld of Los Angeles (Sin City). The movie does everything it can to stay true to the comic books.
"Rodriguez was trying to keep the essence of the comic book," aspiring filmmaker and avid comic book fan, Lee Harmon said. "He was trying to make it look like you were reading a Frank Miller graphic novel. He wanted to make the novel come to life."
Frank Miller had full writing credits to the film and was allowed to co-direct the movie. Robert Rodriguez actually quit the Director's Guild of America because they would not allow Miller to get a co-director credit.
The film is shot in high definition video, not film, and digitally changed to black and white. Spot color is added here and there for visual effects just like the comic books.
"Because it's high definition it will look better than film. The only movie I know of that's shot like that is Star Wars Episode II -- Attack of the Clones, and it turned out really good," said local filmmaker and University of Memphis graduate Richard Lester. "It's a different way of using visual effects, whereas films like HellBoy and Constantine seem to just re-hash what all other action films do."
The comic books were kept on set and the directors used actual pages from the books as storyboards and set design templates. It relies heavily on green screen technology, mostly being used as backgrounds.
"They put live actors against green screens and digitally lifted scenes from the actual comic books as the background," said Robert Saba, a U of M graduate who now does casting and locations for films. "Only one actual set was built for the movie."
"With one of the characters, Yellow Bastard, they took the actor (Nick Stahl), painted him blue, put him in front of the green screen, and then digitally added yellow. I think these dashes of color add to the movie-that's the way the comic books were," Saba said.
When green screens are used in films, actors are just in a room interacting with each other, with screens around them and behind them.
The backdrops are digitally added later. In another movie, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," the whole movie was shot using this method.
The dialogue for the film will be mostly word for word from the comic books, according to the Internet Movie Database.
"This also should be interesting to see --d oes comic book dialogue work for a movie? It's a strange style, but hey, this is a strange movie," Saba said.
People who have followed the Sin City stories will probably not mind.
"I think the fans of the comic book will like the dialogue style," resident film expert Danny Linton said.
The trick is going to be appealing to the rest of the world who doesn't necessarily read the comic books.
"Because of the release date of the film -- beginning of spring -- I think a lot of people will go see it just because there is nothing out to compete with it. " Harmon said.
Linton said critics are calling this movie "Pulp Fiction as a comic book."
He continues to say that there have been very few true comic book movies that were hits. "It's a good visual style, but the trick is keeping us interested."
Ads are pumping out heavily on channels like MTV, aimed at college-aged audiences.
"The 'MTV crowd' will go see it, but what about your 40-year-old housewife? They are marketing heavily toward the late teen to early 30-year-old crowd. But that's a small percentage of the overall population," Saba said.
Compared to Beauty Shop, the other big feature film opening this week, and others in theaters like Miss Congeniality 2 and Hitch, Sin City is very different. It is also different from a lot of the other comic book movies released, like Spiderman and X-men, because the characters in this film do not have super powers.
As sophomore film and video major Colin Logue said, "It's cool because it's not about super heroes, it's a story about a grimy town. The people might be odd, but they are real."
