Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

    Have you ever heard of String Theory? It's a principle of quantum mechanics in which you look at time as a string. On one end of the string is the past and on the other is the future. Now imagine that you put a little red bead on the string. That bead represents you in the present and as time moves on, the bead keeps moving to the right: the future. 

   Well, if you take that string and roll it into a ball parts of the past will touch the future. At the same time, some part of the past and future are touching the present as well. Some say this is how you'd be able to explain time travel. But this idea also represents how stories with time paradoxes can operate. In these type of stories, dinosaurs end up in the modern era or Ben Franklin goes on a walk with Marilyn Monroe and Brad Pitt in 1600 Venice. 

   So why have I am discussing temporal physics when I should be reviewing Sin City: A Dame to Kill For which isn't about time travel but a gritty crime noir film based on a series of comics by Frank Miller?

  A Dame to Kill For was like someone took all of Miller's Sin City tales and threw them into a blender. Characters who were killed off in the last film appear in starring roles. Stories that happened in the last film haven't occurred in this one yet even though some of those previous events did. Don't even get me started on one character whose new appearance is explained by a plastic surgery that happened in the last film but didn't happen prior to the beginning of this movie. It's all very confusing.

   The problem with all of this is that instead of making Sin City(2) either a prequel or a sequel. Co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller decided to make this film both! I'm pretty sure they teach not to do that in Film Making 101. But with the scrambled timeline, you really don't need to see the first film to understand what goes on in a Dame to Kill For.

   If you can get over the initial confusion of the warped timeline, A Dame to Kill For is a pretty good movie. But it's no Sin City! Both films use creative CGI and green screen techniques to make this look like a comic book comic to life. The acting, especially of Mickey Rourke as Marv and Powers Booth as the slimy Sen. Roarke was quite good. But there was a spark missing from the formula that just didn't make the second film hold a candle to the original. 

   With lots of gore, sex, profanity, and violence, this is a gritty drama done in the classic Frank Miller fashion. So, that being said, this ain't for kids. But if you are Frank Miller fan like I am, you will enjoy this. 

   Rodriquez is from that school of film like Tarantino in which they both love to play around with director's cuts and reissue 'definitive' editions of their movies every so often. I think if Robert Rodriguez would take both Sin City films and re-edit them into a way that they were as one film in correct temporal order, you'd have a much more superior film that's more enjoyable to watch and it probably won't have you pausing the movie every 5 minutes and going on Wikipedia to find out what just happened.

    I'm waiting for that edition and hopefully, it will come packaged with one of Miller's Sin City graphic novels as a bonus.

   Worth Consuming

   Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.
   

Tales to Offend #1

 The cover to this book looks like those old EC Comics that I just adore. That's why I picked it up. Up until then, I'd never heard of this book and I thought at first that  it was a just a parody of those old comics from the 50s published by Dark Horse Comics. But to dig under the surface, I learned that this 1997 one-shot was so much more.

   The comic was written and penciled by comics legend Frank Miller. His cover story is a series of sci-fi short stories starting a character named Lance Blastoff. This is the first time I've ever heard of Lance, but from trolling the web and Facebook, he's sort of a cult hero. Lance is rude, crude, and likes to have his way with the ladies. He's a lot like Lobo without the bloodshed or Han Solo without the heart of gold. He's serviced in more ways than one by a squad of sex-starved, busty fembots while he tours the galaxy in search of a quick buck.

   This book also features a short story set in Miller's Sin City universe. It's got all of Miller's great black and white artwork, along with a sick twist ending and lots of grit, sex, and dames to die for- literally.

   The book may seem very rough around the edges. With a title like 'Tales to Offend,' you could think that Miller's got this "Who gives a F#@%?" mentality. That is until you get to the last page. There, you uncover yet another layer to this book. Miller explains that this comic is his gift to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. As you know, I'm a big supporter of the CBLDF and it's work to oppose censorship in the comics industry. When I have a chance, I donate money. But often I use my time and energies spreading the word of this important charity. For someone like Miller to devote his time and talents and not get a dime is so Miller and as kick-ass as Blastoff himself.

    Worth Consuming

   Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.