The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
"Sin City" A-list action stars rub shoulders with snaky villains and sexy wenches, in a city where the streets are always wet, the cars are ragtops and everybody smokes. It's a black-and-white world, except for blood, which is red, eyes, which are green, hair, which is blond, and the Yellow Bastard. This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters that occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map. The movie is not about narrative but about style. It internalizes the harsh world of the Frank Miller "Sin City" comic books and processes it through computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid. The actors are mined for the archetypes they contain; Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. We get not so much their presence as their essence; the movie is not about what the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest dreams. The movie is based on three of the "Sin City" stories, each more or less self-contained. That's wise, because at this velocity, a two-hour, one-story narrative would begin to pant before it got to the finish line. One story involves Bruce Willis as a battered old cop at war with a pedophile (Nick Stahl). One has Mickey Rourke waking up next to a dead hooker (Jaime King). One has a good guy (Clive Owen) and a wacko cop (Benicio Del Toro) disturbing the delicate balance of power negotiated between the police and the leader of the city's hookers (Rosario Dawson), who, despite her profession, moonlights as Owen's lover. Underneath everything is a deeper layer of corruption, involving a senator (Powers Boothe) whose son is not only the pedophile but also the Yellow Bastard. We know the Bastard is yellow because the movie paints him yellow, just as the comic book did. There are other vivid characters in the movie, which does not have leads so much as actors who dominate the foreground and then movie on. In a movie that uses nudity Rosario Dawson's stripper is a fierce dominatrix; Carla Gugino shows more skin than she could in Maxim. Which brings us, finally, to the question of the movie's period. Certain scenes suggest the movie is set today. The cars range from the late 1930s through the 1950s to a recent Ferrari. The costumes are from the trench coat and G-string era. I don't think "Sin City" really has a period, because it doesn't really tell a story set in time and space. It's uncompromising, extreme and brilliant. I give it 9.5 out of 10 stars. "The Amityville Horror" The Amityville Horror stars Ryan Reynolds as George Lutz, the unlucky guy who moves into the infamous house on Ocean Avenue with his wife and her three young children. It was just less than a year earlier when Ronald Defeo murdered his parents and four siblings in the middle of the night and later claimed that "voices" told him to do it. Right from the day that the Lutz family moved into their new house, bizarre events started unfolding. The movie depicts such things as strange sounds being heard in the house, magnets on the fridge being rearranged into not so friendly phrases (ketch 'em and kill 'em Ñ not something I would like to see on my fridge anytime soon), a mysterious new friend named "Jodie" whom young Chelsea Lutz befriends, a priest getting attacked by flies, ghosts popping up all over the place, children's faces changing into demons and mysterious balloons popping up all over the place. Just events that you wouldn't except at your average suburb mansion. Things come to a head when George's personality slowly deteriorates and he becomes possessed by the evil spirits in the house and seems to have a plan to re-enact the horrible crimes of Ronald Defeo. After seeing this movie, I'm still not 100% sure how to feel about it. Sure it was scary at times, but the movie didn't really give you that spine-chilling feeling from start to finish. But it sure makes you feel uneasy. It was also funny at times Ñ which was perhaps a bit inappropriate in some scenes. The slutty babysitter was ridiculous, and in other scenes I got a good laugh. (The wood-chopping incident was rather humourous for some reason.) There were a small handful of scenes that are sure to make you jump in your seat but I really think I was looking for a creepier movie from beginning to end. I rate it 3.5 out of 5.
