Drive-by Weekend Update

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(only not the SNL kind)

Friday: Saw Sin City with Nathan. It was excellent. It's essentially two and a half hours of artistic, film-noir gore and hookers with guns. There's even an entire sequence of Clive Owen (I don't think his jaw could have been so manly without computer effects) talking about Valkyries while almost naked women pull fancy

Comments

[lilyoda]

Sim City was excellent.. =D I have never saw so many gentials ripped, cut or blown off with a gun...=O

I also saw it with my boyfriend late at night in a packed theater and you can hear the whole crowd simuntaeously go OOhhhhhhhh..whenever thins are getting ripped or blown to chunks..sweet...

Favorite Line: I took away his weapons (knocks the gun of Yellow Bastard hand) BOTH of them.
Yellow Bastard: No No!
TEAAAARRRRR (agonized screams)oh man...

and Elijah Wood's character..damn...but he looked so cute for being a creepy dude with long nails..loved how they only showed his glasses and then his eyes.. *drools*

I hate this line in the movie..it made me cringe..

The lesbian girl sitting in the room with the heads of hookers all mounted..

"He made me watch as he sucked the meat off my bone! (showed her stub)
*cringes* or...something like that..

and Clive Owen was the only person I couldn't help gushing about after the movie..I think my bf was getting jealous that I was talking about Clive so much...but who wouldn't?! C'mon he is sexy... mmmm...;)

ok shutting up now...

I'm Sin City crazy!

<(#_#)>

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Speaking of the lesbian... I'm still a little unsure of the gender politics of that movie. "She was a dyke, but god knows why. She could have had any man in town" (or something to that affect) Eurgh, but he was a vulgar guy, you know... And she was still an object of chivalry and general male-gaze-thong-wearing-cinematography, without being an available sexual object. Good or Bad? In any case, I've decided that the overwhelming heteronormativity of the movie was part of the film noir style, and that I can therefore take it ironically and ignore it.

Your boyfriend can suck it up... Clive Owen doesn't begin to make up for massive amounts of naked women fanservice.

"BOTH of them" was excellent. Although I did like "you've got a bum ticker!" too.

[_swallow]

> "She was a dyke, but god knows why. She could have had any man in town"

Frank Miller's gender politics are, everyone in comics fandom I've met agrees, massively fucked-up. Still: I felt that not only was the movie's attitude towards sex and women "part of the film noir style", but also that that specific line, given by that specific guy, was being presented to us absolutely as a character note-- not as even the, you know, belief argued by the entire movie (as you said, I think the movie's style intentionally left its viewers room to take it ironically), or the belief held by the producers; but rather importation information about this character-- considering that it came fairly early in his vignette-- and his undeniably objectifying (etc.) yet oddly, sweetly chivalrous understanding of women.

I think I got this feeling so strongly because of a combination of how ridiculous that line is to me and, I thiiink, anyone with even a shallow contemporary idea of homosexuality; and of how the line was delivered (both of terms of the actor's reading of the line and of how it was framed narratively, as internal-monologue exposition, explicitly directed to the audience, bookended by-- I think!-- slight silences)-- as, again, ridiculous.

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That's a really interesting way to think of it - I hadn't really considered what it means to frame so much of the plot in internal monologues. I will point out, though, that her girlfriend was only mentioned, and that she played the exact same role as the other women did in relation to their chivalrous men, which seemed to me to be a way of delegitimizing her homosexuality outside mind of that specific character.

Out of curiousity, what do you think about the fact that only men were involved in castrating eachother?

[I also feel obligated to say that your "objectifying yet chivalrous" should be "objectifyingly chivalrous", but I think that's beside the specific point.]

[_swallow]

> I also feel obligated to say that your "objectifying yet chivalrous" should be "objectifyingly chivalrous", but I think that's beside the specific point.

heh. You got me-- bad feminist, Lauren! Still, the movie was, I think, making the point that it's better to be a chivalrous objectifier of women than an asshole flesh-eating objectifier of women.

> Out of curiosity, what do you think about the fact that only men were involved in castrating eachother?

Well, that's not really true, is it? There was that arrow-slinging prostitute, the one whose name started with M. I feel certain she castrated at least one man. And I'd swear Gail at least kicked someone in the balls.

> I will point out, though, that her girlfriend was only mentioned, and that she played the exact same role as the other women did in relation to their chivalrous men, which seemed to me to be a way of delegitimizing her homosexuality outside mind of that specific character.

hmm-- you're right. And the fact that the girlfriend was only mentioned the once, totally later forgotten as someone who might help them or someone who might need help from them really drove home the point, possible that the woman wasn't a main character: considering that all the male main characters were primarily driven by their relationships with the women they loved.

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Wait a second. That is NOT a date movie.