Sin City
April 4th, 2005
While I normally advocate reading the book before seeing the movie, in the case of Sin City, I’m not sure it matters much. The two are so closely intertwined that rather than being a reinterpretation of the book, the movie is a retelling in a different medium. I think this has never been done before, but there’s now Sin City (the book) and Sin City (the movie), and the experience isn’t complete without both of them.
Sin City itself played with interpretation of time - the stories are reasonably timeless in themselves, but also disjoint in time with respect to the other stories. As the movie depicts very well, characters, and sometimes dead characters, from one act are always sitting in the background of (or sometimes narrating) the chapter you’re experiencing now. In a similar vein, scenes from the stories in the books show up in the stories in the movies. Maybe you’ve read it before or seen it before, but that doesn’t matter, because there’s more to tell.
It’s an interesting experiment, and it really works for me.
There’s plenty to say about the books themselves, but I really think they need to be experienced firsthand. They’re violent, brutal, beautiful, stark, and unquestionably unlike anything else. If nothing else, they won’t bore you.
There are seven books total - the link is to the first one.
