Frank Miller's Sin City (R13?!?)

At last, an excuse to put Jessica Alba's picture in my blog

Watching movies these days with reserved seating costs around hundred fifty pesos. We watched Sin City in Power Plant Mall in Rockwell Makati for P151.00 (the one peso is either a tax or donated somewhere). For that amount I'd expect a relatively undisturbed viewing experience.

Of course that didn't happen because of Murphy's Law. Never mind the couple seated behind us knee-ing our seats. The movie released as R13 was begging for complaints.

The movie Sin City is based on a collection of mini-series of comic books of the same name. It was written and drawn by Frank Miller, a highly-respected comic industry legend who had penned classics such as Daredevil, Spiderman, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. Back in high school, I was a comic collector, and then it got expensive. Luckily, by then, I had already bought three Sin City mini-series: A Dame to Kill For (which I should mention, I am still missing one issue), The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard. All of which I still proudly keep in my comic box. Recently, I bought a trade paperback collection of the original mini-series, simply titled "Sin City" which preceded those I've mentioned above.

The stories, well, I can't really put into words because of my limited vocabulary, but Sin City is what you get when sex and violence become cool. Fortunately and unfortunately, they ARE cool.
The art is fantastic. It has excellent uses of black and white that has never before been done in comic history. It makes the occasional use of color really stand out. Clearly, it translated pretty well in the movie.

When I heard that they are going to make a movie based on Sin City, I immediately thought that there is no way that they can pull this off without being almost absolutely faithful to the comics. And so, the point of this post is that they ruined it by forcing it to be rated R13 (not for children below 13 years old). How did they manage to do that? Logically, it would have less sex and less violence. The problem: since the very existence of the movie includes themes that revolve around sex and violence, they would have to desecrate the movie. They had cut scenes which had nudity, and scenes which were violent enough and they did so without having a care on salvaging the continuity of the dialogue. In short, they had very, very crude cuts and might I add, very, very noticeable. The worst part was they didn't do a good job of getting rid of all the nudes scenes. So why bother? It's all money. Less restrictive ratings, more potential viewers and ticket buyers.

I've been informed that this is actually the work of the distributors since the MTRCB no longer cuts films and instead stick to rating films. Shame on you. Dibidi, here I come. Somebody ought to tell Frank Miller.

I am so furious I didn't even mention Jessica Alba not stripping for the part of Nancy. Whoops.