Sin City reviews

When a book, movie or CD really grips me, I tend to start to obsess about it. I spend several days reading everything I can about it. Yes, this is because I am a pathetic loser. But I end up being a well-informed pathetic loser.

I never bothered to read reviews of "Sin City" back when it came out. Partly because I didn't want to come across any spoilers, and partly because I knew I would like it and therefore didn't need to hear what anybody else thought.

Now that I've seen it, I've been catching up on some reading. The best review I have found came from Slate:

My reaction to Sin City is easily stated. I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. A tad hypocritical? Yes. But sometimes you think, "Well, I'll just go to hell."

On the other end of the spectrum was this piece from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

It seems to start out positive, with critic William Arnold listing a bunch of reasons why "Sin City" is poised to be the next big thing in film. But he then proceeds to trash the movie in increasingly hysterical fashion, culminating in this remarkable example of critical excess:

Sitting through the thing, watching scene after scene in which I was being asked to be entertained by the spectacle of helpless people being tortured, I kept thinking of those clean-cut young American guards at Abu Ghraib. That is exactly the mentality Rodriguez is celebrating here. "Sin City" is their movie.

Got that? In Arnold's moral universe, if you enjoyed the movie, you might as well bust out the blowtorch and pliers and get medieval on some Iraqis.

I could go on, but I wouldn't be as comprehensive or elegant as this bloke.