DAMES AND DUDES

I could never quite get my head around the first Sin City movie. Frank Miller's writing and layouts always suggested something slow and mournful to me. Miller moves his stories in pin-ups and spreads, scattering terse little phrases around the edges. Detail and emotions are expressed in tight, intimate glimpses. He's always inviting you to pore over his lines, to get a little punch-drunk on all the fetishised hardware. Miller is physicality and quiet intensity, the complete opposite of Robert Rodriguez's clipped, green screen workshopping. It's a tonal mismatch. Miller's comics should be shot like a Masaki Kobayashi samurai film, not a flat, computer-generated miasma.

Batman: Year One

Perhaps aware that a great deal of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's original piece was gobbled up by the Christopher Nolan franchise (enough that, reportedly, at least Miller was cut a cheque), Sam Liu, Lauren Montgomery, and Tab Murphy's adaptation of Batman: Year One doesn't attempt to swell events with tacked on action spectacle. Instead we get a lean, mean war journal; bulletin events and headlines from the first twelve months of Batman's war on crime. A few dopey clarification lines aside, Miller's headache speak survives intact, dominating the film's mood and motor. Mazzucchelli isn't quite so lucky. The outline of the artist's figure frames remain, but they've lost their scratchy, sweaty quality. Likewise, the putrid colours of the newsstand issues are lost to pastels. Aside from Ed McGuinness's action figure drafts, these DC OVAs have struggled to replicate individual artistic ticks. Year One is no exception, but at least Miller's writing is allowed to pop.

Benjamin McKenzie reads Miller with the dull clip of total psychosis. A performance, and presentation, unafraid to portray a multimedia character thinking like a serial killer. Bryan Cranston synchronises perfectly with James Gordon, the actor incapable of giving any reading that doesn't throb with a wounded, conflicted masculinity. Cranston is adept at finding the dark, secret corners of married males - the light frenzy of leadership, or the cold-sweat panic of responsibility. Cranston gamely plays along as Miller's writing exposes the heroic Gordon in unheroic ways, creating flaws and imperfections that colour, rather than void, Gotham's human face of justice.

We've had many Miller adaptations in the last few years, but none of them, not even the Miller co-directed Sin City, have given a complete account of his beguiling, hysterical ability. Sin City deleted the abuse and illness that informed a lunatic like Marv. Zack Snyder's 300 forgot to acknowledge that Leonidas knew he was a fascist battling on behalf of someone else's democratic ideal. Miller's skill is that he can place a recognisable psychological state within the confines of comic reality. He invests his characters with fanatical drives and masochistic kinks that play like truth in worlds teaming with super-identities. This Batman then is the closest yet to full-Miller. Find his indelible mark in the lack of excuse used to justify Bruce Wayne's behaviour. There are no asides to contextualise scenes in which Batman promises to mutilate a criminal. Gordon is framed considering his gun while his heavily pregnant wife sleeps. There is no levity, just the suffocating desire to punish. Extremity of thought, as well as action. This is Frank Miller. He trades in seizure chivalry.

Sketch Sunday: Roark Jr / That Yellow Bastard

John Hartigan's putrid nemesis from Frank Miller's Sin City: That Yellow Bastard. This guy stinks!

"...You're locked up in here with me."

Here's the Scream Awards Watchmen tease Snyder insists he prepared himself. Clip includes some shilling by principles; taste that insincerity! New footage does little to allay fears that the whole film has been shot in slow motion - however, I do see the thinking behind it; it stalls the image, albeit in a mechanical fashion, much like a reader taking time over a particularly astonishing image. Rodriguez and Miller's Sin City mash-up coulda' done with some of this time dilation, instead they amped up the narrative into a breathless sprint. That said though, Miller's manga infused image avalanche plays better to that particular brand of stylisation; Gibbon's maths panel begs for a more restrained, stylistically anaemic patter. Watchmen is more '92 Eastwood deconstruction than 60s Spaghetti belter. Ramble. Ramble. Displeasure must be strongly noted at Rorschach's newfound Sammy Davies Junior wall-run powers. Dear, oh dear. It's pretty central to Watchmen's thesis that Dr Manhattan is the only full blown superpower - the rest are all various creeds of degenerate playing dress-up. Word 'round the campfire is a massive chunk of the ending has been jettisoned too - no Harryhausen fans in Snyder's house? The knock on effect of which rather muddies some celestial noodling on man's relation to a God. Moaning and whining aside, I'm sure Watchmen will make for a much better film than than the ideologically compromised V For Vendetta movie or the dunderhead League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation. Feint praise indeed. That was meant to sound positive! I'm a dreary nerd blogger. Quick! Think of something nice. Erm. I really liked Manhattan disassembling the tank! That was wicked.