However, I am stepping up to the line in defense of one of my favorite films of the last decade and also the writer of the film, Frank Miller. I will ambulate under the concept that some folks, like Kevin B Smith, are not too familiar with the extensive body of work that Miller has produced over the last 27 plus years. Briefly, an evolution in the comic world exploded in 1986 in the form of a new super hero. This hero was a bitter, grim and overly violent personage, who managed weapons and fists with equal glee. He needed no provocation to react in a most cruel rage. Where he had once been a man who would go out of his way in order to resolve conflict with as little injury to an opponent as possible, he endured an event in his life that forever changed him and allowed the raw, seething, psychopathic rage he had kept in check to erupt to the forefront of his personality.

The new hero is Batman.

If you know anything about comics, you might have thought I was describing Frank Castle, “The Punisher.” Interesting considering that Miller handled that comic for a while also. He also redefined the parameters of Wolverine’s character as well. He even did a maker over on “Daredevil”, those issues ringing him to prominence back in the early 80’s. Three characters in the Marvel universe that hit a stride that they maintain to this day.

But it was “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” that made us all gape. That four issue series, to this day, I still pull out and pour over the pages of art and dialog that was not surpassed until the following year when Miller brought us “Batman: Year One” which was an in-yer-face series that said “ I showed you what he became. THIS is how he got there.” Kinda like the one-two punch we got from Coppola 15 years prior. So, to call Frank Miller an “over-rated book writer” is to call Arthur Miller a Broadway hack.

“Sin City.” My word, what an experience that was. To actually see the pages of a comic filmed for the first time was a real kick. Is it noir? Sure. Is it great noir? Mebbeso. Was it at the time the best film adaptation of a literary work ever filmed? Absolutely and it still is to this day. I am going to state my reasons but first want to point out that Marv is a buddy of mine and I cry every time I watch or read the ending to his story. Marv is the, without a doubt, the greatest anti-hero ever conceived. His demise is both a relief and a heartbreak that brings a tear to the eye while the mind says “I’ll sleep better at night from now on.”

“Sin City” is the perfect film adaptation of Fran Miller’s graphic novel. Here are the two best reasons why:

1. Every single word that Miller wrote is the script.
2. The film contains every single panel that Miller drew.

It was a thrill the first few times I sat with a copy of “Sin City” and read the dialog as the segment “The Hard Goodbye” played out on the screen. It has been a pleasure every time since. Even more amazing is being able to freeze frame the exact instance that the drawn panel is on screen and most are almost a pose from the graphic novel. There is no instance of this having occurred before in a Hollywood film. Ever. While his writing is not on the level of “Grapes of Wrath” or any of Shakespeare’s or for that matter, any work by Arthur Miller, it has its own distinctions. Many distinctions, of which, I will list three that evoke the spirit of noir and that I will put up against any classic filmed prior.

1. Marv walks down an alley- Not only his poise, the lighting and costuming, listen to the voice over: “So, you were scared, weren’t you Goldie? Somebody wanted you dead and you knew it. Well, I’m gonna find that son of a bitch that killed you, and I’m gonna give him the hard goodbye. Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything.” It reminds me of how Bogart did it in several of his films and, they say, imitation is flattery.

2. All of the scenes inside of Katie’s- every great noir has at least one scene in a bar. Using the central character as a focal point is important, something for the eye and mind to pinpoint. Like “Titanic” the real story is always what is in the peripherals, that is to say, what is pooling out from that center. To me, when it is done effectively as it was in “Sin City” you can easily see the main characters in such scenes. But what is occurring around them seems to be out of focus or even washed out. It’s as if they are phantoms or shadows, apart from the reality that the central characters find themselves involved in. Even the bar scene in “Star Wars” is a noir copy. None of the characters are truly visible until they are center front and thus brought into focus.

3. Hartigan kills Yellow Bastard- Not only the grim, determined, maniacal look on Hartigan’s face as he works Junior over like a rib bone, it’s the matter-of-fact fury his body displays he punches into the face of his well placed anger. Over and over you see his fists pile-drive straight down until (as we hear in another excellent voice over concludes) “all I’m doing is punching wet chips of bone into the floorboards. So I stop.” It reminds me of when Cody Jarrett finally lets loose on a victim. The difference is that Cody is insane and enjoys inflicting pain on a victim. Hartigan is all business because he is bringing a killer to justice, since Justice had been turning a blind on this cat way too long.

Every one of these scenes has been filmed countless times and many of them done better. On its own merits, we might call “Sin City” a new breed of film noir and I admit that there is plenty of FX involved in the completed work. But it is still noir, still the style that has, over the last 100 years, invoked a sense of mystery and intrigue in the mind’s eye. The smoke, the gloom and rain, the ever present trench coat and suave yet slimy villains are all found in its 124 minute running time. So to dismiss it as “little more than a vacuous PULP FICTION wannabe aimed at fourteen year-olds, with pretty pictures substituting for real vision and wit.” is an insult to the genre. Moreover, anyone stating it as such with conviction should be consigned to the 5th concentric circle of Dante’s Easybake and force fed a steady diet of the crap that Aptow is trying to pass off as film entertainment. He’s an idiot, too.

That’s just silly. It’s not even that great a film, never mind a great film noir. And I’m not even convinced it’s actually noir. Mostly it’s a bunch of expensive, visually stunning trickery using a series of noir (or noirish) tropes and peep show shots aimed at horny adolescents — an emotionally and narratively shallow exercise at best, lacking the dark existential angst that lies at the heart of all the best noir films.

Think of classics like THE MALTESE FALCON, MURDER, MY SWEET, OUT OF THE PAST, TOUCH OF EVIL or CHINATOWN. Even last year’s GONE BABY GONE possess more of a true sense of noir in one scene than the whole of SIN CITY, which is little more than a vacuous PULP FICTION wannabe aimed at fourteen year-olds, with pretty pictures substituting for real vision and wit. I wish Frank Miller (arguably the most over-rated comic book writer to come along in years) and crew had spent as much time working on a decent, coherent plot as they reportedly did trying to get the look of the falling rain “just right.” High tech? More like lowest common denominator dreck, if you ask me.

Next you’ll be telling me 300 is the best war movie ever made…

As for the dust-up over the artistic value of the pulps, it’s true most of them were pretty bad as a whole, but as Tony pointed out, there were plenty of exceptions to support his claim that they offered up plenty more literary value than you gave them credit for. I know — I’ve been reading plenty of them over the last year for an upcoming project. Most of the stories are dreadful — the literary equivalent of SIN CITY, in fact — but the best stories in the pulps can stand proudly beside any of the best literature of its time.

Also, bigotry works better when you dress it up with wit. That way, the stupid minorities don’t know that you’re insulting them! It’s a win win win situation for everyone! Try it out next time. Works great at parties.

Perhaps it is your fractured English that obscures your ideas, but you compound this by a bombast that confuses the reader even more. As a speaker of four languages, and I am the first to admit I am less than fluent in all four, I believe it is best to keep your prose simple when writing in other than your mother tongue.

As far as the supposed influence of the Renaissance on film noir, and the merits of the works published in the Black Mask and the Dime Detective, you are cluelesss.

I don’t have enough time to waste on marshalling the arguments and evidence aganst your other poorly-conceived ideas, so I will focus on the pulp magazines and this statement of yours which is just plain wrong: “But it is no coincidence that none of the masterpieces of the aforementioned writers were among the pieces they had submitted for these pulp magazines.”

Raymond Chandler wrote of the Black mask:

“It was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit to and power. The streets were dark with something more than the night.” (Chandler 1950)

Hammett’s first four great novels, Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931) were all published in Black Mask prior to their publication by New York publisher A. A. Knopf.

Chandler in the 1938 short story Red Wind in Black Mask wrote this poetic prose – another “copy/quote” paste:

“I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.”

Mayer and McDonnell in The Encyclopaedia if of Film Noir (2007) on Cornell Woolrich:

“Woolrich’s Dormant Account published in Black Mask in May 1942, was bought by Columbia for its Whistler series of eight films between 1944 and 1948. RKO’s Deadline at Dawn,was based on Woolrich’s 1944 novel (under his pseudonym William Irish), which was expanded from his 1941 short story Of Time and Murder (published in Detective Fiction Weekly)… and three low budget films based on Woolrich’s short stories were released in 1947. Fall Guy was based on the 1940 Black Mask story C-Jag, The Guilty was based on the 1941 Detective Fiction Weekly story He Looked Like Murder, and Fear in the Night was based on the 1941 Argosy story And So to Death.”

You are full of so much hot air.

First things first, I have tried really hard but I couldn’t see a single thing opposing the following statements in my article:

“Film noir and it’s pre-cursors German Expressionism and French poetic realism are singular historical responses to modernity and its manifest alienation.”

“Noir is not just light and shadow, but an element of many used to express a unique angst – and has nothing to do with the Renaissance. Noir is not only a repudiation of Reassaisance and of the Enlightenment, but of modernity as manifested in the alienated existence on the modern metropolis.”

The fact that noir is an element of many is actually the thesis statement of my article. And the fact that it borrows technical styles from Renaissance does not necessarily mean noir imitates Renaissance ideologically – two are vastly different things. Your frustration, I presume, is due to the fact that you haven’t really read the following statement I have written:

“Considering the fact that postmodernism originally arose as a reaction to modernism, this kind of a declaration seems hardly surprising.”

Since I assert that noir is a postmodern concept, we are pretty much saying the same thing. It should also be noted that modernity and modernism are not necessarily the same thing: A piece that opposes modernity might as well be a part of the modernist movement, since one denotes an artistic trend while the other is much larger in scope. It’s something that affects everyone’s lifestyle.

That being said, I will easily disagree with the second point you have made: It was not the writers themselves whom I declared lacking any literary value, it was the magazines. The fact that a writer contributed to these magazines neither made him a pulp writer nor made the magazines something valuable. According to wikipedia, the writers who have contributed, at one point, to pulp fiction include Isaac Asimov, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Conrad, Philip Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry (who is probably my second favorite author), Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells – needless to say, declaring all these legendary writers ‘literarily worthless’ is not something I can do nor something that I intended to do. But it is no coincidence that none of the masterpieces of the aforementioned writers were among the pieces they had submitted for these pulp magazines.

Additionally, if you think flamboyant sentences are proofs to literary talent, you simply have no clue about the whole thing – simple phrases and sentences work as much as the examples you have listed (i.e. “less is more”). As long as you try to justify the merits of any work of literature with a single copy-pasted paragraph, I will not be convinced, neither should anyone be. It’s where the phrases are used and how they serve the overall artistic style of the novel is all that matters.

Film noir and it’s pre-cursors German Expressionism and French poetic realism are singular historical responses to modernity and its manifest alienation.

The view that noir is a “genre” has little currency.

Noir lighting was yes influenced by German expressionism, but was also a function of technology and the need to mask cheap production values, and only came into its own with faster camera lenses and films that allowed night-for-night shots and the use of a single key light in interior shots.

Noir is not just light and shadow, but an element of many used to express a unique angst – and has nothing to do with the Renaissance. Noir is not only a repudiation of Reassaisance and of the Enlightenment, but of modernity as manifested in the alienated existence on the modern metropolis.

This statement is pure bunk:

“Prevailing at more or less the same time in United States was the American pulp novel tradition. These inexpensive, thin, paperback books/magazines, which had no intellectual value whatsoever, were widely published and read from 1920s through the 1950s.”

The wholesale dismissal of the works of such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornel Woolrich, is an affront to any honest or intelligent assessment of their writing.

Does writing like this from Cornell Woolrich have no ‘intellectual value’:

“We went down a new alley… ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway. The bars of light made cicatrices across us. He reached in at the side and slated up one edge of the pliable blind, made a little tent-shaped gap. For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot.”

“She climbed the rooming-house stairs like a puppet dangling from slack strings. A light bracketed against the wall, drooping upside down like a withered tulip in its bell-shaped shade of scalloped glass, cast a smoky yellow glow. A carpet-strip ground to the semblance of decayed vegetable-matter, all pattern, all color, long erased, adhered to the middle of the stairs, like a form of pollen or fungus encrustation.”

I could go on…

I also have no problems with critics/buffs who praise noir for legitimate reasons (which are many) But it’s my observation that certain trend/movements/films/directors tend to become a tool in the hands of some people who, for some reason, are in dire need to prove their intellectual capabilities without getting into much trouble. The simple way to do that is automatically appreciating any example of a trend if it’s glorified by well-known and/or respected individuals – that might be film critics, famous bloggers, cinephile friends, art school students/teachers etc. Tarantino and his films suffered from exactly this phenomenon in the past (although I don’t know ’suffer’ is the correct word to use, for all this seemed to have increased the attention he is getting) and today noir seems to be at the same spot. I am surrounded by people in the internet and around me in real life who appreciate noir just because it’s hip to say that out loud. If you feel that I am being defensive about something, I will say this is exactly what I find offensive. Needless to say, people are free to like/hate whatever they want, but as long as they don’t contaminate me with their superficial appreciation. I can’t stand being exposed to such vulgarization, nor seeing something as complex as film-noir itself become the new expensive brand that people like to show off and brag about.

Granted, the last part of my article seems a bit out of touch with the rest in terms of the overall tone; but what I was trying to do was to follow a certain timeline when making a certain point, and the last step was to talk about what’s happening today and how film-noir steps to the other side of the mirror of intertextuality. And I thought my observations regarding to the most recent status of film-noir would be pretty conclusive.

By the way, I am not at all disturbed by the fact that the average star rating is 4.5 for the films reviewed in MovieZeal this month. I read nearly every review and I must say I enjoyed the whole thing immensely (Evan definitely did a good job with his selections and the organization of the whole thing), so do not take any of my remarks personal (unless of course you really are using noir for that purpose )