I was desperately looking forward to Sin City, which looked utterly cool in the trailers, and had gotten so much good press that I wanted to see it the night it opened.

Laurie checked out movie times, and it seemed to make the most sense to see Sahara (which looked very silly but kind of fun) first, then go to Sin City after that, then have some dinner and catch either The Upside of Anger or Fever Pitch afterwards.

Sahara went longer than expected, because of the endless commercials beforehand, and the many, many trailers following that. We didn't get out of that film in time to see Sin City at the time we wanted to, so we decided to cut things down to two features and have lunch in-between.

I thought that I'd watch Sahara and sort of like it (I dig cheesy adventure movies, and I like Steve Zahn) and be blown away by Sin City.

I really did enjoy Sahara. It was a lot more fun than I expected, even though it has no real internal logic. It's a silly film, and it treats itself in that way.

Sahara tells the story of Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey), a deep-sea treasure hunter who is obsessed with finding a Confederate ship that dissapeared during the Civil War and supposedly got caught up in the ocen currents and made its way to Africa.

His partner Al (Zahn) is along for the ride, and through a series of coincidences, so is Dr. Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz), an investigator for the World Health Organization. She is looking into mysterious deaths in the same area where Pitt's treasure hunting team is working. As circumstances have it, the clues that Pitt are looking lead to the same place that Rojas must go to find the source of the impending plague. They join up, and inevitably, the two mysteries are intertwined.

Sahara isn't a great film by any means. There are plot holes a mile wide, it loses focus after the first twenty minutes or so, and there isn't a heck of a lot of tension. However, it's a fun romp, and definitely worth the price of a matinee ticket, even if it underutilizes Delroy Lindo horribly.

We had lunch at Pizzeria Uno's, and had about 45 minutes before Sin City was to start. Inbetween films, we went to Bed, Bath and Beyond so I could get a set of queen-sized sheets for my new mattress (my current mattress is a full). I felt the 1,000 thread count sheets, and they seemed very soft, but then Laurie pointed out some less expensive sheets that were just as soft, so I bought those instead.

I think Demeter should come out with a fragrance called "Bed, Bath and Beyond." It would smell like potpourri and soap and candles and fresh linens. It would also mean that whenever I wore it, I'd have an insane urge to go buy towels.

After retail therapy, it was time to see Sin City. I was eagerly anticipating this film, and wanted so much to like it.

The opening scene with squinty Josh Hartnett didn't make too much sense (I know what it was about, but I didn't see why it was in the film until Laurie told me that director Robert Rodriguez shot that scene to convince Frank Miller to let him make a film of his graphic novels), but I thought I'd be taken in once Bruce Willis came on-screen.

However, the film started a downslide from the very first voiceover by Willis. Yes, it's very noir to have voiceover in film, but it got tedious after the first ten minutes, and didn't really help the plot any. "Show, don't tell" is one of the basic tenets of film, and this particular film didn't seem interested in showing anything at all, relying on internal monologues by all three of its main characters to let the audience in on motivation.

All three tales told in Sin City are variations on the same theme. A man needs to save a girl/woman from danger, and gets into a lot of hot water because of it, leading to much violence and bloodshed. In Basin City, everybody you think you can trust (the police, the government, the clergy) is inherently evil, and everybody you normally wouldn't trust (hit men, hookers, murderers) have some redeeming quality that makes them more upstanding citizens than others.

Interesting, in its way, if any of the characters were fleshed out at all. Instead, we get two-dimensional characters playing in a two-dimensional world where there's nothing going on but the most basic of plots, and those plots aren't even interesting enough to hold your attention.

The violence is over-the-top, in an attempt at comic-book style, I suppose, but it was closer to "cartoon" than "graphic novel" for me. Every violent scene played out like an episode of Itchy and Scratchy than a dark tale meant to disturb, or an over-the-top action film, such as the Kill Bill movies.

Part of this comes from the decision to use black and white with only small splashes of color in key places, though why color was chosen where it was is beyond my ability to decipher. Blood is sometimes red (usually where it doesn't make any sort of impact) and sometimes white (which makes it look more like paint or bird droppings than anything else). The hyper-clarity of the black and white images is interesting to watch at first, but gets tiresome very quickly, especially when you realize that looking for meaning in the choice of colors is futile.

So many people have lauded this film for its style, I think I must be missing something. Black and white with bits of color thrown in has been used before, and to better effect. A totally different film, Pleasantville, did it much more effectively (the scene in which Tobey Maguire re-applies gray makeup to Joan Allen so that she can still fit in with her sitcom family is still a terribly moving film moment for me). Heck, black and white and color were used more effectively in The Wizard of Oz.

Setting up shots frame-by-frame to match a comic book format is an interesting exercise, but this left me cold. Other films have been shot in comic-book style to better effect. Both Spider-Man films use comic-book style to great effect (Sam Raimi doesn't attempt for realism in Spider-Man's leaps and bounds, for instance), and still manages to put some humanity into his story. I even liked the use of still images to replace fight scenes in Tank Girl (a really, really bad film) better than what happened in Sin City.

And just what is so "sinful" about Sin City, anyway? We get a number of shots of breasts, and there is a lot of violence, but it's not really a study of a seedy underworld, or of multi-faceted characters who are dealing with moral issues. Each protagonist has an axe to grind, and grinds that axe (usually into his enemy's skull) until the story ends. Men are hard, brutal creatures who need to protect women, and the women are all sex objects, even if they're weilding weapons of mass destruction.

In all, I found Sin City to be a teenage boy's mastubatory fantasy, and not much else. I don't know what portion was directed by Quentin Tarantino, but it doesn't really matter, since all of it is a jumbled mess that ultimately results in nothing much.

And if you're going to mention that a character is "pushing 60", don't make that character Bruce Willis. Especially since he's supposed to age 8 years in the interim, making him close to 70, but still having the body of...well, Bruce Willis.

And if every other woman in the film is going to bare it all for the camera, don't have the stripper stay fully-clothed. A little bit of Madonna/Whore complex, much?

And why is everybody so impressed with Elijah Wood's "performance"? I remember an interview with Michael Caine in which he said that one of the best tricks a film actor can use is to stare blankly into space, which makes him look like he's thinking deep thoughts. Wood does this very well. I haven't seen such a blank stare since Weekend at Bernie's. What his character is thinking is beyond me, as he simply looks like a rabid Harry Potter, who is supposed to be a cannibal.

(Oh, and to say someone is a cannibal in such an over-the-top violent film and not have him actually, you know, eat someone? Is a cop-out.)

Maybe I was expecting too much from this film, but I think if I even went in looking for mindless entertainment, it would have disappointed me. It took itself far too seriously (except for one scene with a guy who is very nonplussed about his method of death, which is played for laughs) to be mindless entertainment. I felt like I was being told at every turn that this was a Very Important Film, and it really didn't have enough of a story, enough depth of character, or enough visual flair to pull that off.

I've never been all that impressed with Robert Rodriguez. Yes, El Mariachi was impressive, but only because he pulled it off with such a small budget. Once he got some money, he made terrible films like Desperado and The Faculty and From Dusk Til Dawn. The only films I've found to have any merit directed by this man have been the Spy Kids series. I believe that's the mentality that Rodriguez brings to all his films. He's not enough of a grownup to deal with what I think Sin City was trying to convey.

Of course, I might be entirely wrong about the film. After all, I found merit in The Astronaut's Wife, which nobody else on the planet seemed to like, and I couldn't stand Fight Club, which was universally lauded as a great piece of filmmaking. It's just my opinion.

"Wo ist der Ball?"

"Wer ist mein kleiner schwarzer Hund?"

"Wer ist der hübscheste junge Hund?"

Today, I practiced some German. Since I'm too shy to speak it to anyone human, I've been talking to Skottie in German. I can use really simple phrases that don't mean anything at all, and get into the whole idea of speaking German.

It helps that Skottie is a dog, and also that he's as deaf as a haddock. I can talk to him all I want, he doesn't hear a damned thing, but at least he gives me some things to say before I try out a few greetings with, say, German-speaking consultants.

The phrase I memorized before anything else is, "Ich bedauere, mein Deutsche ist sehr arm.", which roughly translates into, "I'm sorry, my German is really poor." However, I'm not sure if I'm using "poor" in the right way. I could be saying that I have a German friend who has fallen on hard times.

Clearly, I'm going to have to take a course (or at least get a couple of textbooks) to get back into the swing of things, but I remembered that it's really fun for me to learn another language. I took two languages in high school and my first year of college, and did very well in both (the other is French), so I think it'll just be a matter of being committed to re-learning what I once knew, and then taking it beyond that.

I don't expect any sort of proficiency for quite some time, but it feels good to use that part of my brain again.

And with that, I'll wish you gute Nacht oder guten Morgen!