the cutting room

I caught Sin City on DVD the other night for the first time. I was very impressed by how well Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino brought Miller’s aesthetic to the screen. It was hard enough making the movie just look like the graphic novels, to judge from the making-of documentary included in the 2-DVD set. But what really impressed me, as a person who grew up in New York City, was how well the filmmakers enacted heroic physicality within the urban landscape. No matter where they grow up, little boys dream of having super-human powers and strengths. (Or else, invisibility.) There is a universality in that. But the things they imagine themselves doing with that power will vary, based on where they live.

Jeremy Irons gives his best performance on film (and, indeed, the best performance of the ’80s by anyone) as twin gynocologists who disintegrate after an actress disrupts the delicate balance of their relationship. Dead Ringers radiates a deep and numbing chill as it chronicles the descent of the twins into madness and drug-addiction, with peripheral horrors thrown off at random as a result. The absence of his signature flamboyant gore effects only proves that David Cronenberg…