Movie: 3D Sin City - A Dame To Kill For

It's hard to believe that the first Sin City movie was 9 years ago. I can't believe there haven't been many more movies made with the unique visual style of Sin City. I would love to see a superhero movie made with in this very unique and original style.

For those who aren't familiar with this style of movie, it's literally a comic book made with real people. It's very dark, it's mainly black and white, but there are splashes of colour. It reminds me a little of the Humphrey Bogart detective movies of the forties and fifties, but everything is hyper-real.

This film is visually stunning. It's also horrendously violent. People lose body parts on a regular basis throughout the film. The spurting blood however is white, not red.

The plot is fantastic. There are a number of sub-plots, which are mostly connected up by the end, but there is still enough mystery to open up the possibility of a third installment.

The casting is brilliant. Nearly all of the main characters are back, and there are quite a few little cameos throughout the film. Try spotting Stacy Keach. Powers Booth is just superb as a crooked senator, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin are brilliant as well. They are not playing real people in this movie. All of the characters are hyper real. Mickey Rourke returns as Marv, this time more as a good guy. This is a role he seems to have been born to play, to use an old cliche.

I know it doesn't really mean much, but the box office of this movie doesn't look to good. According to box office mojo, this move has made only 27 million on a budget that I suspect is quite substantial, where as the first Sin City movie made 150 million on a 40 million budget. I just hope that this doesn't mean an end to this style of film making. Do we really need a 19th reboot of Batman?....

Movie: Into The Storm

Hey, it's no Twister, but once it gets moving, it's a real ride.

I have to admit that I am a huge fan of natural disaster movie: the afore-mentioned Twister, Volcano (yes, the one with Tommy Lee Jones), and Dante's Peak.

Like I said, this one isn't bad once it gets going. It doesn't have the humour of Twister, but the visuals, and especially the sound make up for that somewhat.

It doesn't really have an all star cast like Twister has, or even a good soundtrack (the Twister soundtrack is one of my favourites). There is only one actor whose name I recognised, and that is Richard Armitage. I didn't recognise him at first, because the last thing I saw him in was The Hobbit, where he played a four feet tall dwarf. In this film, he is his full height, which has got to be at least six feet.

Some of the dialogue was heavy handed at times, but most of that was at the start, and was passed by relatively quickly. The plot is fairly simple. This movie is about trying to recreate the experience of being inside a tornado, and it does that very well. The movie proves that special effects technology has come a long way since the tornadoes of Twister. If you've seen the trailer, then you have seen a pretty good sample of what the film contains.

One thing that I thought was odd is that this film was not shown in 3D. If there was ever a film that cries out for 3D, it's this one. I think a golden opportunity was missed there.