This the stylish poster of the film of three stories ('The Hard Goodbye,' 'The Big Fat Kill,' and 'That Yellow Bastard') of the seedy underworld explored in Frank Miller's Sin City series:

The poster signifies visually dazzling, sexy, cool, violence and deformed and soul destroyed characters.

However, Sin City isn't just the glossy sheen of Rodriguez and Tarantino.

Frank Miller is the cartoonist behind and co-director of the film, which aims to be a movie that captures a comic book panel by panel. Apparently you can cherry-pick scenes throughout the film that are composed exactly as Miller composed them.

I haven't seen, or read, the comic or deleved into the literary canon of graphic novels (comics for adults?), but I gather that there are seven novels in the Sin City series, plus one art book.

The roots of Sin City are in the mean streets depicted in the hard-boiled school of American crime writing. This includes Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and Dashiell Hammett's 1930's classic The Maltese Falcon, which was turned into a film by John Huston in 1941. Frank Miller is working in one of the basic American literary traditions.

Prior to Miller's Sin City series there was the Dark Knight series.

Sin City works within the dark, shadowy, nihilistic styles of literary/film noir. It is a world of brutal violence; the sex is passionate and rough; criminal activity and prostitution is rampant, commonplace and a way of life; the characters are psychotic.

'Tis modernity as dystopia. It is everything the conservatives fear most: their nightmare of a violent Hobbesian world in a nearly lawless urban landscape is a violent modernity that has become sordid and pathological. Hence the conservative response for more order and discipline to achieve security from fear, and a return to the Judaic-Christian tradition to give social cohesion.

The poster suggests that the film directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller has turned away from the roughness of Sin City comics. the film. It looks to be glossy, slick and high tech (digitally-rendered backgrounds) and disconnected from the everyday lived emotional reality of a violent pathological modernity.

A Frank Miller graphic:

The graphic cuts the poster in terms of form and content. It is far more edgy, dangerous and expressionistic. The form is the sendimented content of the German expressionist artists and filmmakers.

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