QftWo 8/18-8/24: Imposters #66 - A Dame to Kill For

As before, Frank Miller's ability to produce fetishized images goes unabated. As I've said before, I'm a fan of a big contrast between light and dark, so this is quite pleasing to my eyes. The shading, the little flashes of red, the white of her eye. This is very nice.

The tagline, too, is pretty good. "Especially bad" means she's either done something terrible, or that she's always a bit bad and she's managed to outdo herself...

It bears keeping in mind, in case you don't know Frank's work or the prior Sin City film, but Miller has this trend of making the most extreme story out of a familiar genre or trope. So 300 becomes more than Zulu or Spartacus, it's Zulu or Spartacus on a potent combo of steroids and meth. So, too, Sin City is a noir film that prostitutes itself day and night to support its heroin/crack addiction. It's a caricature, if an occasionally enjoyable one.

When it works, it works - and when it flops, it flops. I know some of the scripting in the first picture was painful, clearly words that read better on a page than would be heard aloud.

But it's hard not to appreciate how the general sensibility and aesthetic of the noir/pulp thing has carried over into every element of the movie - including the ads...

Take, for example, how the font for the subtitle "A Dame to Kill For" looks appropriate for an actual pulp novel, while the "Sin City" font looks more suitable for a comic book. Hell, I'm just glad Judi Dench isn't playing the Dame.

Now, that poster above and to the right was in a movie theater I went to recently. The one below, however, is the actual subway ad:

And now you can see that this lovely shot of Ms. Green is just taken from a group shot featuring the whole cast. Or maybe it's the other way around - one of the advantages of a movie made entirely on green screen, I suppose. I just hope they went with Eva because she seems to fit the title of the film, not the fact that she's quite good-looking...