Review: Sin City

[kitchen_kink]

I'm not familiar with Frank Miller's comic series, but I'm familiar enough with the genre to know that the film adaptation is a shockingly beautiful rendition of the dark graphic novel form to the screen. It certainly blows From Hell and any number of other attempts out of the water in terms of its stylization, daring use of black and white and color, noir sensibilities, and appropriately inflated and cartoonish acting style.

Without having read the comic, I could still strongly sense each frame being carefully crafted to reflect a shot from the book, each character striving for vocal delivery that would bring their particular speech styles to life, each splash of color (I use the word "splash" quite literally here; most of the color choices involve blood) serving to further cartoonize the incredible violence being depicted. In the end, the whole film hangs together like a perfect piece of music, the flap of the cast's bevy of flowing coats forming a crescendo in the artificial wind of the eternal, artificial night of Miller's urban nightmare.

So why did I leave it feeling like I was going to vomit?



This film was, by far, the most violent I have ever seen. And yes, I have seen Kill Bill (both volumes), Pulp Fiction, Saving Private Ryan, both Heavy Metal movies, Fight Club, and lots of Cronenberg. People get shot full of holes, decapitated, bullwhipped, blown up, punched into a pulp, scalped by throwing stars, gutted by katanas, drowned in toilets, sliced to ribbons, eaten by dogs, eaten by people, gun barrels backfired into their foreheads, their heads mounted, their throats slit, their arms and legs amputated, their nuts ripped off...well, you get the idea. But the extreme violence is all comic book. Blood flows in white, red, and yellow. Decapitated heads come to life and speak. A freaky Frodo in a Charlie Brown shirt and white glowing glasses smiles beatifically while a wolf eats away his flesh in ink-drawing side silhouette. A Wolverine-like Mickey Rourke is shot, stabbed, and torn to ribbons, falls from great heights, throws himself through moving cars and is hit in the noggin with a sledgehammer and still survives. A minor character gets an arrow in the chest and looks at it, a bit worried: "Do you think I should see a doctor?" It's over-the-top violence that makes you laugh in places even as you cringe.

Yet the end of the film left me shaken, sick, uneasy in a way I found it difficult to explain. This was compounded by the fact that all over my friends list - not to mention all over IMDB and everywhere else - people are extolling the virtues of this film. The general public I can understand, but I count on my friends to be intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful people, and I'm a little surprised that so far, no one has left this film feeling disturbed the way I did.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to suggest that you're all missing something or that I'm some sort of more highly evolved thinker. If anything, I'm wondering if I'm not missing something. As I said, I haven't seen the source material, but my understanding is that the film is very true to it, so I doubt that would change much. And I've enjoyed very violent movies before without much squeamishness, whether the ultra-realistic warfest of Private Ryan or the blood-fountain kung fu orgy of ridiculousness in Kill Bill.

Part of it, I think, is the thought I've been having about film in general: it seems to be getting ever more violent. At first there was a goal of gaining more and more realism to the violence; now there is a trend of making it less and less so and instead, more and more spectacular. I have to wonder at this trend. I certainly don't want to jump on the conservative bandwagon that suggests that violent movies and video games cause people to act more violent. But I do wonder at how desensitized we get to violence as time goes on, and how that has escalated, given that what was considered ultra-violent twenty years ago seems tame today, and that every violent film that emerges seems to feel the need to push the envelope just a little bit further. What could be driving this aside from a feeling that audiences need to be shocked more and more, and that violence has gotten so commonplace that it has to keep going further?

What concerns me about this trend is that I still have the old-fashioned belief that violence (and to a lesser degree, sex) in films shouldn't be entirely gratuitous; that it should serve the plot and especially, the themes; that it should be there for us to see because some important point is being made. This is not out of some squeamishness or sense of Puritanical propriety: in the best horror movies, the most frightening thing is that which you don't see but know is menacing. In ancient Greek theatre and in Shakespeare, many of the horrors of war and death were described in great detail by messengers - partly, yes, because they could not be depicted given the contemporary theatrical technology, but also because the properly chosen words could help each audience member imagine his or her own personal version of hell. Granted, film is a visual medium, and technology has caught up with nearly whatever we'd like to see onscreen. But there still needs to be a judicious application of thought put into what it is necessary to show in order for a film to work most effectively.

Which brings me back to Sin City. In the case of this movie, I think part of my problem may be that it exists as violence for violence's sake. Very few of the characters evoked sympathy in me; I didn't get to know any of them enough to care, really, what happened to them. Mostly I just watched as three different brutish men attempted to defend and/or avenge brutalized women and/or really tough women from more brutish men, mostly by killing and sometimes torturing them. The one I could get behind most was (as usual) Bruce Willis, who operated within the rules of honor and justice at every turn, almost to the point of caricature - regardless of whether or not the law was on his side. But the real star of this movie is the violence itself, the spectacle of it, and the technical and artistic wizardry that makes it dazzle us.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've seen movies that operate through a continuous stream of senseless violence, and have not been overly disturbed by them. Which was what confused me so much about my state of troubled nausea last night. (It could have been the movie popcorn and pink lemonade, but I digress.) What made this different?

The answer may lie with the film's guest director, Tarantino.

In the sensationalized violence department these days, Tarantino is king. And yes, at times his violence seems to exist purely for its own sake. But just as the ultra-realism of the first 20 minutes of Spielberg's war masterpiece taught me the the true horror of that war (and thus, all war), Tarantino's special brand of violence, when done well, teaches.

I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time on video a few years ago, and found something surprising. I wasn't all that into action movies or violence, and didn't expect to enjoy it the way so many people did. Yet I found it arresting, fascinating and disturbing in an important way.

Anyone who has seen the film recalls the scene where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta accidentally shoot the brains out of a guy in the back of their car. The thing that surprised me about this scene, and many other gory scenes in that film, was that it left me laughing. Hysterically. And I had to turn inward and take a good long look at myself, and face the dark bits.

Which, for a filmmaker, is an excellent accomplishment. Pulp Fiction taught me that violence can be made funny, that for characters such as those he creates, this is the everyday world, and in that world, human life is simply held at a lesser value. And that I, too, can laugh at someone getting his brains blown out.

This struck me as somewhat important.

With Kill Bill, he did it again. I sat in rapt amazement, occasionally gasping at a light change, wincing as swords cut across bodies, laughing when blood spurted theatrically from the necks of decapitated bodies, breathing hard in vicarious exhaustion and awe when the lights came on and a hundred bodies (many with missing body parts) were strewn across a restaurant floor. Here, the violence was cartoonized, the effects of swordplay so unrealistically portrayed that it became art. Fake blood spattered floors and ceilings like a Jackson Pollack painting. Warriors spun with such speed and dexterity they seemed weightless. And some scenes were actual cartoons, crude animations in anime comic-book style. If Pulp Fiction taught me that violence can be funny, and therefore can cause me to look at the dark places inside myself, Kill Bill taught me that violence can be art: Wilde's old maxim transformed to "violence for violence's sake" - but with a twist: throughout, you can feel Tarantino's hand, his laughing wink. He laughs at you, he laughs at himself: none of this is real, he seems to say. It's okay to laugh, it's okay to find it beautiful. Look at me, pulling on the puppet strings. He is not just glorifying violence - he is commenting on it.

Tarantino's hand is in Sin City, and I found out that he actually directed the car ride scene in which Benicio del Toro's head starts talking to Clive Owen. It's hilarious, perfect and pure Tarantino, and it is the one thing in the movie that stands out to me as elevated beyond the dark hell of the rest of the film. Yes, the violence in Sin City is stylized, unrealistic, and at times, beautiful. But it doesn't teach me anything - perhaps because underneath the slick aesthetic, it still feels horribly, horribly real to me - all the rapes, filletings, cannibalism and carnality have too close a relation to real events to allow me to see them merely as cartoon violence.

More than this, though, Tarantino develops his characters. Bruce Willis' character in Pulp Fiction has a childhood, a legacy, a history, a goal. His character in Sin City has a wife, but we never even see her. He has a partner, but we only see him in his moment of betrayal. Kill Bill follows the revenge rampage of one woman whose story we know and sympathize with. Mickey Rourke's (admittedly brilliant) Marv kills, maims and tortures countless people for the sake of one whore who was nice to him, just because she needed protection. All we know about him is what he tells us; all we have is his present. Why should I care?

In the end of Sin City I felt a little like Marv: as if I'd given my time, love and energy to something that looked perfect, holy and blessed, but turned out to be an illusion, a commodity that gave me a few moments of adrenaline-fueled pleasure followed by a long, sickening road to death. The aesthetic, dazzling and well-done as it is, is like a beautiful man or woman with nothing behind the eyes: pretty, but somehow empty. It is telling that in the end, Goldie's twin sister Wendy tells Marv that he can call her Goldie if he wants to: Goldie was his perfect woman: blond, shapely, gorgeous, unconditionally loving - and dead.

Comments

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-Very interesting review, thank you.

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

I'm a little surprised that so far, no one has left this film feeling disturbed the way I did.

I feel that same way. I just didn't want to think hard enough about it to right such a cogent review.

[ivy]

Argh. Thank you so much for writing this. My friends too have unilaterally praised the movie, and I was going to go see it, and now I know I would have been horrified and walked out. I didn't know it was Tarantino, either -- I generally don't like his movies. Too much gratuitous violence.

[water-childe.livejournal.com]

See for me the violence read as as so overblown that it became almost a parody of violence. It was ridiculous. Sensationalism to an extreme. Because the comic was so faithfully and even slavishly rendered (I've read the comic, but now wish to re-read it) the movie itself impacted my like a comic book come to life. These were not real people. If many of them seemed a little 2-dimentional, it's because the actors were pantamining the actions of pen and ink people, not those of flesh and blood. While it was very very gory in places, it wasn't any worse to me then some of the classics of literature. It read like a comic book film noir manifestion of a Greek Tragedy.

[tisana.livejournal.com]

Tarantino only directed the one scene--the rest was Rodriguez and Frank Miller (arguably--he did the storyboards).

[water-childe.livejournal.com]

I also find it interesting that you use 'Saving Private Ryan' as an example. Real violence makes me want to run. I almost didn't make it through 'Saving Private Ryan'. I went to see it in the theater, and if I hadn't had someones hand to hold, I would have literally run screaming from the theater. I like splatter gore movies. Zombie films. Kung-Fu Bloodbaths. They aren't real. I know they aren't. Even more so because I know how the special effects, stunts, and even the make-up works. I've studied it, and have even had to attempt to reproduce some of these effects on a small scale back when I did make-up for a Halloween Hayride production.
Still, I wonder sometimes if people don't have as good a grasp on what's real anymore.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you for the well- written review and warning. I will NOT be going to see that! I have much the same reaction to on-screen (or comic book, even) violence. It bothers me a lot. I am very visual and the images stay with me far too long. Kill Bill did almost have enough redeeming (humor, commentary, distance) to make it worthwhile... but just barely, for me.

[buxom-bey.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it's not the film that makes you think, but someone else's viewpoint of it.

Thank you.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

I actually did enjoy it. A lot of it was the sheer aesthetic beauty of it - I found it very visually striking. But it was also the way the violence was done. I usually hate guns and the idea of them, because they're so distancing. I personally feel that if you're going to kill someone, you should have to pay for it at the very least by experiencing it, but being there, by being up close and personal. If you kill someone with a sword, you are involved in your action, and you can't distance yourself from it. If you kill someone with a gun, you are far away and all you did was pull a trigger. You don't have to feel it as much. That bothers me. I loved the way all the gun violence in this movie was up close and personal. It got rid of a lot of what generally bothers me about guns. In Sin City, when you kill someone, you are involved, you are there, and you have to go through thet experience and pay the price. That matters to me.

[madbard.livejournal.com]

Now there's a good tagline for the movie: "So pleasurable it will make the rest of your life feel like a long, sickening road to death!"

[fanw.livejournal.com]

I was not completely won over by this film either, and just for comparison, there were notably mixed reviews amongst my friends on LJ. Basically, I found it to be a very visually effective and artistically done tribute to a comic I wouldn't like.

I watch a lot of action movies, and violence doesn't twig me much. I enjoyed much of Kill Bill and certainly I'm completely at ease with something like Alien, but there's a big difference between these movies and Sin City. In S.C. there were a lot of elements of just outright sadism. The violence was there because people liked it that way, not because it was achieving some purpose. Feeding Frodo to the dogs and the many many castrations were just unnecessarily brutal. In contrast, in Kill Bill the Bride wasn't making assassin sashimi because she felt like it, she was doing it in self-defense and in order to reach and kill a single targeted foe. The justifications in Sin City were briefly passed over, barely mentioned, in the rush of gory glee to get to the "good stuff".

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

The justifications in Sin City were briefly passed over, barely mentioned, in the rush of gory glee to get to the "good stuff".

I don't agree.

I felt that the movie had a subtle but strong message: "It's ok to kill bad people, but you must be sure that they are bad." Dwight certainly has angst about whether the motorcycle cop is good or bad. He also waits until "the bad guys" have actually done something bad before trying to kill them. Marv less so, but we are given many indications that he is greatly unbalanced, even for a Sin City dweller. Still, Marv doesn't go out of his way to kill people, only harming those who impede progress towards his goal. He even has introspective moments wondering if his justification for killing cops is all in his head.

As a corrolary to this message was "If you harm women, you will die a gruesome death." which I loved. None of the male protagonists harms women - except the hit man at the very beginning and end, and he does so cleanly with no sadistic glee.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

See, I don't have the same reaction. Real violence or cartoon violence - if it serves no purpose, I'm not interested in it.

Still, I wonder sometimes if people don't have as good a grasp on what's real anymore.

This is part of what bothers me as well, and I didn't edit enough to remember to write it. As I said at some point, while the violence was very cartoonish, the motivations and the acts themselves (see fanw's wonderful comment below) are steeped in a reality that's unnerving. It seems like the cartoonishness of the violence is serving, not to comment on itself or on our own darkness as it does in Tarantino, but to cover up the hints of real violence in a stylish veneer.

This trend upsets me.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Again, I don't react badly to violence just because it's violence, or because I'm squeamish - I used to be, but I'm not anymore. I just have a problem when the violence doesn't seem to have any purpose.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

You know, I enjoyed it while I was watching it, too. It was at the end that I felt haunted and sick, like I'd had a bunch of meaningless sex with a stranger.

Your point about the guns is awesome and amazing. It is true: the violence here has a price. Thing is, it seems to me that the characters are more than willing to pay it - in fact, they mostly enjoy killing.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Indeed. You know, you always manage to find the funny even in my darkest entries. :)

In honesty, though, I was hoping for some remarks from you, since you were among the chorus of likers, I believe.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this - it touches on something I didn't get much into because it was already getting so long. Yes, the violence was enjoyable for the characters, and that disturbed me, especially since they were supposed to be dark knights. I *like* dark knights, but these were twisted ones who were (with some exceptions) less interested in the protecting and saving than in the killing they must do to get there.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

As a corrolary to this message was "If you harm women, you will die a gruesome death." which I loved.

I was *kind of* into this as well, but I wasn't crazy about how it messed with newer conceptions of "tough women," i.e. the whores of Old Towne. There's a weird thing going on in film with badass women, where they need to be just as sexualized and perfect-looking, but also have to kick ass. So now instead of being simple sexual objects, they're sexual objects with the added bonus of engaging in the same bad behavior that men do.

Granted, these particular tough women do so only in self-defense. But it's a strange trend, and it doesn't quite mesh with the "must protect women at all costs" thing. If you're going to make them as tough as men, when are you going to put them on equal footing with them?

Then again, there have been so many movies with "bad women," and they are always the ones who are tough, whereas "good women" have to be virtuous and helpless and saved by the male hero. This movie had hardly any bad women, and that is possibly progress.

[water-childe.livejournal.com]

I see over the top violence as a healthy outlet.
If there is something that I feel that I can't act out in a controled way (excercise, beating up my punching bag) a very violent over the top movie can help me get it out of my system. If I played video games (other then pin-ball ,skee-ball, or Ms. Pac-man) I might consider them an additional outlet.

I have lost some of my taste for splatter gore. I now tend to prefer Kung-Fu movies. The violence in them usually relates to skill in terms of using ones body and will as weapons. Shoot-em ups? Most of the time they don't speak to me as much because it's obvious that they don't know anything about the weapons they're weilding. It's just big guns, lots of ammo, not a lot of skill being exhibited. Never take me to any movie with sword work where it's clear they're just swinging things around like baseball bats. It's not just violence, it's technique.

[fanw.livejournal.com]

"It's ok to kill bad people, but you must be sure that they are bad."

Sure. I'm not arguing about this point. It's more HOW they killed people. Most of the killings in this movie seemed to be done with relish. The japanese assassin was just ready and waiting for "fun", Marv could have just killed Frodo, but decided to feed him to dogs instead, Dwight's lady laughing as she wields a machine gun. Justified or not, it really seemed like people enjoyed what they were doing.

[ectropy.livejournal.com]

Hm, ok, I see your point.

[wacko1138.livejournal.com]

This is definitely the best review I've read of the film.

While I wasn't adversely affected by the film at all and enjoyed the film, I do agree with what you've said.

I've read all but one of the Sin City volumes and reread the three used as source material for the film in the week leading up to the film so I was very clear on that material when I went into it. And everything is there in the books. The enjoyment of the violence by the protagonists, the excessiveness of it, etc.

Giving it a little more thought I realize that part of the issue could lie in the fact that none of the protagonists are someone with whom I (or most people I would think) can identify. There's no emotional connection. In the case of Kill Bill, one can, to an extent, put themselves in the Bride's place and so the violence becomes excusable for that reason. A film I just watched again, that even better parallel's Marv's tale is Man on Fire. Denzel Washington's character goes on a rampage of violence, including one bit near the end that would fit right into Sin City, but because the viewer is given the chance to understand him at the beginning, what he does never seems as excessive as what Marv does.

[chillguru.livejournal.com]

Basically, I found it to be a very visually effective and artistically done tribute to a comic I wouldn't like.

I think this is something that should be considered when thinking about this movie. It is an amazingly well done film version of the original source. I think it helps to look at the graphic novels, since the film is the comic writ large in three dimensions. There are lots of thematic and character based discussions that could be had about the film and the comic (and I must say I am enjoying reading those), but when Frank Miller created the original Sin City it was more as a glimpse into a highly stylized noir inspired tempest then as a parable or morality play. It had many elements in common with a lot of Miller’s other work, such as psychologically disturbed characters, hellish urban environments, and unflinchingly graphic violence.

Miller made revolutionary strides in graphic storytelling throughout his career, one the largest being breaking apart the traditionally linear frame-by-frame layout of comics. As the film is very true to the comic, I don’t think you, or K., are wrong in your impressions of style over substance. In some sense how the story is delivered is as important as the content itself in Sin City. I was delighted to see the makers of this film (Robert Rodriguez is a phenomenal artist IMO) pushing the bounds of their medium because this to me is just as crucial in attempting to remain true to the original.

Miller also pushed the themes and content of comics far into the realm of mature/adult content. There is an element of sensationalizing here. Miller is comic book artist and as such often dealt in big boobs, big guns and near caricatures of heroes, but in Sin City he pushes it past (and for some way past) the norms for the genre and many standards of decency. I once read a piece by Orson Scott Card on how to write realistic characters, and in the beginning he talked about SF and fantasy epics where your setting and your milieu are so massively in depth that it essentially becomes the main character. I feel that this is part of what is going on in Sin City.

The city itself is what is being presented to us, and all of the people and their actions are aspects of its ‘personality’. The city is wretched and corrupt and no one can escape that, not even those who would be its heroes. The ‘bad guys’ flourish in this world and come out more appalling then our darkest imaginations, and we can only recognize the ‘good guys’ as those who are the least morally corrupt. I feel that this is why at times the reader/viewer feels like we can see cause and effect unfold in the story, but we aren’t getting deeply into characters’ motivations. What we get are small glimpses of what happens to people in this city and how this environment damages the minds and lives of its inhabitants. There are good people here but they have only the one world to operate in and it is one of murder and carnage.

[unknownrockstar.livejournal.com]

you write way too well. heh. I don't know if I wanna see this film in the cinema now, my interest in it is that Jessica Alba plays an exotic dancer (so sue me). that'd probably more entertaining with the luxury of freeze frame control anyway. Robocop was probably the most violent film I've seen -I found the excessive violence in it sickening, although it did start to become funny when it got over the top, to a point. (particularly when some guy lost his head courtesy of a car.) still, afterwards I had an unpleasant feeling in my gut and I also worry films are getting too violent. not to say I never have violent thoughts myself, nor vent them artistically, I do sometimes, but I don't splash those all over film screens around the world.

I'm also curious about this film because I'm told like 'Sky Captain', only the people are real and all the environments they occupy, computer generated. I'm not really into excessive violence in films though. might take a pass. thanks!

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I agree about the emotional connection: as I said, there's very little backstory, if any. It all seems to exist in a vacuum. Each protagonist is very single-minded, and nothing tells us what is driving that single-mindedness.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

This is a very interesting take, and an excellent point, really. If the story is really about a city, the worst city that you can think of, then the movie (and presumably the comic) does a splendid job.

The trouble I have is that I can't get as interested in the life of a city per se as I can in the life of a person.

more as a glimpse into a highly stylized noir inspired tempest then as a parable or morality play

I don't ask all stories to be parables or morality plays, and I can see where a revolutionary comic artist would rebelliously steer away from that, seeing as comics are traditionally hero/villain stories. But I do require a story to have characters with whom I can sympathize. And that was really hard for me, here. Perhaps doubly so, since if the city is truly the main character, it is impossible to sympathize with its wretchedness.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Then it's a price they're willing to pay. So be it. I would also like to see films where they paid the price and had different reactions to doing so.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

This is a critique I totally agree with. It bothered me in the comic, too (which I read years ago). I loved when the whores told the guy to stay out of it while they protected their turf, but resented the quick turnaround where we learn that if women try to take care of themselves that way, they will screw up and need to be rescued by a man in the end.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you! I wasn't able to put this into words, but this is a lot of what I like about it, also. I'm glad you expressed it so clearly.

[chillguru.livejournal.com]

But I do require a story to have characters with whom I can sympathize. And that was really hard for me, here.

i think that, in part, miller does not intend to offer you sympathetic characters. this world is utterly devoid of people with redeeming qualities, and i agree it does make it extremely difficult to relate to them. we are so conditioned to want to relate to someone in a narrative, and it is an essential part of all literature/film. in this story though, it is nearly impossible to root for anyone unless we also want to recognize some amount of moral darkness in ourselves. for instance, we can't really want marv to succeed in his quest for vengeance unless we admit to ourselves that his victims truly deserve their fates.

i agree it is uncomfortable to be confronted with this. i do think it's a good sign though that you had the visceral reaction that you did to the film. i think it's an empathetic and compassionate response to seeing a world where these things are nearly absent.

i for one relish any work of art that can hit me so deeply, whether it be through beauty or horror, it's the intensity of the reaction that is important to me.

...i think i need to go see this movie again...

[chillguru.livejournal.com]

*blush* thanks a heap. back in my college days i did my fair share of academic literary and film analysis, and i really enjoyed using comics as my subject. it's nice to flex those muscles again, it's been awhile. i've really enjoyed the discussion going on in this post.

[ditenebre.livejournal.com]

...I'm a little surprised that so far, no one has left this film feeling disturbed the way I did.

I didn't see it in a theatre - my partner borrowed the DVD from a friend. I sat, cringing, feeling slightly nauseous in places, until I suddenly came to the realization "I don't want to subject myself to this -- there really is no reason for me to continue subjecting myself to this." I voiced that thought out loud to my partner, excused myself, and went to my very uneasy sleep. I get some of the things others say about the artistic expression and depiction of a city this evil, but I really am glad I made the choice to stop watching it when I did.

I don't need to abuse myself for the sake of anyone's art.

Pulp Fiction taught me that violence can be made funny ...

The same has been said about other forms of violent humor -- the Three Stooges and other slapstick, and even children's cartoons. Sometimes it seems there are filmmakers wondering "How far can we take this and still have them laugh?"

Thank you for this very well written review. I found it linked from your more recent review of 300 -- which my friends have already told me I'd never want to see.