Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
“300: Rise of an Empire,” the sequel to the 2006 Gerard Butler ab-fest, should rightly be called “300: Buckets of Blood” or perhaps “300 Sweaty, Screaming Men & A Lady.”
A parallel story to the original film, the movie shows what else was happening while Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, who only appears briefly in flashbacks) and three hundred brave men battled against Persian “god-King” Xerxes’s (Rodrigo Santoro) 300,000 soldiers.
This one is a showdown between the freedom-loving Themistocles of Athens (Sullivan Stapleton, from HBO Canada’s “Strike Back”) and Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green), and that old foe of democracy, King Xerxes. Once again the Greeks are wildly outnumbered but put up a valiant fight against Artemisia, who not only wants to beat the Greek army but humiliate them as well.
This is a manly movie, filled with super macho advice like “don’t get killed on the first day,” and “there is no more noble action than lying in the blood of your brothers.” It’s a violent, testosterone soaked story, drenched in gore and more battle scenes per minute than any war movie in recent memory. There’s so much combat that a fight choreographer appears to have called in to devise the one and only sex scene.
The amount of man flesh on display might shame most of us into renewing our gym memberships, but swinging the biggest sword is Artemisia. She’s ruthless, driven by thoughts of revenge and is an all round awesome movie villain. How evil is she? Early on she plants a kiss on the lips of a man she’s just decapitated… and gets nastier from there.
The movie mimics “300‘s” highly stylized visuals. Much of the film resembles gothic oil paintings, but the addition of 3D introduces a “splatter zone” effect in the theatre as gallons of gore are sprayed across the screen. Also, like the first film, slow motion is used to emphasize the action. It’s so prevalent that if you played all the slo mo scenes in real time the 140-minute movie would only be about an hour long.
“300” was a heavy metal blast of sword and steel, an epic story with larger-than-life visuals but almost ten years on “300: Rise of an Empire” feels a bit old hat. A great villain and some fun action scenes almost make up for the plodding plot but the brutishness of the storytelling makes the original feel positively light hearted by comparison.
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
