Critical, But Not Serious

William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offers one of the few negative reviews of Sin City this weekend, suggesting that, in giving Frank Miller directing credit, Robert Rodriguez is "cowardly shielding himself from the backlash.... Hey, this is Miller's world, not mine."

But don't confuse Arnold with the "Christian right and other voices for movie censorship." (Ironic, then, isn't it, that he calls the film "a giddy spectacular in which we sit back like Romans at the Coliseum watching people being decapitated, disemboweled, dismembered, castrated and humiliated." And hey, you like irony with your irony? The same guy wrote of Gladiator, "it delivers a particular kind of visceral historical spectacle that movie audiences haven't seen in decades.")

He doesn't believe in censorship, or that movies "motivate mass murder." But:

"I do think that a film like this, especially one made by a major director under the flag of artistic integrity, adds something ugly to the air for which critics must hold it accountable."

Oooooo! Watch out, Hollywood! The movie critic for the Seattle paper has given you an "F!" You have been held accountable! Not for your film itself, not the direction or the acting or the editing or the visual style, but for "the ugliness it's added to the air!" Not to mention that Arnold has called Sin City the movie for the guards at Abu Ghraib. (I guess that makes Roger "four stars and a big severed thumb up" Ebert head guard on the night shift.)

I haven't yet seen any right-wing Christian efforts to censor this film (those Bible thumpers have been rather busy lately), so Mr. Arnold's going to have to stand alone and shield himself from any Hollywood backlash. "Arnold? Isn't he that prude from Seattle? What is he, a Christian or something?"

Hey, cleaning up movies is his gig, not mine.

UPDATE: Not to let Ebert off the hook here; just a week ago, in reviewing the ultraviolent Korean torture/revenge flick Oldboy, the sweatered one declared:

In its sexuality and violence, this is the kind of movie that can no longer easily be made in the United States; the standards of a puritanical minority, imposed on broadcasting and threatened even for cable, make studios unwilling to produce films that might face uncertain distribution.

Um, yeah. There's that puritanical minority again, making life hard for artists. Just try finding a theater that's playing Sin City this weekend (OK, it is opening on 3,230 screens) or a Blockbuster that doesn't have Kill Bill available. "No, sorry, a puritanical minority was in here earlier and burned all the copies."