Nasty Little Thing Productions

Sin City and an Assignment?

Got an email from TCS Pitstop today.  We 86 people who are going for the training programme in Mumbai have been divided into groups, and each group has to make a presentation on Day 1.  I am in Group 10 and our topic is related to Coaching and Mentoring.  Emailing on this has started already.  Seems like a nice group of people and I'm looking forward to meeting all of them in Mumbai.

I also got to see Sin City a couple of nights back!  The movie was awesome.  Often, when a movie is made based on a book/comic/videogame, one starts comparing it with the source, and most often one finds several differences.  In most cases, you'll hear "the book was better" and in VERY rare cases, the movie betters the source.

No such difference for Sin City the movie — it's so closely adapted from the source books that I felt like I had re-read the books after watching the movie...  And this is exactly the effect that director Robert Rodriguez wanted to achieve, he calls it a "translation" of the books into film!  It's brilliantly done — you might have already seen several book-to-film comparisons of the movie, like this one from Film Rotation, but the attention to detail in the movie is stunning!  For example, "Skinny little Nancy Callahan" at eleven years old looks JUST like she did in the books.

For the record, the movie is based on three of the Sin City stories by Frank Miller (four, if you count the three-page short story "The Customer is Always Right", which serves as the intro to the film) — The Hard Goodbye, which is about Marv (Mickey Rourke) trying to avenge the death of Goldie (Jaime King); The Big Fat Kill, in which Dwight (Clive Owen) must dispose of a bloody mess, failing which the delicate truce between the cops, the mob, and the hookers of Old Town might be in danger; and That Yellow Bastard, which has honest cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis) saving an eleven year old girl from child molestor/murderer, and finding that he has to save her again eight years later (the 19-year old Nancy Callahan is played by Jessica Alba).

I've written about these stories in detail earlier, and I thought they were all very good.  Since the movie adapts the stories so closely, I like the movie just as much as the books.  With a huge star cast, amazing visuals (the movie was shot with actors performing against a green screen, with all the backgrounds added in digitally during post-production) and nice music, this is certainly a must-see film.

Vivek Janardanan sent an email with an interesting link.  This is the webpage of the Time Traveler Convention, which, if all goes well, should see people from various timelines in MIT on May 7.

posted by Karthik Abhiram @ 9:41 AM