So, in other words, the sequel is faithful to the spirit of the original ...

It's sad and interesting to see how Rodriguez went from being our generation's George Lucas of vim and vigor to our generation's George Lucas, retreating into a green screen maze and the ego to believe he can do everything.

"But Dame to Kill For’s dialogue and female representation is so impossibly bad that it retroactively makes the first film, and the comics from which these films were adapted, look terrible."

This applies to Miller's work as a whole, I find. He seems interesting and inventive when he first works on a concept, be it Daredevil or Batman or any of his original stuff from the 80's, but the more work he does on it, the more you can see that all he has in him is misogyny and violence. And then when you go back and try to read the earlier stuff in the light of that realization, that's all you can see in those works, too.

@3 I'm cracking up at your Lucas and Lucas comparison. Comedy gold, man!

Im wishing that they would do a RONIN movie, get away from the noir and go full samurai sci-fi but if they did Im sure they would botch it and cast Keanu as the lead

Indeed, well played @3

Stop pulling punches and tell us how you really feel Paul.

I'm still gonna see it... because I'm a sucker for Eva Green and will pay good money to see her (nearly) naked.

It seems like the studio hasn't bothered doing any promotion for this thing. I haven't seen any previews, any mentions on social media. I first heard about this movie two days ago when my boyfriend mentioned it.

@4,

I'd heard from others that Miller was a misogynist, and even when I merely saw Sin City, I could see where they were coming from. The "strong" female characters in that movie are absurd caricatures, and the violence against women seemed excessively prurient, not sympathetic to the victims. I bet Miller likes to wank to rape porn.

So all I'm getting from this review is that you don't like the Sin City series anyway so of course you don't like the movie either.

Miller's writing of female characters throughout his work is pretty horrifying. It was actually while reading Ronin and seeing how he treated its female lead that I realized that he was just an asshole. But I was already pretty uncomfortable with his portrayal of an aged Catwoman in Dark Knight Returns as an overweight prostitute whose only contribution to the story is to get beat up, his introduction of the hooker backstory for Catwoman's modern origin in Year One, and how his 'revolutionary' run on Daredevil was largely spent on turning the character's love interest into a drug addicted mental patient. That's not even getting into how Sin City's 'strong' female characters are mostly strippers, or the shitshow of objectification him and Jim Lee pulled in All Star Batman and Robin. His work is just an unending parade of horriblness.

So when you get stuff like the recent interview where he out of the blue blames Rod Stewart lyrics about actually being friends with the women you're sleeping with for a 'crisis in masculinity' and the death of 1940's notions of manhood, it's not exactly a surprise.

"a child banging on a piano" - love this metaphor. Nice writing.

WHORES, WHORES, WHORES,
- Frank Miller

sounds like he never grew past the age of 15

I read the Dark Knight Returns back when every comic fan I knew thought it was the best thing ever -- and we can probably blame/credit it for the long-term trend where literally everything had to be "darker" and "grittier" in order to be taken seriously.

But I disliked it for its sour and vaguely fascist view of humanity. I didn't even see it as sexism per se -- just a really brutal, anti-humanist view. I seem to recall its main point being that all humans were horrible and the only thing to be done about it was for a really powerful, and violent, and yet somehow slightly less horrible according to the logic of the story, man to take charge and beat everyone up.

Miller's sexism and racism has gotten much more blatant over the years.

There's no denying that Miller is a self-hating, sickly objectifying man-whore with a prostitution fetish, but that doesn't mean he's without artistic credibility. The first Sin City was groundbreaking, a true piece of evil art, and unlike anything in the cinema at the time. Compared to the Hollywood formulaic, I'd even take Sin City 2 anytime (which I admit was pretty bad). And let us not forget that Rodriguez brought From Dusk to Dawn and also GrindHouse (with a little help from our little narcissistic friend). Do they really deserve to be skewered and seared in this way? Would cinematic history be less interesting if they had never existed? Despite the absolute atrociousness of The Spirit, at least there is someone out there not doing another Adam Sandler or Vaughn or Vin Diesel family movie. A little less coffee Paul.