There's a lot of cultural cud to chew on in Sin City, an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel series of the same name and the most popular movie in the country right now.

For instance, it's the first movie I know of to use a series of comic books as the shot-for-panel cinematic storyboard to the movie. This brings into cinema many questions about the distinctions between the two forms and it throws a jackhammer into the framework of the auteur theory of cinema, the still prevalent notion that a director is a movie's sole author. This belief is, in fact, so much still in vogue that the Directors Guild of America recently expelled Robert Rodriguez merely for wanting to share Sin City's directing credit with Miller.

I didn't read these novels prior to seeing the movie; however, I really can't look at it from this new perspective, so I will instead stick to the old one and look at it as a film unto itself. As such, I'm most interested, both aesthetically and politically, in its representation of gender.

Sin City carefully, rigorously adopts conventions from the cinematic tradition of the '40s known as film noir. Thus, the subject matter is crime and the scenery is rich with murder, sex and alcohol. That scenery is expertly captured with low-key chiaroscuro (i.e. "shadowy") black-and-white photography that occasionally includes splashes of color to heighten the intensity of certain images and also to shimmer for beauty's own sake.

At the same time, Miller/Rodriguez carefully upend a different noir convention. In classic film noir, the sexually aggressive "femme fatale" is scheming, seductive and ultimately lures the hero into self-destruction. In Sin City, however, the sexually aggressive noir women are allies of the film's three cynical heroes -- violent meathead poets played by Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, and Clive Owen -- and help each of them to obtain personal redemption.

Willis' detective Hartigan tries to protect little Nancy Callahan from a monstrous child molester; Rourke's Marv seeks revenge against someone that killed his lover; and Owen's Dwight sets out, at first, to stop a gang of hooligans from committing rape.

Thus, the female roles have been switched from villains to damsels-in-distress. One might contend that this gesture falls back within the chauvinism it's trying to overcome since the women still have to rely on men to save them. However, this objection is somewhat overruled when one considers Sin City's substitute choice of villain: the destructive sexual impulse in men, which Miller/Rodriguez subsequently tie to political and religious corruption. As if to drive the point home, the film is heavy with both threats of castration and actual castration of sex offenders.

This was an impressive deconstruction of noir by Miller/Rodriguez, but they also manage to exploit the genre's gritty, sensationalist approach to sex and violence to an extremely entertaining degree for those that can stomach it.

The highlights are Miller's stark, morbidly poetic "voiceovers" and Rodriguez's skillful neo-noir visual translation.

I also loved the way Sin City launches right into each of the stories headlong, not giving the audience a chance to catch their breath between segments and its dark, mean sense of humor that I was ashamed to laugh at, but did anyway.

Still, neither women nor men can possibly identify with these super-strong, but paper-thin characters. And although the roller-coaster, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to cinema can work really well on first viewing, it falls subject to the law of diminishing returns (think Kill Bill: Vol. One) more often than films about dynamic human beings.