Sin City Special Edition DVD (2005)

Among the more dubious practices in Hollywood is the release of multiple DVD's for a single film under the guise of being 'special' or 'extended' in some way. Not so much dubious in that they don't include interesting or entertaining new features, but that I find myself owning several DVD's for the same movie. A quick glance through my DVD collection shows 2 Dawn of the Dead's (3 if you include the remake), 2 Saw's, and now one more duplicate: Sin City.

Voted as Khyron's favorite movie of 2005, I wont say much more on the merits of this excellent and highly faithful comic book adaptation, but directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and Quentin Tarantino made one helluva cool movie.

So how does this new special edition DVD hold up? Pretty well despite a very annoying sound flaw.

First I'm going to talk about said flaw, because it really turned me off to the whole presentation of the film. This may not get on the nerves of others as it got on mine, but in the first of the Sin City stories (That Yellow Bastard, starring Bruce Willis and Nick Stahl), an ever-present ringing noise could be heard behind several pieces of dialogue. It went away before long, so didn't ruin the whole movie, but it drove me nuts trying to get to the bottom of it.

I went so far as to rewire my surround sound system to try to fix it--to no avail. I haven't ruled out the possibility that I got a bad disk, but I don't think that's the case. As the 2 disk set comes with a theatrical disk and an extended one--and the ringing is present on both.

Alright, so annoyances aside, the extra features here are dynamite. Most notable among them is the option to watch each story on it's own. In the theatrical version, the 3 main stories were intertwined with a short opening and ending sequence. Now you can choose to watch them individually and with deleted scenes added.

There's nothing pivotal that was added, but for the fan of the graphic novels, you'll notice a few items of interest. My favorite is a more light-hearted scene in which urban monster Marv visits his kindly mother's house.

Otherwise, the special features are all very Robert Rodriguez. There's a cooking lesson of all things, plus plenty of commentary (including one recorded at the film's first screening, so you can feel like your in a theatre), and even the option to watch the movie with green screens and no special effects. The later of these really helps you appreciate the work that went into creating the Sin City's unique visual appearance.

If you don't own Sin City yet, this is a must get DVD. If, however, you were a sucker like myself and eagerly bought the barebone's DVD already, you could probably do without it. But if you choose to get both, I'm pretty confident you wont feel cheated over owning two.

Rating: 4/5