Comic Book Pain

In case you were worried that the Walt Disney Company was pulling out of the sick violence biz, today's New York Times will set you straight. Even though someone else will now be paying for Harvey and Bob Weinstein's gourmet meals (see photo), the new studio head, Dick Cook, reassures us that "family-friendly" Disney "will not be turning its back on the extremely violent fare that helped make the Weinsteins ... famous."

The new Miramax release, "Sin City," based on the "graphic novels" of Frank Miller, features "cannibalism, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, electrocution, hanging, massacres, pedophilia, slashings and lots and lots of torture."

For anyone naive enough to think about actual human suffering while watching images of "the heads of five prostitutes mounted on a wall, or a dog eating the legs of a still-live boy, or a man ripping out the genitals of another man," the director Robert Rodriguez (who, to judge by the photo, is just getting started on gourmet food) notes that the MPAA gave the film an "R" rating because "they got the stylization, they got the abstractness of it and it was obviously not a realistic movie."

Whew. But go easy on the red paint, Hans Hofmann, because along with buckets of "white blood, and yellow blood," this movie has "plenty of red blood." Why? The ever-so-sensitive Mr. Rodriguez wants "to make clear that characters getting beaten to a pulp were, indeed, feeling pain."

Bon appetit.