f13.net

So you've seen it? I just thought the new previews (with more Sam Jackson) seemed pretty cool.

What's being pitched at the film's mostly-teenage fanbase is writer-director Frank Miller's adoration of women as sultry monuments of desire, mean streak nihilism, big guns, and portentous show-and-tell dialogue: "The city screams," whispers the Spirit, and then we hear a literal scream—just one of many examples of spoon-feeding that happen constantly throughout the film.

"The Spirit," graphic artist Frank Miller's first solo effort as a director after sharing credit with Robert Rodriguez on 2005's adaptation of his own "Sin City," has a single redeeming feature. It illustrates the limitations of the comic-book aesthetic on the big screen.

If we didn't realize this before, it's now clear: Movies must obey the immutable laws of cinema and cannot unfold like so many moving panels. For all its bold digital drawings, a comic-book movie must observe the narrative rhythms, scene construction, character development and dialogue delivery that cinema has honed for more than a century.

"Spirit" does none of this, and it is truly a mess.

For years now, I’ve owned a copy of “Battlefield Earth.” I’m not sure I need to explain to this crowd why, but for the newbs, I’ll go ahead and give it a shot. Both as someone who wants to make movies and one who just plain loves movies, I own movies that inform my ideas of what film could and should be. Films that share my sensibility, my ideas of romance, action, comedy, etc. Films that give that same gut reaction the 10th time you watch that they did the 1st. And then, there’s “Battlefield Earth,” which I own as the example of the opposite of everything I hold true. ...

And now I’ve seen something that has taken the top prize from “Battlefield Earth.”

If this summer's "The Dark Knight" raised the bar for seriousness, ambition and dramatic realism in the comicbook-based superhero genre, "The Spirit" reps its antithesis: Relentlessly cartoonish and campy, it's a work of pure digital artifice, feverishly committed to its own beautiful, hollow universe to the exclusion of any real narrative interest or engagement with its characters.

I won't bore you with too many details or jokes because my job is to inform you on the quality of a feature, not do stand-up comedy. 'The Spirit' is a film that no matter how bad it looked or how bad I heard it was I still went into with an open mind. I wound up getting my mind blown and not in the fashion I like. This film is a complete mess from frame one and not even worth the film it was recorded on which should be burned immediately to save the participants from further embarrassment.

The hard-boiled visual style of Sin City,with its comic book compositions, noirish black-and-white, and impressionistic splashes of color, now feels shopworn. Running gags limp and scenes drag on endlessly with little sense of rhythm, shape, or momentum. Miller’s screenplay oscillates sleepily between leaden camp, stumbling slapstick, and pulpy pseudo-poetry and Macht leaves a fatal charisma void in the lead role. Not even the presence of Jackson in a Nazi uniform late in the film can give this regrettable boondoggle a pulse. In comics, it took Miller decades to devolve into embarrassing self-parody. In film, he’s made that leap over the course of a single disastrous film.

The Spirit feels like the follow-up to Batman & Robin no one wanted. Main bad guy Samuel L. Jackson even spends much of the film indulging in egg-themed wordplay that almost inspires nostalgia for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s avalanche of ice puns in the unloved third Batman sequel.

There will be relationships that end because of this film, which ties with "Wild Wild West" as the worst first-date movie of all time. Even in these lean economic times, I would guess that somewhere between 25 and 35 percent of each audience will walk out before the movie is over. Throwing your $10.25 down a storm drain is a better idea; at least that way you won't feel the added self-loathing of wasting more than an hour and a half of your life watching Eva Mendes in the worst acting job of her career.

"The Spirit" is a loony, embarrassing mess that takes the late Will Eisner's classic comics creation and beats it senseless with a giant toilet bowl (literally, at one point).

The movie is a septic tank of vapid noir posturing, bad narration, bizarre pacing, cartoonishly hot femme fatales and ineptly staged slapstick -- in which The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) squares off against an ex-girlfriend turned jewel thief (Eva Mendes) and an eye-shadow- and Nazi-uniform-wearing villain named The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) over some supernatural treasure.
 There's not enough newsprint to document the endless, cover-your-face, can-I-get-a-refund foolishness that ensues. Miller gives George Lucas a run for his money in making Jackson and the rest of the cast (including Scarlett Johansson) look like dinner-theater thespians floundering in a world of green-screened art direction.
 Try not to think about the fact that future Pixar directors Brad Bird and John Lasseter nearly made their own "Spirit" feature in the '80s, because that will only depress you. Eisner is probably spinning in his grave with enough force to burrow to the Earth's core.

Miller clearly wanted to make an impression, and that he does. Maybe it's better to be remembered for one of the worst movies of the year than forgotten for a mediocre one.

We have our winning entry in the "worst scene in 2008 cinema" sweepstakes. It arrives halfway through the achingly poor screen version of "The Spirit," based on the comic book series begun in 1940 by artist and writer Will Eisner. In a Nazi vaudeville interlude, Samuel L. Jackson, dressed like Col. Klink with a monocle, shares the screen with Scarlett Johansson, dolled up as if rehearsals for a remake of "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" were starting any minute. They gas on about their plans for immortality, and Hercules' mystical blood, and various failed experiments while their prisoner, the masked, supernaturally hardy crime-fighter known as The Spirit, played by Gabriel Macht, sits there muttering how bored he is with their act. And how.

Hard-boiled and half-baked, The Spirit mashes vintage comic strips with new-fangled CGI, sucking the very life out of a mid-century pop icon in the process.
Frank Miller, who began his career as an artist for Marvel (Daredevil was one of his early assignments), now seems bent on transposing the multi-panel, word-balloon format of comic books to live-action film in the most soul-crushing ways.

Eisner is probably spinning in his grave with enough force to burrow to the Earth's core.

Oh come the fuck on. This just makes me want to see even more now.

Even the earliest trailers made it look like a cheap Sin City knockoff. That style doesn't work all the time, and it only works at all if the story(ies) does all of the actual heavy lifting anyway. It's like this generation's bullet-time.

Miller appears to have lived up to all my expectations for this film. "Sin City" was gorgeous and different and thrilling, with the weakest bits being Miller's contributions (i.e. dialogue, narrative, characters).

Can't wait to see this.

I'm not following.. What's the style of Children of Men have to do with any of this? What am I missing? It seems to have more in common with.. the Pianist...than it does 300 or Sin City.

The only people abusing this Sin City Noir-Lite shit are the people that made Sin City. The style of 300 or Children of Men is far more compelling, Hollywood just hasn't realized it yet.

 300 was the movie that finally took Top Gun's mantle for "Unintentionally Gayest Action Movie".  I
Children of Men was a good film.

Sin City was shit.  Cartoony pseudo-noir shit.  It caused me actual physical pain.  300 was the movie that finally took Top Gun's mantle for "Unintentionally Gayest Action Movie".  It didn't help that again, the dialogue, story, and script were all written for 12 year old idiot savants.

Children of Men was a good film.

I was merely speaking to cinematography/the style in which they filmed it. I wasn't saying they were alike. I'm not sure how you inferred that from what I wrote.

I'm thinking it was more than a little intentional.

Has anybody actually seen this yet?

I miss a good story and wanting to give a shit about the characters.

THE SPIRIT is not so muçh a disaster as a miscalculation, a naive assumption that because people liked SIN CITY that they would also like whatever other stupid crap this same guy tried to do in the same style.

You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach. It's like when one political party takes over the whole government. They start to get cocky. They lose track of reality. They go too far, so far even the people originally on their team get mad. The Nerdening of America may have reached that point.

I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of "geek culture," and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)

Guys like Harry and Moriarty started to interview writers and directors and to some extent measure their worth based on if they knew about comic books or collected movie posters or some shit. We're all used to these articles about, "Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes." And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.

I don't think Big Gulp got it.

Hilarious review of the Spirit (http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern/):

Even Top Gun Volleyball can't top Return of the King.  Or even Batman and Robin, although the latter was arguably intentional.  I'll never forget watching ROTK with my dad in the theater and having him turn to me saying "you read the books...are the hobbits supposed to be boyfriends?"

Even Top Gun Volleyball can't top Return of the King.  Or even Batman and Robin, although the latter was arguably intentional.  I'll never forget watching ROTK with my dad in the theater and having him turn to me saying "you read the books...are the hobbits supposed to be boyfriends?"

I actually liked the movie version of Galactus.

Not that the movie was that good, but the general idea of depersonalizing Galactus makes his role much more menacing. Plus, he looks fucking ridiculous anyhow.

They are much, much gayer in the books. To the point that I'm surprised some Christian group hasn't had them banned for having short gay heroes as the main characters.

NECRO!

Finally saw this on DVD.

Holy shit, the reviewers were absolutely spot on. This movie is fucking awful, awful drek, and I say this as someone who is huge fan of the character and of Frank Miller. Not since Dark Knight Strikes Back has Frank Miller been so wrong about a treatment of a character. The only redeeming quality is Eva Mendes' naked ass. She cannot fucking act her way out of a paper bag, but goddamn is she fine. The rest of the movie wasn't even good camp, it was just BAD.