When people leave the theater at a movie screening, it means quite a lot. It perhaps means even more when those people happen to be film critics being paid to see said film in entirety. So, I was therefore not too surprised when I saw that the regiment of perhaps 10 film critics in Portland decided that this film was at best sneeringly laughable and, at worst... enough of a bomb to get the hell outta there.
The funniest movie departure, however, stemmed from an incident that happened before the screening. It seems as though a handlebar mustachioed bear biker-looking critic had a little spat with an older fellow, I think from the local daily about biker dude's predisposition toward bashing the film before it even started. Phrases such as "self-important" and "rude" were sputtered out by the older critic, and some of the others around us were literally standing back as though observing an elementary school fracas. "Ohhhh!" What made this incident particularly apropos here is that it was the older critic who ended up leaving early, the biker waving him mockingly away in the dark.
And why not? There's no question that Frank Miller's re-envisioning of Will Eisner's epochal and highly influential The Spirit is god-awful. That goes without saying. The few critics who ended up sticking around were unquestionably in consensus with this contention. Here again we have proof positive that just because someone might be apt at making fantastic commercials (Michael Bay) or amazing music videos (Michel Gondry) or, in this case, bold and innovative comic books (Miller) does not at all mean a good filmmaker this person makes. By the way, have you seen Madonna's directorial debut?
I haven't (and you probably won't either), but I have seen this execrable machination from the mind of a man who may be able to spill his stylistically chilling visions onto the printed page, but clearly just can't keep it together enough to put it onto the big screen. I tell you, I loved Sin City. It surprised me. It really did. I wasn't expecting much. But, what Robert Rodriguez created with Miller's vision and words was something that was fun and urbane, stylistic and well-crafted.
The Spirit is just junk, plain and simple. All popcorn, no caviar. From the man whose previous film-making exploits include the "script" for Elektra, we're left with a total mess and not a very beautiful one at that. Indeed, even those supposedly stylistic comic book-esquire visuals aren't nearly as stunning as they could be or should be to justify such a lackluster plot with performances that bordered on caricature in a well-worn universe that has already been equally mocked and embraced by supremely superior The Crow.
In the end, The Spirit is a scribbled laundry list of scenes that lead to nowhere. The genre- bending here isn't fun; it's so much "everything all at once," that it leaves one not even in a state of exhaustion, but boredom. In a movie where anything can happen, and where anything pretty much does, you start to disconnect, especially when you can hardly see what's going on through visual filter after filter and trite overuse of blue and green screen computer animated nonsense. Kitschy dialogue such as "With the Octopus, who knows how far his tentacles stretch?" or "Shut up and bleed!", we need to see something that also gives us some semblance of substance: put down the high-ball and let us in on the joke, Frank.
It's as though Miller and team sat around coming up with the most absurd gimmicks at the moment--a tiny foot with a head on it bouncing around a laboratory, a villainous sexpot who grants the last rites to a man she's about to have killed... while she Xeroxes her butt (I s**t you not), a completely out-of-place and baffling sequence involving Nazis from nowhere in particular, and a progressively irritating obsession with eggs on the part of Samuel "M************r!" L. Jackson. And not a one of these digressions goes anywhere, not a one does anything except make one realize that this really is a filmmaker who has no idea what he's doing whatsoever and simply had no one around him willing to say, "No, Frank."
Yes, The Spirit is terrible at every turn. I'm sure the national critics will agree with us on that particular score. And you might, too. But, you'll see it anyway, won't you? And as long as you do, you're sure to see The Spirit sequels one after the other. In the end, as one producer recently told me, "It's not about making good movies. It's about making movies that make money." It's a shame that no one told him, or perhaps Frank Miller, that there's such a thing as movies that can be both.
The funniest movie departure, however, stemmed from an incident that happened before the screening. It seems as though a handlebar mustachioed bear biker-looking critic had a little spat with an older fellow, I think from the local daily about biker dude's predisposition toward bashing the film before it even started. Phrases such as "self-important" and "rude" were sputtered out by the older critic, and some of the others around us were literally standing back as though observing an elementary school fracas. "Ohhhh!" What made this incident particularly apropos here is that it was the older critic who ended up leaving early, the biker waving him mockingly away in the dark.
And why not? There's no question that Frank Miller's re-envisioning of Will Eisner's epochal and highly influential The Spirit is god-awful. That goes without saying. The few critics who ended up sticking around were unquestionably in consensus with this contention. Here again we have proof positive that just because someone might be apt at making fantastic commercials (Michael Bay) or amazing music videos (Michel Gondry) or, in this case, bold and innovative comic books (Miller) does not at all mean a good filmmaker this person makes. By the way, have you seen Madonna's directorial debut?
I haven't (and you probably won't either), but I have seen this execrable machination from the mind of a man who may be able to spill his stylistically chilling visions onto the printed page, but clearly just can't keep it together enough to put it onto the big screen. I tell you, I loved Sin City. It surprised me. It really did. I wasn't expecting much. But, what Robert Rodriguez created with Miller's vision and words was something that was fun and urbane, stylistic and well-crafted.
The Spirit is just junk, plain and simple. All popcorn, no caviar. From the man whose previous film-making exploits include the "script" for Elektra, we're left with a total mess and not a very beautiful one at that. Indeed, even those supposedly stylistic comic book-esquire visuals aren't nearly as stunning as they could be or should be to justify such a lackluster plot with performances that bordered on caricature in a well-worn universe that has already been equally mocked and embraced by supremely superior The Crow.
In the end, The Spirit is a scribbled laundry list of scenes that lead to nowhere. The genre- bending here isn't fun; it's so much "everything all at once," that it leaves one not even in a state of exhaustion, but boredom. In a movie where anything can happen, and where anything pretty much does, you start to disconnect, especially when you can hardly see what's going on through visual filter after filter and trite overuse of blue and green screen computer animated nonsense. Kitschy dialogue such as "With the Octopus, who knows how far his tentacles stretch?" or "Shut up and bleed!", we need to see something that also gives us some semblance of substance: put down the high-ball and let us in on the joke, Frank.
It's as though Miller and team sat around coming up with the most absurd gimmicks at the moment--a tiny foot with a head on it bouncing around a laboratory, a villainous sexpot who grants the last rites to a man she's about to have killed... while she Xeroxes her butt (I s**t you not), a completely out-of-place and baffling sequence involving Nazis from nowhere in particular, and a progressively irritating obsession with eggs on the part of Samuel "M************r!" L. Jackson. And not a one of these digressions goes anywhere, not a one does anything except make one realize that this really is a filmmaker who has no idea what he's doing whatsoever and simply had no one around him willing to say, "No, Frank."
Yes, The Spirit is terrible at every turn. I'm sure the national critics will agree with us on that particular score. And you might, too. But, you'll see it anyway, won't you? And as long as you do, you're sure to see The Spirit sequels one after the other. In the end, as one producer recently told me, "It's not about making good movies. It's about making movies that make money." It's a shame that no one told him, or perhaps Frank Miller, that there's such a thing as movies that can be both.