Todd’s Movie Blog

I’ve been reading quite a bit about The Spirit, not sure when I will get to see the film myself, so it may be a while before I throw my two cents about it out onto the web.  One of the things I’ve noticed is that most of the critics hate it.  I will give you a quote from Roger Ebert that sums up what most critics are saying, “The movie is all style — style without substance, style whirling in a senseless void.” Critics also complain that there is no sense of fun in the film, which there was in Sin City and 300.  I don’t know about the sense of fun they are talking about as Sin City and 300 are both pretty dark and  depressing films, they have humor in them yes, but it is a dark, dark humor that mostly revolves around hurting or humiliating someone.

But what I want to talk about first is the style over substance complaint.  To which my response is, well duh it’s Frank Miller.  Any comic book fan will tell you he’s work, from Daredevil to Dark Knight Returns to Sin City is all about style over substance.  What matters are the visuals, the stories and characters are just a prop to place the art work on.  So if Frank Miller is making a movie on his own then yes, it would be all about the visuals.

As for that lack of joy mentioned earlier, again this is Frank Miller.  His work is predominantly joyless.  His world isn’t one of good and evil, but a world of brutality and darkness.  His heroes aren’t so much heroes as just people who aren’t as bad as their opponents and usually tortured by their pasts, or to put it in cinema terms, noirish.  The perfect classic film noir example of a Frank Miller protagonist would be Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly; he’s violent, greedy and self centered, but has a deeply buried spark of decency that comes through at odd moments making him slightly better than the sleazy mobsters he fights. A bit of a digression I know, but I’ll go to any length to drop in a Mickey Spillane reference (Max Allan Collins would be so proud).

I think what bothers critics is that unlike Sin City and 300, The Spirit is a comic book superhero movie and as such he should act like what we have come to expect from Spider-Man and Batman instead of a film where, to quote Ebert again “people come and go in a dank, desolate city, where always it’s winter and no one’s in love, and their duty is to engage in impossible combat with no outcome.”

For many, this nihilistic point of view must be hard to take, but with the economy getting worse and now more violence exploding overseas, The Spirit could be seen as a mirror of our uncertainty and sense of hopelessness right now, much like horror films were in the thirties.

I don’t consider myself a dark person by nature, and I generally enjoy films where the heroes are heroic, like James Bond and Indiana Jones, but I will be going to see the Spirit anyway for two reasons.  One, I’ve always enjoyed Will Eisner’s original comic book stories, and two, Scarlett Johansson wears a lot of skintight, low cut outfits.  As Stan “The Man” Lee would say, “Nuff said!”

I know that this is a blog about movies but I have been watching the coolest show on TNT.  It’s called Leverage and stars Tim Hutton (the definitive Archie Goodwin in my opinion) as an ex-insurance investigator who dropped out of circulation and into a bottle after his own company denied his insurance claims which resulted in his son’s death.  Resurfacing with a crack team of criminals (all of whom he himself had chased during the course of his former job), he now sets out to help ordinary people (no pun intended) who have been taken advantage of by ruthless corporate  CEOs and con them out of their money, and maybe get them sent to jail.  Like The Equalizer and Vengeance Unlimited, this show is the ultimate revenge fantasy with the twist of the timeliness of making  rich business people the villains who get their just desserts (something  that would probably warm the heart of any Great Depression kid today).  What is great about the show is you never really know where they are going until you get to the end, each time at the two thirds mark you think that the villain has figured it out but then it turns out that was all part of the scam from the beginning and the real reveal is something completely different.  Kudos to TNT for adding another great show to their roster of great shows.

I have to admit, when I first heard that Frank Miller was going to do a film update of Will Eisner’s groundbreaking comic book The Spirit, I didn’t think much of it’s chances.  Who had even heard of the character outside of devoted Golden Age Comics fans, I was the only one in my group of friends who even knew who Eisner was.  Plus the early sneak peak trailers made it look like just a reworking of Sin City.  But then I saw the new trailer and I’m getting pumped.  But it’s not for the visuals, which do look stunning, it’s for the dialogue.  Who wouldn’t enjoy Samuel L. Jackson whipping out a pair of huge guns and proclaiming, “I’m called The Octopus because I have eight of everything!”  But the line that hooked me was Gabriel Macht’s as The Spirit storming out of the hospital emergency room, having just regenerated from massive wounds that would kill an ordinary man and demanding, “Somebody get me a shirt and tie, and it damn well better be red!”  I don’t know why, but there is something about his angry insistence on the specific color for his tie that just cracks me up.  Plus I like any movie where the characters look super cool tooling around town while wearing trench coats and fedoras, it’s the retro in me.