Krenuo je The Spirit.
Neke reakcije, kao ova ovde, nisu baš pozitivne.
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An adaptation lacking 'Spirit'
By Steven Rea
Inquirer Movie Columnist and Critic
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.
Having collaborated with Robert Rodriguez on the green-screened, pinup pulp of Sin City, Miller takes his solo directing shot with The Spirit. It's a numbing adaptation of the old, much-loved series - about a domino-masked, crime-busting cop back from the grave - created by the late, great Will Eisner.
The Spirit stars the charisma-challenged Gabriel Macht in the title role, hambone Samuel L. Jackson as the villain, and an eye-candy harem of fantasy femmes (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega).
Miller's idea was to put them in cartoonish neo-'40s getups, orchestrate a few fights, and let fly with ridiculously lusty, crusty dialogue. After the actors' soundstage work was done, a team of digital artists painted in the green screens with noirish cityscapes and bold, stylized backdrops.
As for the plot: something to do with an ancient vase, the blood of Heracles, and, oh yeah, immortality and world domination. Ho hum.
The sleek, shadowy settings, which pay homage to 1940s and '50s B-movies in a fake kind of way, are matched by line readings that are as vacuous as they are arch. (Miller wrote the screenplay, too.) The nadir of knuckleheadedness is reached in a scene in which Jackson, as the Octopus, a bad guy with bad eye makeup, and Johansson, as Silken Floss, his slinky, bespectacled hench-lady, sport SS uniforms and blather on to a captive Spirit - strapped to a dentist chair and about to be injected with a lethal serum.
Mendes is curvy and vampy as Sand Saref, a jewel thief of sorts who knew the Spirit back when they were both innocent teens.
Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.
The Spirit *1/2 (out of four stars)
Directed by Frank Miller, based on the comic books by Will Eisner. With Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson and Scarlett Johansson. Distributed by Lions Gate Releasing.
Running time: 1 hour, 48 mins.
Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence, adult themes)
Quote from: "Alex"Neke reakcije, kao ova ovde, nisu baš pozitivne
Čuj
neke, čuj
nisu pozitivne. Svi iole relevantni kritičari koji su pogledali Spirita potpuno su ga pokopali. Naravno, ja neću ništa da pričam dok ne pogledam film, ali na osnovu svega do sada viđenog i pročitanog očekujem najgore...
Evo jedne dobre (dobre u smislu dobro sročene i relativno detaljne) kritike sa AICNa:
Q. What's the upshot?
Boy, those other writers weren't kidding: "The Spirit" might be the worst movie I've seen since -- what?-- "Turistas"? And if I start thinking too hard about the talent involved (or the former talent involved, or the dead talent involved) versus what made it to the cineplex, "The Spirit" might even elbow its way up to be the worst movie I've seen since "The Phantom Menace."
It's one of those painfully, jaw-droppingly, call-your-lawyer bad movie experiences -- the sort of flick where pretty much every scene is a complete misfire, and not in that so-bad-it's-funny way. The timing's all off. The actors look confused and embarrassed. And if you care at all about the source material, the movie feels like punishment, or the final act of revenge in some long-simmering Miller/Eisner feud you never knew existed.
As AICN readers know, writer/director Frank Miller is adapting comics master Will Eisner's classic newspaper-strip character for the big screen. (Here's a nice writeup that brings you up to speed on the character's history and importance; here's the Wikipedia entry.) Miller got the gig on the strength of co-directing "Sin City" with Robert Rodriguez, and also on the strength of his back catalog as a comics writer/artist.
But without Rodriguez, Miller's lost -- and as a storyteller, he's like ten or 15 years past his prime.
And so, in his first solo outing as a director, Frank Miller manages the neat trick of denting the legacies of two comics legends -- Frank Miller and Will Eisner -- in one excruciating 90-minute go. And because Miller slathered his creepy/campy fetishes all over someone else's character in a movie instead of in a comic book, he finally made all of his 21st-century artistic crutches and coastings a matter of national discussion -- not just fodder for a message-board thread where disgruntled fanboys refer to "All-Star Batman and Robin" as "ASSBAR."
God, I'll bet Lionsgate feels ripped off right now. Keep this man away from "Buck Rogers."
Spoilers henceforth.
Q. What's the story?
Eisner's Spirit was a former cop named Denny Colt, thought killed, who woke up in a cemetery and decided to smash crime in a domino mask, fedora and off-the-rack blue suit. There's a certain sneaky genius in the plainness of The Spirit's costume; it places the character in some weird nether-zone between superheroics and noir, which gave Eisner a sort of artistic blank check to do what he wanted. The character's exploits appeared in seven-page comic-book inserts in Sunday papers starting in 1940, and the generous format gave Will Eisner all kinds of latitude to play with comics language, to stretch the art form, to experiment. I'm guessing for a lot of casual comics fans, especially younger ones, "The Spirit" is one of those titles where they've been told it's Important and Seminal and Influential more than they've actually picked the damned books up and read them. If the movie changes that even a little, well, good.
(Though I was recently told by an anguished-looking comics-shop clerk that "civilians" are coming into his store asking for copies of "Frank Miller's Spirit" -- which is a bit like asking for copies of "Sidney J. Furie's Superman," as far as I'm concerned.)
With the movie, Frank Miller has basically done the exact opposite of what Eisner was doing with the comic. In his own weird way, Miller is playing it extremely safe -- cycling through his usual visual obsessions and ripping himself off and making the whole thing look deeply stylized in the exact same way "Sin City" looked deeply stylized. Miller used to talk about working on a "Sin City: 1940" comic that never came to fruition, and I wouldn't be shocked to learn he was planning to make it look a lot like this.
Miller has also taken the Denny Colt character and given him fast-healing superpowers, a black suit and a "hard-boiled" smart mouth -- turning Eisner's everyman into a cross between a declawed Wolverine and ASSBAR's Batman, basically. (As a friend put it after the screening, "I'm surprised Miller didn't have him say, 'I'm The Goddamned Spirit.'")
The movie opens with Miller's idea of The Angel of Death: a hot half-naked chick named Lorelai with a bunch of shit glued to her face. "I am Death, Denny Colt, you are the only one who has ever escaped my cold embrace," she says amid glittery light effects borrowed from "Xanadu." Then we cut to the outskirts of Central City, USA, where The Goddamned Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is getting in a knock-down drag-out fight in a cesspool with The Goddamned Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) -- a mad scientist with Cruella de Ville's fashion sense, a naughty-nurse dominatrix for an assistant (Scarlett Johansson) and a weird, unfunny habit of finding the slightest excuse to go on and on about how he hates eggs. During this opening fight, the pacing is immediately weird, and The Octopus hits The Spirit with giant wrenches and toilets and says "Come on! Toilets are ALWAYS funny!" and The Spirit hits The Octopus with kitchen sinks and says, "Well, I'll be learnin' you!" and the audience says, "Well, I guess this supposed to be campy or something."
It only gets worse from there.
Denny's childhood first love, Sand Serif (Eva Mendes), also turns up during this scene. In a wetsuit. With a gun. She and The Octopus are each after a couple of boxes of ancient mythical treasure inexplicably buried in the cesspool, I think: One box contains The Golden Fleece, which Sand wants because it's glittery, and one box contains the Blood of Heracles, which The Octopus wants because it will make him immortal.
Each villain makes off with the wrong box. The Spirit sort of investigates the case between bouts of talking grittily to himself. And a bunch of weapon-wielding women in various skimpy form-fitting outfits lust after The Spirit and/or beat the shit out of him. Sound familiar, "Sin City" fans? It's all really just an excuse for Miller to once again make moving versions of all the stuff he's been drawing obsessively for a while now -- women's asses, sneakers and boots, gloves, Nazi symbols, dinosaurs, bald guys, ancient Greek shit and fight scenes full of improbable straight-legged kicks, all of it colored black and red and white.
Q. What's good?
1. Gabriel Macht (or as I like to call him, "2008's Bruce Boxleitner") tries really really hard to find a coherent character in Miller's script, and he's going to be unfairly shunned in the weeks to come. He's especially good at recreating The Spirit's wide-eyed oh-shit-I'm-in-over-my-head facial expression that Eisner drew so well.
2. Sarah Paulson does just fine as The Spirit's long-suffering doctor girlfriend.
3. Geek-fave cinematographer Bill Pope ("The Matrix," "Team America") and a battalion of post-production PC jockeys do a skillful job carbon-copying the looks of "Sin City" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." (Is there an official name for this particular brand of mostly animated "live-action" movie yet -- like "Expressionism Plagiarism Priapism" or something?)
4. There's one scene (one!) that I thought kind of worked as intended: The Spirit's walking down the street in the middle of the day, punching out purse-snatchers, and he gives a TV interview in which he tells kids to brush their teeth. There's a mild opening-scene-of-"The Incredibles" vibe to the way it's done. However, even writing that just reminds me that Brad Bird and John Lasseter almost made a "Spirit" feature in the '80s.
5. There's a truck with the words "Ditko's Delivery Service" emblazoned on the side. Denny Colt mentions "Dropsie Avenue" at one point. That's kind of neat.
Q. What's just stunningly fucking awful?
Um, to paraphrase Fatboy: everything else?
1. The dialogue is just an endless crap memory of hard-boiled dialogue -- a whole movie of people loudly and rapidly saying stuff like, "You knew the score!" without any deeper sense of the history of the kinds of movies that dialogue is meant to reference.
2. Moratorium: No movie is ever allowed to "cleverly" reference the glowing box from "Kiss Me Deadly" again. Ever.
3. Samuel L. Jackson, like many of the actors, seems to be directing himself in many scenes and visibly loses faith in his director over the course of the production. It's terrible to watch -- especially if you know what a hard-core comics fan Jackson is. Imagine one of your artistic heroes casting you in a movie and then making a fool of you.
4. Who exactly is Spirit telling his backstory to as he walks home after the opening fight -- his cat? No one in particular? It's hard to tell.
5. I'd now like to describe a few scenes in detail. (Like the scenes you may have seen promo-ed online, these are actually worse in context.)
a. Miller is constantly creating images he clearly thinks are funny -- but he doesn't have the first clue as to how comedy is paced or staged when it actually has to move and cut together. One of the least hilarious recurring jokes in the movie involves a series of cloned henchmen (all played by Louis Lombardi) that the Octopus keeps killing in fits of pique. These guys are all grievously stupid, finish each others' sentences, and wear black t-shirts emblazoned with words like ETHOS, LOGOS, PATHOS, DIALOS and SOS; imagine "Don" and "Rob" from "The Dark Knight Returns" as written by a sozzled uncle who laughs at his own jokes, and you're starting to get the idea.
Anyway. In one scene, The Octopus orders one of these henchmen to commit seppuku -- which the guy starts doing, with a dumb blank grin on his face, kneeling in the foreground, the blade stuck in his stomach but no blood visible, lest the PG-13 rating be endangered. ("This kinda tickles," I think he says, the actor looking kind of embarrassed as he says it.) Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson are pacing back and forth behind him like they've been directed to move from point to point in a bad college art film, ignoring Lombardi and droning on and on about their plans (and eggs, I'm sure). It plays like Miller shot his storyboards and nothing else, giving the editors no leeway to find a comic rhythm.
b. Sand Serif lectures a guy about "making an perfect ass of yourself." As she says this, she is making a photocopy of her ass. No, really. The Spirit finds it later and immediately recognizes Sand Serif from it. The Frank Miller who writes ASSBAR wrote this. And he thinks it's hilarious.
c. At one point, The Spirit wakes up tied to a dental chair and says, "What smells dental?" He looks up, sees a swastika, and says, "Dental and Nazi. Great."
What follows is one of the goofiest, unfunniest, most ineptly staged scenes I have ever seen in a comic-book movie, and that includes the ones produced by Roger Corman.
Samuel L. Jackson suddenly stomps out in a full-on Nazi SS uniform and starts monologuing about experimental serums (and eggs) -- because apparently we need to know the secret origins of this character we barely care about. Jackson is flanked by Scarlett Johansson, dressed as a naughty nurse, and a bellydancer named Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega) who apparently loves to sashay around and kill men with a pair of Klingon-y swords.
At one point -- probably when Jackson was going on about runny eggs or Huevos Rancheros again, and shortly before Jackson declares someone "dead as 'Star Trek'" (???) -- Macht says, "Pardon me, but is there a point to all this? I'm getting old just listening to you." The urge to stand up and applaud was overwhelming. By the time Plaster Paris (Paz Vega) was dancing off into the snow in a belly-dancing outfit, carrying a couple of swords, I was thinking to myself, "This is the visualized inner life of a not-well man."
d. There's this cute rookie cop (Stana Tatic) who goes on and on about Sand Serif's "Elektra complex." It's the sort of weirdly self-congratulatory joke -- a nod to Miller's past "Daredevil" glory that only comics insiders will get -- that turns up all over this movie.
In another scene, someone sees The Spirit hanging from a skyscraper and says, "You'll believe a man CAN'T fly!" Seriously? A pun based on the advertising tagline from a 1978 superhero movie? Who is that gag for, exactly? It's like you're watching a very expensive series of inside jokes, or reading a really bad webcomic with a vast continuity and its own tiny and deeply insular LiveJournal community.
This leads me to my larger rant: Watching the movie, I really started to wonder if Miller suffers from that artist's malady where he's been called a "genius" and a "maverick" so many times, he's settled into a nice comfy couch inside his own head and is now perfectly happy cycling through a tiny set of visual obsessions that only he finds funny or profound.
This isn't the Frank Miller who wrote and/or drew dense, scary, funny, moody, multilayered sci-fi satires -- classics like "Ronin" or "Give Me Liberty" or "The Dark Knight Returns" or his staggering takes on Elektra and Daredevil. That Frank Miller was like the James Cameron of comics, young and hungry and drunk on telling bad-ass popular stories full of strong women.
Maybe Hollywood thought it was hiring that Frank Miller to adapt "The Spirit." What Hollywood is about to learn -- in a very public and embarrassing way -- is that the "Frank Miller" comics fans once spoke of in hushed tones stopped making good stories about 10 years ago, if you count "300" as his last ambitious book. It's worth pointing out here that Rodriguez was skillfully remixing Miller's 10- and 15-year-old material for "Sin City" -- material that gets weaker and weaker as that series (and that movie) goes on. (Seriously: Try reading the last "Sin City" book, "Hell and Back," and getting any nutrition from that silly wet dream of a drug hallucination of a rescue fantasy.)
Miller can still draw -- even if he now gives every character hands and feet so Looney Tunes large, I'm surprised the gloves don't have three fingers -- but as a writer, he's become reduced, primitive, a "hard-boiled" parody of himself. He keeps saying in interviews, "I just do the stuff I do!," but he's wrong -- he's doing less and less. The blown production schedule suggests he was going through some rough creative times while making "The Dark Knight Strikes Again," so I should probably cut the man some slack on that book. But couldn't he have just taken a break instead of taking a fascinating pop-art superhero premise and executing it without a single establishing or crowd shot -- relying instead on hammy narration, jumbled close-ups and embarrassing Photoshop filters to get the job done? Reading "Dark Knight Strikes," your jaw drops as Miller just plain skips over the parts of the story he doesn't feel like telling. And you wonder if one of the most influential comic writer/artists of the late 20th century -- the man who helped make comics safe for a more grown-up audience -- has lost his nerve, his mind, or just his desire to think things through and bust his ass.
Miller inspired a generation of writers and artists to take comics seriously with "Ronin" (1983), "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" (1986), "Elektra: Assassin" (1986), "Batman: Year One" (1987), "Give Me Liberty" (1990) and "Sin City: The Hard Goodbye" (1991). Now he just barely manages to write "All-Star Batman & Robin," one of the most stupid, vile and reviled Caped Crusader comics ever committed to print.
My point being: Hollywood just gave the keys to a major motion picture to today's Frank Miller, an artist who needs to get hungry again, a guy who now coasts on a greatest-hits list of pumped-up sight gags. And he fucked up "The Spirit" big-time, and took the late Will Eisner's legacy with him.
Warmest, Alexandra DuPont.
AlexandraDuPont@yahoo.com
Tja, ne verujem da je lošiji od Mumije 3, a čak ni ona nije sasvim loša.
Deo o tome kako je Miler u krizi kao scenarista je tačan, a podrazumeva se i da biti strip autor ne znači nužno i snalaziti se sa filmskom režijom. Videćemo.
Ja se samo nadam da eventualni neuspeh Spirita neće dovesti u pitanje snimanje Sin City nastavaka...
Turistas uopšte nije loš film.
Miller je oficijelno Prsao. Recentni stripovi su mu očajni, a kada sam samo video njegova obrazloženja za kreativni smer The Spirit pomislio sam da bi bilo dobro da Will Eisner ustane iz mrtvih i dođe da mu zarije zube u grlo. Pre par meseci sam napisao neki tekst za neku novinu (za koju ne znam je li na kraju izašla) obrazlažući zašto je The Spirit (strip) klasika i zašto Milleru ne bi trebalo davati da se sa time petlja, sve usput gajeći poslednji molekul nade da će me možda, ipak na kraju iznenaditi i napraviti nešto vredno gledanja. Ali, ups, izgleda da ne... Doduše, s obzirom da njegov aktuelni Betmen ne može da se čita čak ni kao gilti pležr, jasno je da sam se previše nadao...
Zao mi je Milera ali to se moglo i ocekivati.
Meni ga nije žao. Toliko je nosom zaparao nebo kada ga je Rodrigez stavio na špicu SC a film ispao uspešan da mi je drago da se malo spusti na zemlju. Ne da će mu to pomoći...
Docekace se on na noge. Ne brini. Za takve uvek ima mesta pod suncem.
Ma otkud ti ideja da ja za njega brinem? S obzirom da je poslednju stvar vrednu čitanja napisao pre više od deset godina, Miller je za mene odavno deo istorije od koga slabo očekujem išta svarljivo u bilo kom obliku u budućnosti.
Čudno je da se ocena na IMDBu poklapa sa ocenom filma The Shadow R. Mulcahyja.
Iako Shadow nije bog zna kakav film, ja sam njime zadovoljan i mislim da je to pravi način tretiranja old fashion pulp avanture.
Spirita je trebalo tretirati na isti način ali mi se čini da je Miler imao sasvim drugačije zamisli.
The Phantom ima još nižu ocenu publike na pomenutom sajtu, a i on je podnošljiv za jedno gledanje. Publika, posebno nešto starija mlađa publika, ovakav tip filma smatra neozbiljnim i sklona je da ih smatra lošim.
I Sjenu i Fantoma sam gledao u svojim mladim godinama i to su solidni filmovi.
Od CGI filmova u retro strip fazonu Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow je imao svog šarma i kvaliteta i pored falinki.
To je definitivno film koji treba pogledati dvaput, čisto da bi se razgraničilo šta su stvarne falinke a šta dio bizarnog humora.
Quote from: "Meho Krljic"Ma otkud ti ideja da ja za njega brinem? S obzirom da je poslednju stvar vrednu čitanja napisao pre više od deset godina, Miller je za mene odavno deo istorije od koga slabo očekujem išta svarljivo u bilo kom obliku u budućnosti.
Prelako ga odpisujes. On ima sta da kaze.
Voleo bih da imam poverenja u njega kao što ga ti imaš. Ali kako mu je All Star Batman & Robin skoro nečitljiv a naredni Betmen koga piše, Betmen protiv Al Kaide pod nazivom Holy Terror obećava da bude još nečitljiviji, kako će Sin City od sada pisati direktno u formi filmskog scenarija, nekako mislim da do kraja života neće više uraditi išta vredno pažnje...
One review to rule them all!! Evo šta kaže Vern:
THE SPIRIT
Yes, as you've heard by now, THE SPIRIT is a terrible movie. But don't fall into the trap I did. Just because almost everyone agrees that it's terrible doesn't mean it's funny or interesting to watch. I thought it looked bad from the trailers and really had no interest until I started seeing some of these reviews comparing it to various landmarks in bad movie history. The more vicious the reviews got the more I started to think shit, I kind of want to see that. People acted like it was some bizarre Ed Wood type shit that they couldn't believe they were seeing.
Well, there are a couple weird touches. For some reason Samuel L. Jackson's villain character, The Octopus, talks about eggs all the time. Seriously, he just keeps bringing them up - "I beat you like an egg," "I don't have egg on my face," etc. etc. It's worse than Tarantino's obsession with feet. Also there's a part where SPY KIDS style home computer effects depict a little tiny head attached to a foot that hops around on a table in front of him and he keeps saying it's "plain damn weird." I kind of wish writer/director Frank Miller was in the theater to experience the uncomfortable silence as the scene milked the "joke" over and over again for a couple minutes, clearly convinced it was hilarious.
The story involves a mysterious super hero dude called The Spirit who sort of helps the cops and gets in a fight with Sam Jackson and gets a toilet broken over his head. But the Octopus implies there is a secret that ties their pasts together, and then everybody dresses up like nazis and kills a cat. Also the Spirit's childhood girlfriend is back in town trying to steal the same treasure that would give the Octopus super powers or I don't know, who gives a shit. Not me and not you, I guarantee you.
Scarlett Johansen plays a sexy nurse or secretary who works for Jackson and drives him around. I like the girl but she has no idea how to handle this dialogue and comes off like an idiot. Eva Mendes does the same thing but, let's be honest, that's what she's known for. The police commissioner is played by the dad from the Wonder Years. I guess if I had to choose the best performance it would be this dude Gabriel Macht who plays the Spirit. He's kind of like Casper Van Dien might be after hanging out with George Clooney for a month. He does his best to embody the spirit of, you know, whatever this thing is supposed to be. (that's not a pun by the way, it's a coincidence.)
Some of the shots look kind of cool as individual stylized images, but this is clearly the work of an amateur director. There's just no sense of pacing, acting or storytelling. It's all the problems of SIN CITY without many of its strengths. It's Robert Rodriguez's cheesy tendencies without his natural born filmatist skills.
I guess I can sort of in concept admire Miller's dedication to his own stupid idea of what's cool. At least he doesn't try to copy what other people are doing that actually is cool. It's pretty ballsy to start out the movie with a personification of death named Lorelei and a long, melodramatic voiceover monologue about the city being the hero's special lady friend. It's a metaphor I just summed up in an overly generous 8 words - he stretches it on for a couple minutes, and then returns to it again at the end of the movie. "She is my mistress. My lover. My damsel. My lady. My fuckfriend. My booty call. My one and only love. I wrap my arms around her streets and run my fingers through her glistening chimneys. She is my city; the only one I would go down on. Ordinarily I'm not into that but for her, I would do anything. Sorry Meat Loaf." (paraphrase)
In the early '90s there was a small spate of these retro, defiantly cornball super hero movies, trying to partially modernize these old Saturday morning serial characters but also recapture whatever it was people might've liked about them back then, or something. So you had THE ROCKETEER, THE SHADOW and THE PHANTOM. All very flawed but also kind of fun. I especially liked THE PHANTOM where Billy Zane had the balls to wear a bright purple super hero outfit and ride around on a white horse in the jungle protecting African treasure from colonialists. I guess the Spirit looks more like the Shadow, but he's that type of defiantly old school super hero - a dude in a fedora, tie and Kato mask. He's a former cop who has mysteriously become immune to gun shots, so he decides to become a vigilante and a spy for the police force. Apparently his crimefighting mainly consists of clumsily jumping across roofs and stopping two pursesnatchers.
Okay, so let's say you accept the cornball retro super hero deal. Now can I interest you in a SIN CITY hypermacho hard boiled noir thing also? I hope so, because The Spirit is gonna constantly narrate and flashback and talk tough about "broads." When he disappoints his girlfriend by hitting on another woman right in front of her she will say "You bastard!" but then secretly smile to herself because she thinks it's adorable that he treats her like human garbage. I'm sure all of America will love the retro super hero/chauvinism combo but just to appeal to a wider audience let's mix in some juvenile humor like cartoon sound effects during fights, pants falling down and some wacky mentally deficient clones who wear t-shirts with their names written in bubbly cartoon font. That way we're hitting all the bases of all the greatest things that make movies awesome. Mask, broads, pants falling down. Home run.
It's all a bunch of tributes to obsolete entertainment styles that don't mix that well. Didn't we (those elite few of us) sort of like The Phantom because he was such an old fashioned boy scout? Would it really make it better if he was wearing that purple suit but lived in an exaggerated cartoon of a black and white city and there was blood everywhere? I don't think those are great tastes that taste great together, necessarily. Maybe in the nerd world of comic books people are more accepting of this fetishistic nostalgia passing for a story because they expect less from reading a pamphlet for ten minutes than from paying ten bucks and 90 minutes to watch a production that took a year and millions of dollars to make and doesn't have another installment coming for at least 2 years.
And maybe that's part of the problem, is that those other movies I mentioned looked like they spent alot of money and time on them. This thing would be really impressive if some dude made it in his house and put it on Youtube, but for a major studio motion picture released in theaters it looks bargain basement. Not even bargain basement, more like garage sale. It's suspiciously lacking in establishing shots, it always seems like it's in closeup because they only have a 3'x3' piece of brick wall background to put behind somebody's head. It seems like it's always CGI snowing but there's rarely snow on the ground. They must've been real excited about a snow effects filter they had on their laptop.
The thing I really couldn't figure out is Miller's obsession with fuckin Converse All Stars. I think him and Will Smith's character in I, ROBOT are the only people in the world who think Converse are all that fascinating to look at. I mean here is a guy wearing a suit, trenchcoat and fedora, and fuckin Chuck Taylors. It's like those dudes who wear a suit and tie but then jeans instead of slacks, and that's supposed to show that they're laid back. It just looks silly but Miller is so proud of it that throughout the movie he does a special effect where the soles of the shoes are stark black and white like a xerox. So it draws your eye.
I don't get it man, those aren't even good footwear to be jumping roofs in, the soles are so flimsy and the traction's no good. Plus, it's such an outmoded stupid visual cliche for a cartoon character to be wearing Chucks.
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.
As their generation took over the media and entertainment industries the types of movies, TV shows and children's comic books that nerds love became more widely accepted into the mainstream culture. Now magazines, TV shows and marketing firms try to reach out to "geeks." They seem superstitious about the geek acceptance much like republicans going after that evangelical vote. In the last year Entertainment Weekly has done cover stories or entire issues on the San Diego Comics Convention, the Watchmen movie, Dark Knight, Iron Man and probaly other ones I've forgotten about. And in their endless chasing of zeitgeist tail they end up believing these "fanboys" as they call them might be right and they better be covering all this shit from a "we're geeks just like you" perspective.
So when Robert Rodriguez made his movie based on the SIN CITY comic book, the table was set for him to try a pretty ridiculous experiment: why not, instead of taking this book and telling the same story as it fits best into the medium of film, dress up a bunch of dudes in Halloween costumes and have them awkwardly re-enact the exact drawings and every last word of the comic book using cheesy low budget special effects to make actual photographs into a limp imitation of black and white ink drawings? And in fact why don't I quit the director's guild so that they'll allow me to have the guy who drew the pictures stand on set with me and credit him as co-director? Nerds always complain about comic book movies not being faithful to the source material, why not make the first ever UNCOMFORTABLY FAITHFUL comic book movie? It's just so stupid it might work!
And I guess it did kind of work. I forgive SIN CITY its many shortcomings because at least it was an original thing to try, and I thought they were pretty good pulp stories, alot of it worked for me even though it looked like dudes standing in front of greenscreens, which in my opinion is exactly what it was. But if I may make some constructive criticism of the geek lobby - please don't take this as racist against geeks, some of my best friends have glasses - the motherfuckers are way too god damn literal. Always talking about faithfulness and canonical this and the original that. I understand being a purist but I think some of these guys are sort of obsessive compulsive about it, they focus on one meaningless detail and miss the whole picture. For example I swear to Christ (and Christ will back me up on this I'm sure) there was a dude in the Chud comments on a story about a rumored "reboot" of the BLADE series, and he said he would see it if they went back to the original source material and used wood weapons instead of silver. To him it was the material that the weapons were made of that was interesting to him in that particular story.
What I'm saying is maybe SIN CITY is a pretty good movie that gets a little too much credit just for being literal about adapting the comic strip. That maybe Nerd America is too willing to accept literalness in place of actual cinematic quality. Unfortunately I can't test that theory because this one is done in the same phoney greenscreen style as SIN CITY, but apparently the comic strip isn't so much like that. So of course nerds want Frank Miller's heart on a Lord of the Rings limited edition sword replica with certificate of authenticity for not being faithful. Okay, fine, but another reason to hate this is it's a terrible fuckin movie. No need to get into the specifics of the adaptation.
If you must watch it, do it in a safe place surrounded by supportive friends.
... u toku noći se pojavio dvd rip THE SPIRIT, obratite pažnju na darodavca, izdanje grupe DIAMOND ima neku falinku, dok je izdanje grupe PUKKA prava stvar...
***ako me zamolite, postaviću i RS linkove, kodirane, naravno!
Ne moraš da postaviš ovde ali ja bih ti bio zahvalan da mi ih dostaviš na PM!!!!!!!!
...fali mi jos nekih 250MB i skinut je... :lol:
Ja skinuo.
Iako veliki Ljubitelj ranijeg Milerovog rada na Dardevilu ,
postovalac Dark knighta i Sin Citya,
ovo mi je bilo ogavno u prvih nekoliko scena...
Misliiim, ni sva slova nisu prosla a meni je vec bilo muka od gluposti....Nisam ni odgledo film, premotao neke scene ,maltene na FFwd, tek kolko da vidim mozda nesto...
... i nisam video nista...
Zali boze utrosenog vremena za download....
:lol: :lol:
Ja sam ga samo malo prelistao i... da... :shock: