Which is why he finally made SIN CITY with Rodriguez … in the dvd commentary, he even said that SIN CITY was “his baby” and he wasn’t letting anyone touch it.

He’s been wrong about how to approach this film from the get-go. He doesn’t care about the integrity of a character other than how he can filter it through his own limited perspective. He’s done it with Batman (and every character he’s touched in connection with that franchise) and now he’s moved on to the Spirit. It’s a shame. Wonder if he’d have had the balls to do something this hideously inappropriate if Mr. Eisner were still alive.

The thing is, I bet Miller would be squealing like a 6-year old girl if someone took one of his toys and screwed it up the way he’s obviously screwed up The Spirit.

The frightening this is … don’t they usually select the “best” scenes for the trailers?

I thought that was pretty funny.

@ Sphinx Magoo. He said that Eisner did a lot of hallucinogenic stuff. That’s very much right. Is that turning people off? I thought that stuff was spot on to the visual spirit of Eisner’s SPIRIT. It’s been years since I read THE SPIRIT, but I can tell you certain things about it that make this trailer look good. Folks on here probably know it, but I’ll say them anyway.

Eisner was all about weird perspectives and weird presentations. Check.
Hallucinogenic openers? I think it went beyond the opening often enough. Check.
Eisner also often liked to use The Spirit more as a point of view than as an actual protagonist. Don’t know if this will have that. (remember the story about the guy who could fly? The Spirit was in like two panels of that)
The Spirit got has ass kicked a lot. I have a feeling we will see that in here, too.

So, I mostly feel good about it.

Like I said, I read my Spirit comix YEARS ago, when I was much less interested in girls. Did The Spirit get a lot of action? Was it even implied that he got a lot of action? There were definitely a LOT of vampish women around. I just don’t remember it even being hinted that he was scoring. I remember him as being almost monkish.

Am I wrong?

If they changed that element… it could be either that:

A) Miller believes the Spirit was scoring and that Eisner just couldn’t depict that in a comic that went out in newspapers so Miller is setting the record straight.
B) Hollywood made him do it.
C) It isn’t even really that way so much in the movie, but the people making the trailer decided to make it look that way to sell tickets.

Unquestionably, the role of women in this movie is going to be the big topic in our little world, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Is it really fair to say that there’s such a gulf between Eisner’s take on women and Miller’s? I feel like that’s been the suggestions all along as this movie has been dribbling out details.

It’s true that Miller likes to portray women as literal whores whereas Eisner more or less just filled his pages with sexed up vamps, but… I guess I’m just saying that, because Eisner is gone and he’s one of the great heroes of our little culture, we are tempted to lionize him in all ways. Make him a prophet in things that he wasn’t such a prophet in. I just don’t think it’s fair to say that Eisner created self-possessed, in control women and Miller created whores. I think the character-center of both creators is considerably fuzzier than that and there are reasons why the women in both men’s works should both make people who care about such things uneasy and inspired.

I guess we’ll just have to see, but I’m gonna go opening weekend, you betcha.

Love the tie! Love, love, LOVE the tie!

I have it posted at

http://jokebooks.blogspot.com/

and there is, indeed, a commercial preceding the trailer.

Oy

I never thought I’d be GLAD that Will Eisner was no longer alive.

This can’t even be defended using the excuses people have been using to give a pass to Miller’s recent output, like “it’s an experiment!” or “it’s a joke and you just don’t get it!” Jokes fall flat and experiments fail, just like virtually all of Miller’s new work since the end of 300 (the comics series) has — a period of 11 years.

Simply put, this is not good at any level.

a) “Batman: Holy Terror”
b) The last issue of Frank Miller and Neal Adams’ run on “All-Star Batman”
c) The end of “The war on terror”

I threw b) in just to be snarky (I don’t even know if DC is still planning on having Neal Adams on “All-Star Batman”), but sheesh! the time to release “Batman: Holy Terror” may be long past. Any longer and it’ll be as relevant as Jay Leno’s Monica Lewinsky jokes.

*Shudder*

looks interesting and over the top and kinetic and like…comics in a way.

Hey, I loved SIN CITY.

Jimmy

wonder what this would have looked like if it had come out before Sin City

I know everyone remembers the noir crime look of the Spirit. But Eisner was just bringing that look which was already established in the cinema to comics. This… this looks really different.

I’m going to try and keep an open mind about this one…

Unless Miller’s going for a kind of Jack Cole/Plastic Man vibe where Denny Colt’s perceptions are so whacked out after his dunk in Dr. Cobra’s chemicals that he sees everything as if he were a heroic protagonist in a Fellini movie.

Either way, I’ll be watching The Beat to see what Heidi says!

Whether or not it lives up to expectations of fans of The Spirit, I think that the technically adventurous Will Eisner would have approved of the experiment. (That is to say, the style if not the substance.)

Whereas I will refer to it as “Alan Smithee’s The Spirit.”

Really? Me, I can only imagine wanting to see it if you had NO prior knowledge of The Spirit!

I might think it looks like a stylish, sexy, so-fucked-up-it’s-cool type of film if I wasn’t constantly comparing it to what I know of Eisner’s work.

If this is the type of movie Frank Miller wanted to make, why couldn’t he just come up with a new character? Or make another Sin City movie? Weird.