The images were posted on Adams' website, where he quasi-explained,

I have never been able to bring my "A" game to Batman, to my satisfaction. Oh, a little here and there, but all out? Never, never. On this project? Yep. This is the Batman I believe in. So what do I, and of course the incredible Frank Miller bring to Batman after all that's gone before? Well it better be something that's pretty darn hot, Jocko, right?

He's actually been more descriptive before; two years ago, he revealed that Odyssey is planned as a six-to-eight issue series plotted and drawn by Adams, who defined the look of the Dark Knight in the 1970s, with dialogue from Miller, whose The Dark Knight Returns redefined the character in the 1980s.
Officially, the series doesn't exist; asked this week about it by Newsarama.com, DC Comics Executive Editor Dan Didio only offered a non-confirmation confirmation,

[S]ince it's never been officially announced, I can't really say if anything's going on with it... And if I had 80 pages in my drawer of it, right now, I still wouldn't be able to talk about it.

With Bruce Wayne rumored to be returning to the pages of Batman comics early next year, don't expect to see this before mid-2010 at the very earliest.

(Via)

For almost as long as there have been superheroes, there have been superheroes who were intended to be patriotic figures representing American values by offering up inspirational speeches, standing up for the little guy and socking Hitler in the jaw whenever possible. Considering the popularity of the medium during the Second World War, it's easy to see why Real American Heroes became so prevalent, even if they've failed to find so easy a purpose ever since (Although trying to do so has produced such great stories - and such sly commentary as Captain America's 1970s villains, the Committee to Regain America's Principles... or CRAP, for short). But this isn't a day to think about troubled times... so let's salute the brave, bold and... others... of America's Fictional Finest.

The Classics
Captain America
Still the best of all of America's superheroes - or, at least, the only one who's really weathered the years and stayed in print the longest. Sure, there was that whole period he disappeared after the War, but that's because he was frozen in a block of ice. Who would've wanted to have read that month after month?

Uncle Sam
Who could be more patriotic than Captain America? Well, how about Uncle Sam himself? Oh, alright; this character, created by The Spirit's Will Eisner, wasn't the Uncle Sam, but instead the resurrected spirit of a Revolutionary War-era soldier who mystically returns in America's various hours of need, but still. Look at that beard and wonder just who could argue?

The Shield
Created more than a year before Captain America, Archie Comics' super soldier patriot may not have the name recognition of Marvel's counterpart, but DC Comics is doubtlessly hoping that J. Michael Straczynski's upcoming revival of the superpowered military man will change all of that.

The Fighting Yank
A character so wonderfully named, he's been revived not once but twice in recent years, and by no less than Alan Moore (in a 2001 issue of his America's Best Comics series Tom Strong) and Alex Ross (in his ongoing Project Superpowers series). But who could resist the lure of a man haunted by the ghost of his War of Independence-era ancestor who fights for his country's honor?

Liberty Belle
What are the odds that a woman could have a spiritual connection with the Liberty Bell so strong that it gives her superpowers and the ability to fight Nazis? if you're a comic book character from the 1940s, apparently they'd be good enough for that character's daughter to take on the same costumed identity and fight crime with the Justice Society today.

The Forgotten Heroes
Mr. America/Americommando
Reason #1 to love this 1941 superhero: His secret identity is a Texan oilman out for revenge against the Nazis. Reason #2: His sidekick's name was "Fatman." Reason #3: His Nazi-fighting technique? Dying his hair black and whipping his enemies until they surrender. Why is this character not getting multiple movies and fan worship as we speak?

Miss America
Sadly unrelated to the above, Miss America gained her powers from a dream where the Statue of Liberty came to life and gave them to her, and thankfully kept up that level of weirdness all the way through her career, whether it was faking her own aging process in order to live a quiet life or making a new body for herself from space debris and renaming herself Miss Cosmos. There's something admirable about that kind of ingenuity, wouldn't you agree?

USAgent
A much more recent patriotic hero than most, John Walker hails from the 1980s and an unsuccessful stint as a replacement for Captain America that accidentally led to his parents' death. His success as a character is perhaps best defined by the fact that he - an American-themed hero with a very American name - was transplanted to Canada by Marvel in a desperate attempt to make him a success. It failed.

American Eagle
Marvel Comics' 1981 attempt at inclusiveness resulted in this Native American hero, Jason Strongbow, whose generic origin story (Gained powers in accident caused by supervillain, seeking revenge for a dead brother) and lazy stereotypical costume didn't hint at the potential that's slowly being unlocked by more recent creators in series like Thunderbolts and War Machine.

Star-Spangled Kid
DC Comics keep trying with this name, even if the characters keep getting popular enough to outgrow it; the first SSK became Infinity Inc.'s Skyman in the 1980s, and the second became the Justice Society of America's Stargirl. Luckily, we now apparently have a third in the Teen Titans franchise, even if she does happen to be martian. Does an alien really count as star-spangled?

The Crazy Ones
The Comedian
Sure, there may be nothing particularly American about his name - or even his outfit, most of the time - but there's no doubting that Alan Moore's Watchmen character served his country - or more accurately, his country's government - better than most superheroes. Not enough to stop himself getting thrown out a window, sure, but them's the breaks.

Nuke
Frank Miller's intentionally-failed attempt to repeat the Captain America experiment may have seemed slightly out of place in the classic "Born Again" Daredevil storyline, but there's no denying that his drug-fueled, crazed Vietnam-flashback rantings made him a memorable indictment of mindless patriotism in Reagan's America.

Superpatriot
An old-school superhero captured, made into a cyborg and going insane and murderous in the process? Erik Larsen's quasi-parody may have a history that's as ridiculous as it is eventful - and that's before you've gotten to the kids he didn't remember having and his half-martian grandchild - but we're choosing to look at him as a man who's just made a few mistakes, is all.

Major Victory
Leader of conservative supergroup the Force of July - Get it? - this DC Comics character was everything some would want in a true American hero: Charismatic, attractive, arrogant and racist as all get out. Never given to complex characterization, the character's descent into political parody continued when he joined a new corporate superteam called the Captains of Industry - Get it? - before, thankfully, dying.

Captain America
Yeah, I know; Steve Rogers isn't crazy, right? But his retconned 1950s replacement most definitely was. After all, how else would you describe a man whose take on American values was deemed acceptable by Nazi supervillain the Red Skull on more than one occasion? Yes, he may think he was a patriot - and, thanks to cosmetic surgery, he even looks exactly identical to the original Cap - but this guy is not the kind of hero you want in your corner.

WTF?
Yank & Doodle
Yes, it's a crime-fighting duo called Yank and Doodle. Even during their heyday of the 1940s, there's no way that kids didn't find these two America-loving teenagers more than a little dumb. Surprisingly, they've just been revived in Dynamite's Project Superpowers series... Here's hoping that new names are forthcoming.

Yankee Poodle
Well, what else would you call the world's most patriotic crime-fighting dog? Part of DC Comics' Zoo Crew, Poodle isn't even the most America-centric of the team... That'd be American Eagle. Who, you guessed it, is an actual Eagle. Stunningly, thanks to Final Crisis, these characters are officially part of DC's main continuity these days.

American Maid
Armed with a boomerang tiara and her quick wits, The Tick's occasional partner in crimefighting stands out as being probably the most capable of all the characters in the comic/show - Dressed like Lady Liberty and working for the US government more often than not, evil will never get away with it as long as she's around.

The First American and US Angel
Alan Moore's turn of the millennium take on the idea of patriotic comic characters was this unusual duo - An overweight, incompetent superhero (The latest in a long line of First Americans) and the former stripper who dreams of taking his place. Social satire, or serious commentary on the impotence of American masculinity in the face of an increasingly revelatory society obsessed with surface glamor above all? You be the judge. But it's not the latter.

US 1
If a trucker who can pick up CB transmissions thanks to the metal plate in his head, and then gets kidnapped by aliens before opening an intergalactic diner in space doesn't sound like the very personification of the American Dream to you, then there's only one explanation: You're not an American in the first place. But even that doesn't stop us from wishing you a happy Independence Day... even if it was independence from you that's being celebrated in the first place.

The Essential History:
Essential Hulk Vol. 5
Ignore the title - and, for that matter, most of this book (Although there are some great examples of 1970s Marvel water-treading here, and the "Counter-Earth" trilogy has to be read to be believed); all you need to know is that this collection includes Incredible Hulk #180 and 181, AKA the first appearances of Wolverine. Looking back at it now, it's interesting to see what's changed about the character (He's no longer as quippy, and the whiskers on his mask have thankfully gone), and what was already in place (He was called Weapon X all the way back then), but either way, you'll never look at the character in the same way ever again.

Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1
From fighting the Hulk, Wolverine underwent a personality change as well as a costume change when he joined the X-Men. This great hardcover collection of the first thirty-or-so issues of the "All-New, All-Different" X-Men (ie, the ones that you know: Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Cyclops, etc.) takes you back to the days when the X-Men was part Star Trek homage, part Legion of Super-Heroes rip-off and rewriting the superhero rulebook with abandon. At the heart of it all, Wolverine starts to gain the personality that we know and love today, even if his age seems to shift around a lot in the process. And the less said about his off-duty cowboy look, the better.

Wolverine By Claremont and Miller
Just reissued in time for the movie, Wolvie's first solo series brought X-Men writer Chris Claremont together with soon-to-be superstar Frank Miller in a story that played to Miller's interests, and forever changed the character. By building on Wolverine's already-established mysterious Japanese history, Miller and Claremont cemented the image of the character as a tragic hero fighting against animal urges to become a noble warrior... Plus, you know, ninjas. The new edition of the book also contains the follow-up to the story, the X-Men storyline that brought Wolverine back to Japan, and introduced Rogue to the team.

Wolverine: Weapon X
Weirdly enough, the most important piece of Wolverine's backstory didn't come from Claremont, the writer who essentially owned the character for his 17-year tenure as X-Men writer. Instead, artist-and-writer Barry Windsor-Smith was the one who explained what happened to Logan in the eponymous Weapon X program to turn him into the adamantium-boned former Canadian agent in this weird and wonderful story that kind of makes you wonder just what mainstream superhero comics could get away with back then.

Wolverine: Origin
By the start of the 21st Century, Marvel had decided that fans had waited long enough to find out about Wolverine's backstory (Plus, it'd be sure to sell a lot of copies), and so came up with this... and immediately crushed a million fanboy dreams. Were fans appalled to see their badass hero as a whiny kid crying when he first popped his claws, or was it just that no story could live up to the one in their heads? It's probably both; this particular origin was slow and more dull than the character deserved, but the fact is, fans really never wanted to know the full story after all.

The Inessential Good Ones
It may be somewhat blasphemous to say, but for such a great character, Wolverine has appeared in an incredible number of shitty stories. Yes, he may be popular enough to appear in several titles each month, alongside any number of special editions and guest-spots in other people's books, but when it comes to truly great stories about the character...? They're not exactly piling up out there. But here're some worth checking out.

Essential Wolverine Vol. 1
The first couple of years of Wolverine's solo monthly series saw various creators try and work out what to do with the character, and this black and white collection is the best way to watch them do it. From Chris Claremont's Casablanca riff to Archie Goodwin and John Byrne's more feral take, different sides of the character are showcased throughout, but my favorite is Peter David and John Buscema's storyline, which pretty much pretends that he's Indiana Jones with claws and makes fun of him all the way through.

Essential X-Men Vol. 7
Again, feel free to ignore a lot of this book (Although it's right in my nostalgic sweetspot, as the X-Men try and rebuild themselves after the mutant massacre and end up saving the world and dying); the story you really want to check out is Uncanny X-Men Annual #11, where Wolverine goes up against the ultimate enemy and ends up with godlike powers. Maybe it's my inner 12 year old speaking, but this still seems like the ultimate "Wolverine As More Than Just A Killing Machine" story to me, even more than 20 years later.

Wolverine: Not Dead Yet
Warren Ellis takes on Wolverine and basically turns him into the star of the greatest John Woo action movie never made. Thrill to the incredible stunts and impressive action set pieces, ably illustrated by a young Lenil Yu (who'd go on to make his name on last year's Secret Invasion series), try to work out just who the bad guy is, and more importantly, enjoy the fast moving plot that ignores all of the cliches that the character had accumulated by this point in his history.

Wolverine: Enemy Of The State
Yet more Wolverine as action movie star, as Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. spend twelve issues pitting the character against... well, almost everyone else in the entire Marvel Universe, thanks to some brainwashing, some undead magic McGuffins and, of course, ninjas. It's like "Wolverine's Greatest Hits," only stupid, and yet that somehow completely works for the character. After reading this, X-Men Origins: Wolverine will seem like a letdown, because there aren't enough explosions sending characters flying into the air to match the levels of dumb excitement contained herein.

Longer version: Originally the result of Moore looking to revitalize characters purchased from the defunct publisher Carlton Comics for DC Comics - characters who later found their way into the regular DC Universe such as the Question, Captain Atom and Peacemaker - in a similar way to which he had approached Swamp Thing and Marvelman/Miracleman (both of which he has won industry awards for), Watchmen grew in terms of scope and ambition as Moore and Gibbons worked on the series, eventually becoming a series that would redefine the superhero genre forever... much to the creators' upset. Aiming to create, in Moore's words, the superhero version of Moby Dick, the two veterans of British SF comic 2000AD set out to make a book that required multiple re-readings and tried to redefine the technical boundaries of the comic medium; the series is structurally complex in ways that are still groundbreaking, from the metatextual comic-within-the-comic Tales From The Black Freighter to the complex use of visual metaphors throughout the book (most obviously in the fifth chapter's visual symmetry).

Sadly, neither the technical brilliance nor the ambition of the creators became the lesson learned from Watchmen's success; instead, the book - and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, also published by DC in 1986 - ushered in a spate of "grim and gritty" superhero stories that aped the story's tone without understanding the intelligence, or humanity, that lay underneath. Moore has since decried Watchmen's influence within the genre:

The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine.

Nonetheless, the book was a critical and commercial success unlike any other. A multiple award-winner within the comic industry, the book has also been recognized in the mainstream; Time Magazine called it one of the best 100 English-language novels written since 1923 and Entertainment Weekly said it was "the greatest superhero story ever told" and one of the best 50 novels of the last 25 years. The collected edition has remained a top seller since it was released (outselling every other graphic novel released last year, for example), and it will likely always be one of - if not the comic that other superhero comics will be compared with in terms of content, technique, and critical and commercial success.

Digital Spy reports that the occasional auteur is "polishing" the script for a sequel to Zack Snyder's adaptation of his sword and sandals epic, while Sin City 2 is a much more immediate concern:

The word I have heard is that we are going to get into production in April and I can't wait.

While Robert Rodriguez will be returning to co-direct Sin City 2 (based on the A Dame To Kill For series), it's still uncertain whether or not Snyder would be returning for a second 300 project; he may still be tied up in court for Watchmen, after all.

Miller talks 'Sin City', '300' sequels [Digital Spy]

Maybe it was the appalling reviews, or the unconvincing trailers. Perhaps a nation's theatergoers just realized that even Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories would be a better way of spending an evening. Whatever the reason, Miller's movie version of Will Eisner's classic comic earned only $3,825,000 on its first day of release, coming in below movies like The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button ($11,700,000), Tom Cruise's Nazi's Aren't All Bad Honest movie Valkyrie ($8,350,000) and the surprising hit of the day, Marley And Me ($14,600,000). It even ranked lower than movies that had been released last weekend (Yes Man and Seven Pounds, to be specific).

We can only hope that this poor opening - and presumed subsequent disappointing box office, as I can't see this movie suddenly becoming a hit based on word of mouth - means that TPTB will rethink their plan to let Miller recreate Buck Rogers for a new generation.

[Box Office Mojo]

If Sin City was located in the scariest darkest portion of New York, then The Spirit's home turf is Connecticut. The monochrome style of Miller's movie makes you feel like you're watching another Sin City chapter, but this time on the good side of the tracks.

An all black-and-red palate doesn't bother me. In fact, I was amazed by Sin City's ability to burn images into my brain. I will forever remember Becky's glowing cross and earring set. Alas, the super-dark world of The Spirit never really pans out wide enough for something in CG motion to have that sort of delicate touch. Mind you this isn't a knock at the violence, as The Spirit never actually tries to be a violent film, but it looks so much like Sin City, you can't help but feel you're trapped in some terrible suburb.





Does it look like hell all the time? Certainly not. But was it distracting? Absolutely. Like one of the Spirit's many cats, I was easily distracted like a toy string by our heroe's red CG tie, along with the zoomy lines that followed Samuel L. Jackson around. But a few splatters of super red blood did remind me of the ink-on-film look they were striving for.

The Spirit follows a crusading cop named Denny Colt, who swears to protect his greatest love of all, Central City. Colt dies, but then he rises to the grave as a superhero. Sadly, the movie's lead, Gabriel Macht, never sells me on the fact that he was a super-anything. While he looks quite lovely without his shirt (which luckily takes up a large part of the movie), the Spirit's legendary sexual swagger is always just out of Macht's reach. I blame this on two things: his too-innocent-looking face, and the god-awful dialog he has to deliver. It never works, not once. I was completely ready for a hot one liner to drip from Macht's mouth, but instead he just stands there trading boring quips, or even non-sequiturs, while women around him acted much more aroused or interested than he did, despite his lover-of-women rep. Case in point:





I wanted to root for Central City's Spirit, but the only times I found a connection with this new actor was when he was paired up with the police commissioner Dolan. The hard nosed cop, who seems to be Spirit's only confidant, is played by the incomparable Dan Lauria - or, as we all know him, the dad from Wonder Years. Lauria was an absolute pleasure to watch. He encompassed the noir style that Miller was so desperately trying to force on screen, right down to his crinkled trench coat. This man is a gem, and needs to be in a detective movie/series, stat. He even works the silly one-liner fight dialogues into somewhat believable arguments between himself and his ally, the vigilante Spirit. But despite the moments of fun between those two, not all the guns (and there were plenty of them) in The Spirit could protect us from Samuel L. Jackson's interpretation of the villainous Octopus.

Our superhero patrols the land looking for eight-limbed trouble, and soon enough, he finds it. For the first 15 hours of this movie (well that's how it felt) Spirit launches into an all out battle of fists and toilets, while breaking up his evil nemesis' plans to drink the blood of Hercules (and become immortal). As I've said before, slapstick is an art, and combining slapstick and fighting apparently takes a lot more time than they were willing to spend. Instead, Jackson howls and shrieks at the camera, as if overcompensating for his lack of white gloves, and the Spirit punches the same spot over and over. It's tedious and feels like improv.

As the first actual realization of this never-before-seen bad guy, Jackson takes his character to a whole new level of crazy town, terrible eyeliner aside. His insane monologues reel out of control as he spews off putting lines like "deader than Star Trek" and obsesses about not having egg on his face, completely taking you out of the moment. Granted when coupled with his sidekick Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) the two seem to bring out the best in each other, and they nail the infamous Nazi torture scene. But the minute you separate this Miller-dubbed "Lucy and Ricky" team, it's all downhill for both of them. Jackson's madder than hell act starts to wear thin, waiting for the next actual funny moment.





When Scarjo and her cleavage work on their own, she joins the ranks of the other women in this film - as convenient plot points to move the story along. Characters like Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega) the angel of death Lorelei Rox (Jaime King) and Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson) are throw-away additions to the male team. They are merely there to prove that Spirit is sexy, because they all want in his pants. Also, Ellen is supposedly Spirit's ex-squeeze when he was Denny Colt, and you're telling me that not only does she have very limited pull over his actions but that she can't tell her dead boy-toy is standing right in front of her? (It's not that good of a mask.)

The film goes to great flashbacky lengths to establish Sand Saref's (Eva Mendes) character but the film loses me when she xeroxes her butt, allowing Spirit to use it as a mug shot around town. Oh, the little-person bellhop recognizes it, because he's short - get it? Get it???? While it's fun to see young Saref, like in the panels, and it made her diamond-thief-hunting MO slightly believable, the film cancels out all this work by limiting anything interesting the adult Saref gets to contribute, besides being a towel-dropping, butt-xeroxing gold-digger.





All in all, the ladies look lovely, and you can't deny the costumes are a lot of fun. But their characters are flat. And while watching Scarjo and Jackson prance about in SS Uniforms at the expense of some poor kitties is a really funny, demented scene, it in no way shape or form makes up for the rest of the film. The green-screen really takes its toll on the actors. You can clearly tell which sequences were shot separately, or together. The film is left feeling disjointed, and perhaps that's what's to blame for the missing connection with the audience.





The final question I was left with was: Who is going to go see this film? I can't imagine hardcore Will Eisner fans wanting to see a Sin City-esque adaptation of their beloved Spirit, and it's not mainstream enough to pull in a wide audience.

Bottom line: it's a hero no one really knows anything about, and not even Scarjo's lady lumps will be enough to pull in real numbers. So what is it? A giant ad for Bulgari jewels? The Spirit is so wrapped up in being a monochrome, funny-ha-ha, camp film, it forgot to include character development and plot that might bring in a wider audience. With a few more edits and people above Miller checking the direction and flow of this film, this could have been the new cult bad movie I've been looking for. But as it stands now, The Spirit is a parody of this mans appeal, and not in a good way. Frank Miller out-Frank-Millered himself.

Doing promotional interviews for next year's Watchmen movie, Gibbons hinted that there may be a movie in the offing for his co-creation with Miller, Martha Washington:

Frank's enjoying a certain amount of success in Hollywood and I wouldn't be surprised if something happens with that. I think that would make a great movie. People misunderstand Frank, they think he's very grim and right-wing, but he's got his tongue very firmly in his cheek. Martha Washington is a war story but it's quite satirical and I think has a strange resonance with what's happening in the world today.

If there is any way that we can make this happen - and bring the series' oddball collection of characters, like "the Aryan Thrust," an all-gay neo-Nazi terrorist organization, to a wider audience - then we must do it. I'm not saying that it may break Miller's strange cache in Hollywood (I think The Spirit's box office and reviews are likely to do that, to be honest), but the very idea of Give Me Liberty managing to make it to the big screen unscathed is so unlikely that I think it's almost our duty to try and make it happen.

Dave Gibbons [Digital Spy]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Miller and production company Odd Lot Entertainment (The company behind The Spirit) are in discussions with Nu Image/Millennium, the production company that currently owns the Buck movie rights, in order to option them and allow Miller to work the same magic on the time-lost space hero that made The Spirit so critically-acclaimed.

The Reporter says that the movie is likely to be a "priority project" for Miller, who'll be recreating the character with "a darker take, with many of Miller's signature visual elements and themes, such as corruption and redemption." So, Sin Rogers, then.

Frank Miller eyes big-screen 'Buck Rogers' [Hollywood Reporter]

Letting Frank Miller gallop across The Spirit film set unedited opened the doors for the actors to do so as well. In a press conference for his newly released film The Spirit Miller described how one should adapt a comic to film:

As far as what translates from comics to film, I find that they are the better source material, and would cite marvel's recent Iron Man and Incredible Hulk as wonderful witty jobs at adapting them. I think if they get too presumptuous, comic book movies tend to fall apart.

That's all fine and dandy to say, Mr. Miller, but revelations throughout the conference revealed that you and your cast went a little willy nilly with changes and additions. Case in point: the lovely Scarlett Johansson's part, Silken Floss, was completely rewritten and expanded once the gorgeous ScarJo wanted in on the project. And that was only the beginning of the actors dictating changes to the movie.

Take the Spirit's nemesis, the Octopus — an evil character brought to the flesh by Samuel L. Jackson. Despite Miller's many rewrites and expansions, after meeting a few actors, he ended up giving Jackson free rein.

At the presser Samuel L. Jackson was asked about if he was cautious about bringing to life a character that had never before been seen on film or in the panel. In the comics, the Octopus was always just a pair of ominous gloves. He explained that he created most of his character's look himself, in the makeup chair.

It's quite an honor to actually be able to walk into a situation and put flesh and blood into a character that's only been a pair of gloves. And I thank Frank for that opportunity. He gave me license to be as demented and as genius and as goddamn funny as I wanted to. So I kinda took that as my license to do all the things that I ever wanted to do in a film, chew as much scenery as I felt like chewing, and not be criticized for it....."

Also, the Octopus' notorious smeary makeup? All Jackson.

The big discovery for me was, Scarlett and I shared a makeup trailer. So when I would go in in the morning and they'd be making her up and I'd look at her and those beautiful colors of eye shadow on her and I'd go "Wow, I should try some of that." So I got my makeup artist to start experimenting with eye shadow and I would put it on then I would run in there and go "Frank!" and he'd go "I love it!" so then I'd go back to the trailer and go, if I'm wearing a Nazi outfit I should have lightning bolt eyebrows! And I'd go "Frank!" and he'd go "I love it!". And from that point on it was all just a matter of me just kinda me running in and doing as much as I can to myself, even down to the little ermine eyebrows, which I thought was kinda cool.

You just said a mouthful, Sam. While Jackson as a Nazi cat-killer in an SS Uniform may be full of win, seeing him leaking makeup just takes away from the character. There should have been someone on set saying, "Whoa, now we're getting ahead of ourselves let's all just think about what we're doing here for a moment."

Jackson said he also found a lot of inspiration in the wardrobe closet, and if you've seen any pictures from the film you'll agree it's got a pretty crazed assembly of ensembles. But at The Spirit's heart the story was really a romantic comedy, he said:

But other than [a moment where he kills a cat], there's no real mean spirited moment in the film. I don't even conceive that as a mean spirited moment, it's an example of what we do. Just one of those things. But having fun and creating a spirit of adventure in the middle of what we finally discovered was a romantic comedy was kinda great.

At the end, Jackson did truly seem to care about the character. He read all of The Spiritworks provided by Frank Miller. Plus, Miller and Jackson met constantly, trying to discover the reality of the Octopus and gave birth to a Lucy and Ricky type relationship between Silken Floss and Octopus (Sam is the Lucy).

The Spirit hits theaters on December 25.

Remember when you saw the first footage of The Spirit of the cess pool fight, and I called it a disjointed attempt at slapstick? Well now there are six more clips for you to peruse, and decide if Frank Miller's Spirit will tempt you into spending your hard earned money on a movie ticket. My guess is after hearing some of these one-liners fall flat, the answer will be no. But then again Eva Mendes gets pretend naked, so that has to appeal to someone.
 
 
 
 
 
A Fight In An Alley



The Hospital

Common Criminal (Or Eva Takes Off Her Towel)

Eye Candy, Scarjo Explains Why She's On Team Octopus



Lots Of Guns

Snowballs Over Guns

So he got all these big name Hollywood hot shots only to break them down into little subcategories of stereotyped women. I do not understand, how does our main man Miller get away with this? It's because Scarjo is shaped like an hour glass, isn't it? Yeah, that's the ticket.

The Spirit will be released in theaters on December 25.

[MovieWeb]

The Spirit hits theaters on December 25.

While I don't mind some of the lady looks, I'm more worried about the combination of Samuel L. Jackson psycho chic with all the three-piece she suits (let's not forget it appears as if he dons a Nazi-esque uniform in the trailer).

The Spirit will be out on December 25, 2008. [Movies - Spoilers]

According to IGN, Rogers was indeed the character that producer Deborah Del Prete was referring to, when she said that Miller's next project would be revamping a classic sci-fi hero. More worryingly than the news that we should probably expect a future full of vampy women who just love to pout at our brave hero/director stand-in is the end of the IGN article:

We originally reported that Buck Rogers would be budgeted in the $40 million range. The cheapness of the low-budget effects will be a running joke in the movie, which will retain the campiness of the 1980s TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Frank Miller tries his hand at camp? This can't end well.

Buck Rogers Update [IGN]

Yes, yes I still think it's totally unbalanced, but I can't stay mad at a movie that brings me this shot of Samuel L. Jackson in a cracked-out samurai get up.

[Yahoo]