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.

At its best, The Spirit newspaper strip was about so much more than crime fighters in masks and smart suits and femme fatales: It was all about groundbreaking look and storytelling that slowly but surely turned away from the genre stereotypes towards something that was both larger in scope and smaller in execution. It's not just that the strips were good in and of themselves - although they are, or else they wouldn't be worth reading more than half a century after they were created - but that there was an added thrill that came from watching Eisner and his studio creators stretching the boundaries and expectations of the entire medium on a weekly basis. As Alex has already mentioned, the splash pages brought influences from outside of comics to bear, redefining not only the way that comics could look, but the way that creators thought about the way that comics could look... but just as importantly as the visuals, the writing of the series evolved throughout the strip's initial 12-year run, outgrowing its pulp origins to become something more Runyonesque and humanist; as the series went on, stories would center on characters as more than just stereotypes or plot devices but as individuals in their own right (This focus on the little guy continued in Eisner's later work on books like The Dreamer, The Building and Invisible People).
As the series transcended its roots and invented new tools of the trade, it became known as a masterpiece because of the skill of its creators (Eisner wasn't the sole writer or artist for the strip, and during World War II, wasn't involved in the strip's creation at all - other creators involved during its original run included Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood), and because of the subtlety of its execution. What made The Spirit special was the work itself, not the character - It wasn't another Spider-Man or Batman that could endure no matter who was writing or drawing it that month; The Spirit belonged to the Eisner studio, because The Spirit was, at its core, a coherent body of work, instead of a franchise.

(This would be why there was no real attempt to revamp the character by other creators until 2007's series from DC Comics by Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone - Yes, I'm ignoring the failed The Spirit: The New Adventures anthology series from the mid-90s, because that was as much a series of love letters by various creators to Eisner as it was an attempt to deal with this Spirit as a character or series with any life left in it - and even Cooke took his lead from Eisner, offering up a series of stories about individuals that hopped genre and influence with each issue; he realized that there is arguably no way to do the Spirit justice without trying to match Eisner's heart, ambition and, yes, spirit.)
Now, compare and contrast this with what we've seen of the Spirit movie. The trailers and posters have been eye-catching in their own way, yes... but they've also lost almost everything that actually mattered about the original strip. Everything seems fake, whether it be visually with CGI-created backgrounds and manipulated actors, or in terms of story with cliched femme fatales, cackling villains and dialogue that replaces the nonchalant wit of Eisner's original hero with either slapstick base humor or tough guy cliche. It's unmistakably the work of Frank Miller - even the tagline, "My city screams," sounds like a line that his bitter Batman or Sin City's Marv would utter more than anything Denny Colt would say - but the problem with that is that everything that made The Spirit important as a series or as a character is a million miles away from Frank Miller's aesthetic.

Miller's take on the world is tougher - and, as anyone who's been following his work for any length of time could recognize - more mean-spirited than Eisner's; it has a streak (I'll leave it up to you to decide how big a streak) of misogyny that Eisner lacked (Whatever sexism Eisner had in his head - or racism, as "fans" of Ebony White would point out - were more from his being a product of his era than any true bigotry or hatred, I'd argue), and perhaps most disappointingly for fans of The Spirit, Miller's work is a large blunt instrument smashed against whatever story he's trying to tell, instead of the scalpel that Eisner, or his studio creators, would have used.

Ultimately, Miller's movie Spirit could, on its own terms, be wonderful. Despite the unpromising trailers and teases that we've seen, it may be the stylish, sexy, exciting action movie that it so clearly wants to be. That would be great. But there is nothing that I've seen, either in the pre-release material for the movie or in any of Miller's earlier work that shows that he has it in him to translate what was so special about the newspaper strip - the real The Spirit - onto the screen, or even that he has any real inclination to try. And as someone who loves that version of the character, that's why I'm continually disappointed by everything we learn about the movie - and why I'm so negative about it.

From the visuals we've seen so far, Miller's distinctive vision seems to have scrapped the rapidly switching genre for his own usual film noir feel, as you can see in the poster at left. The high profile of the Spirit's female paramours also marks a shift from the original comic. There's also a major emphasis on a villain who's never directly represented in the comics, Samuel L. Jackson's The Octopus. Yet there was considerable brilliance in the original strip's directors of photography. Pioneer Will Eisner and his legendary group of collaborators pushed the form forwards in stunning artwork that deserves to be seen by all.

12.

These covers reflect the genuine variety of tone that is the staple of the series. Like in Bill Waterson's long illustrated dramas with Calvin as the protagonist (whose Christmas stories are direct tributes to The Spirit), tongue is planted firmly in cheek throughout.

In a 1973 essay that appeared with the Kitchen Sink reprint of the strips, scholar Maurice Horn put it this way:

11.

This development alone, and the inclusion of the creator in the process, were popularized in the strip's pure serial format.

What was The Spirit about? The Spirit was the first superior example of a main character who has things happen to them as much as he makes things happen. Back from the dead, The Spirit is, on the surface, your typical crime-fighting keeper of the peace.

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Yet the genre-stepping series exulted in making side characters the real protagonists, classic creations like Commissioner Dolan's sassy daughter Ellen, and Spirit's minstrel sidekick, Ebony White. This approach does square with Miller's early conception of the Spirit's harem of women who desire him - he's merely the object of their love.

The character of Ebony White looks distasteful today, though many defend his Tom Sawyer-like scampiness and his important place in the milieu as evidence for Eisner's non-racist purpose. The fact remains it was obvious at some point that the minstrel appearance wasn't going to age the comic very well. As Tom Heintjes details it in his remarkable series about the genesis of The Spirit:

"I wish I had done that differently, because it seems a little unnecessary in places," [Eisner] said. "I think part of it had to do with my own limitations as a writer, because later on I was able to handle it much more gracefully." He added that despite whatever the criticism he's received about Ebony over the years (which actually has not been much) he says he has no regrets over how he chose to treat a minority character as The Spirit' s dependable sidekick.

9.

The Spirit was assembled by a team of artists, and when Will Eisner was drafted into World War II, an experience documented in his autobiographical novel The Dreamer, his aides swept in and filled the void.

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Eisner recalls arguing with legendary collaborator Jules Feiffer in a Dave Sim essay:

You should hear me and Jules Feiffer going at it in a room. 'No, you designed the splash page for this one, then you wrote the ending — I came up with the idea for the story, and you did it up to this point, then I did the next page and this sequence here and...' And I'll be swearing up and down that he wrote the ending on that one. We never agree.

7.

And yet this chaotic system of management produced an irrefutable result.

6.

Still, Eisner's focus on the immigrant struggle in what is transparently New York City and his depiction of power therein strikes all the right underdog notes. I'd be shocked if the Frank Miller story touched on any of these themes, but pleasantly surprised if it did. Eisner's grappling with these topics had him focusing on Jewish themed projects like Fagin the Jew and his autobiographical The Dreamer.

5.

Above all, the artwork of The Spirit is remarkable in its consistency. Its echoes in the comics that came afterwards are everywhere, and not simply in the distinctive artistic style that brought high art to the funny pages. More than anything else, The Spirit is hysterical, and the humor holds up as well as the artwork.

4.

And the artwork does impress. Frank Miller has talked about first being inspired by a panel in which The Spirit walked by the river, mourning the one he loved. One favorite tool that Miller likes to use from Eisner is the contrast between the size of elements. The Spirit was always picked up...

3.

2.

...carried...

1.

or down on the ground.

There are plenty of reasons not to be optimistic about the fate of this Christmas movie, but we'll reserve final judgment for now. The bar is set high, but it's always enjoyable to watch a confident director adapt deserving material. If the final result isn't exactly The Spirit I love, then okay — it will still be The Spirit. And you'll have to forgive me for hoping some marketing flack wrote on the official website, "In the spirit of Batman Begins and Sin City," and not even getting the pun.

Will Eisner's Official Site [WillEisner.com]
Tom Jeintje's series about The Spirit [Adventure Strips]

I am aware that a lot of Will Eisner's original Spirit comic was tongue-in-cheek. Girls parachuting from the sky to madly rip off the Spirit's clothes is good old fashioned silly camp, and I'm open to it. So I see what Frank Miller is trying to capture here, but his jokes fall flat with the style and delivery. Sorry, Frank, you need light hand when directing slapstick comedy. You can't just give Sam Jackson a big wrench and say, "Go for it!" Because honestly that's what this whole scene looks like, two guys rolling around in crap but stopping to pause for the obligatory one-liner. Poor Jackson even tries to deliver the lines the best way he knows how. Truth be told, I even enjoy the Octopus' little crazy-person dance, but overall it's not funny, it's not light hearted, and from the amounts of Spirit I've been exposed to it is no where near what I'd expected or hoped for.

Second, and probably the most important issue on why this just doesn't work, it looks like the movie Sin City pissed all over it. It clashes with the banter the script is so desperately trying to make witty. The crap that the two characters are mucking around in looks.... like crap, and soundstage crap at that. I understand having a "signature look" but can't Miller smell his own shit when it stinks? And this is a big one. What happened to the color of The Spirit? Isn't his suit blue? Are colors not allowed in Miller's world? It's not balanced it looks like a gritty world with forced banter, I'm sure you can have both, but Miller certainly didn't figure out how. Oh and I'm not even touching the slow-mo kick moment.

Still, the hardest part for me to watch is Samuel L Jackson as the Octopus. If anyone could make those cheesy lines work with his dance acting it's Jackson, but my god, that eyeliner. What the hell were they thinking? He looks like the world's saddest drag queen. That is unforgivable.

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

Let's disregard the godawful late-90s rock music in the background for a moment, and focus on the big bad. First, you've got a ton of things going on that make no sense. The Spirit is seen climbing across big fat lady lips, that's a bit jarring. Next there's the dialogue: it's rotten. It reeks of trying too hard. "You're so close," coos Lorelei. Finally, the barrage of Hollywood hotties seems more like a desperate play for sexiness than picking the right actor for each role.

One good thing about this trailer is we finally get to see more of the actual Spirit (Gabriel Macht) it looks like he'll make a good Denny Colt, but I'm ready to see the darker side come out of this actor.

[Film School Rejects]

Miller said, 'I tried to translate [Eisner's] vision into a modern film. Look for his touch, you'll see it. For purists it will be a bit of a shock, but I have to say it's a hell of a ride." Actress Eva Mendes was also along for the screening and took a bit of offense when MTV host Kurt Loder accused her of being one of Eisnner's many 'hot babes' to which Mendes replied, "Hell no, I play a jewel thief who has been married 15 times and has killed all of them. Does that sound like a hot chick?" Well, yeah actually.

The rest of the panel discussed in great detail the lengths the team went to work with Eisner's comic. Producer Deborah Del Prete mentioned that, 'the most important thing to Eisner was that he didn't want his Spirit to ever use a gun and that was something we always tried to protect."

The fans asked about Samuel L. Jackson's role as The Octopus especially since the only part of that character that shows in the comic was his white gloves. Miller defended his choice saying, "Jackon was my first and only choice for The Octopus." He continued that simply showing white gloves like in the comic book would get tedious so there will be full shots of Jackson.

It did seem like Miller always had Eisner in mind. Keep an eye out while watching the movie for Miller's own personal moment for Eisner, "My favorite shot in the movie is with Spirit moving across the top of a water tank he stumbles, just a bit, and I said, 'That one's for you Will.'"

Meanwhile, the movie's producer, Michael Usman, talked a bit about the process that led to the movie becoming a reality at the Eisner panel on Friday.

Usman had first met Eisner at a comic-book convention when he was a kid, and had been "thrilled to his toes." He'd met Eisner again at the Harvard Club fourteen years ago, and they'd decided then and there to make The Spirit film together. As part of attaining the rights, Usman swore that no one would be involved, and the movie would be left unmade, unless everyone attached "totally got it." One day, after mentioning that he had on his hands what he considered the single best and most groundbreaking comic work with future co-producer Deb Del Prete, she said, immediately, "Don't tell me you have the rights to The Spirit?!" Usman's reaction to finding a producing partner who similarly "got it" was relief and joy: "Mama, I'm home!"

Usman did his best to drive home the care with which The Spirit movie is being made, perhaps in an attempt to banish some fan fears that Frank Miller's aesthetic might come to overwhelm Eisner's. He related that Eisner himself had had "no interest whatsoever" in either directing or writing a Spirit flick himself, but that in the painstaking fourteen years of plotting for the feature, they had been able to put all their questions to him — and get his input and feedback on their own decisions, until his death in 2005.

The Eisner panel was full of praise for the joint role that Eisner had mastered in the medium — succeeding as both a businessman and a creative talent. DC Comics publisher Paul Levitz pointed out that while art and business often exist in inherent conflict, Eisner negotiated his own contracts and recognized the need to have rights and full control over one's creations very early in the game. As such, he has long been seen as a trailblazing figure.

In response to the question of whether Eisner had created the studio system of producing comics, Jack Kirby biographer Mark Evanier paused, but agreed, "I would argue that." Eisner and Kirby, he said, had reinvented the medium — broken it out of the old panel-a-day rhythm, made it so that comic books were being made, not just tiny strips.

Additional reporting by Kaila Hale-Stern.

As the popularity of Eisner's character - soon to appear in a Frank Miller-directed movie that looks to be more Sin City than Spirit - started to fade in the early '50s (partially due to shifting audience tastes and partially due to Eisner's lessened direct involvement with the strip; Jules Feiffer was writing it by this point), it was decided that something drastic had to be done to grab readers' attention. And what could be more drastic than pulling the character out of his Central City crime story rut and putting him in charge of a government mission to space with a crew of criminals?

The "Outer Space" sequence of stories were written, for the most part, by Feiffer and illustrated by EC Comics' great Wally Wood - Despite the SF setting, they resisted the overly fantastic and continued to offer one-off stories focusing on character (Yes, even that story about the Hitler-alike being the first man on the moon), touching on topics like the effects of space travel on the mind with surprising subtlety and sobriety. They are wonderful comics; beautifully illustrated and a quiet version of SF comics that you just don't really see anymore (with the exception of something like Planetes). What they weren't was enough to save the series - After returning to Earth, the strip lasted one more week (that saw the Spirit recast as a "UFO Investigator") before being cancelled.

After years of being out of print, the Outer Space sequence of stories will be available for readers in the May 7th-shipping The Spirit Archives Volume 24. And that's worth whatever champagne toasts you're willing to offer.

Paul Levitz: Toasting Will Eisner [Blog@Newsarama]

Miller's dark designer's eye made the movie version of Sin City look like beautiful slag, and I can't wait to see what else he's got in store for us in The Spirit. The Eisner comic ended in the 1950s, right after the Spirit went to the moon. Let's hope the moon trip is in the film, because I'd love to see the Miller-ized version of Luna.

The Spirit is currently slated for release in January 2009.

Leaked pics of sexy Scarlett [Hollywood Newsroom]