Frank Miller’s The Spirit Worse Than Battlefield Earth?
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People, I think I may be about to cry.
It was bad enough when Punisher: War Zone, a movie that I was really and truly looking forward to, turned out to be damn near unwatchable. I was heartbroken, but I figured I’d survive. I mean, at least it wasn’t Battlefield Earth, right?
Then I read Jondough’s review of an advance screening of the last movie to which I was looking forward, The Spirit, on Ain’t It Cool News, and I’m devastated.
Jondough apparently feels that The Spirit will dethrone Battlefield as the absolute WORST. MOVIE. EVER.
I… I’ll just let him tell you. These are obviously excerpts of his review. Click here for the entire thing.
[...]
And now I’ve seen something that has taken the top prize from “Battlefield Earth.” I mean, I honestly thought that would never happen. And it’s not like there aren’t MANY shitty movies made every year, and it’s not like I don’t SEE many of those. In fact, friends of mine and I have recently started a “Bad Movie Night,” where we have an opening act, a main feature, and a dessert: all of incredibly bad film & TV (the last one we did featured a vampire theme, so we started with “Knight Beat” (only available on VHS, but highly recommended), we feasted on the horror that is “Lost Boys 2: The Tribe”, and then for dessert, watched the (very) little-seen, “Paul Lynde’s Halloween Special” (holy crap! Amazing!). They’re our very own “MST3K” nights.Yet, despite all of the “badness,” I’ve never had that potent sense of “this is bad on a level worthy of B.E.” before last night.
“The Spirit,” as written and directed (hahahahahaha) by Frank Miller, is that movie. I can’t go into specifics of HOW, exactly, I saw the film (I use that term loosely here), as there are privacy issues at stake, but it’s not even all that important. What is important is that the two of us who stayed awake (one of us has a “real” job…he’s already an outsider, no reason to ridicule him further) for the film in its entirety could talk about nothing else for the remainder of the night. After 2 hours of ruminating, pondering what had just happened, we came up with this description of what the viewing experience was like: “I feel like I just watched a movie in a foreign language, where you speak JUST enough of the language to realize that the main character just said he had sex with your mother and then wrote a movie about it…a movie that you can’t fully understand except for the nagging feeling that that’s your mother up there getting reamed.”
Or, as said about a half hour later by my buddy, in all seriousness, “I think I now know what it feels like to be raped.” (The sense of betrayal, the sense of loss, the sense that somehow it was his fault.)
Yeah… ouch. And that’s just the beginning.
He starts in on the actors :
Let’s start with the acting. Oh lord. I didn’t know who Gabriel Macht was before this film, and I don’t really care to know him after. But according to IMDB at least, it looks like his agent’s pulled an “Ari” and gotten him a bunch of work based off this lead role before anyone saw it. Good for his agent. Because when people see this steaming pile of shit, where Macht is on screen the vast majority of the time, he’s going to take the biggest hit. To be fair, I’m not sure it’s ENTIRELY his fault (see “Actors: Self-Direction”), but Christy Christ, son. Going to the gym a lot does not mean you’re prepared for a role. If your director doesn’t give you any help, for god’s sake, HIRE AN ACTING COACH. I mean, do you realize that the nature of film is for people to SEE it? People are going to see this movie (granted, not many), and when they meet you on the street (assuming you’re wearing a stick-um mask, as he sports it during the entire movie…maybe that was his idea, to protect his face), they’re not going to be able to say anything other than, “Oh, hey. You were in the Spirit…(starting to laugh)…no, no, it’s not anything you did…(laughing harder)…no, I was just thinking of something else…(bent over now with laughter, then slowly recovering themselves)…But seriously, you were awful.” This scene will be played out all over town, all over the country. Probably not all over the world, though, as it’ll tank well before it gets real distribution. (Then again, this movie may actually MAKE more sense if you don’t speak English, so maybe your star has finally come after all, Gabe.)
To be honest, Old Gabe doesn’t even come off that bad…at least not compared to Sam Jackson. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? Sam: what the fuck, man? I’m not going to rehash your old glories here: you know them better than I do (hell, you’ve been reliving them on screen for the last decade). But come ON. I would have said you’re better than this…but you’re really not, are you? How big is your coke habit? Who do you owe money to? WHAT THE FUCK????
Dude…didn’t you suspect something was amiss when they asked you to bring all your own costumes from home?
(Costumer Designer: Hi Mr. Jackson, it’s Susie over at Lionsgate. Listen, we’re wondering if you have anything you’d be willing to bring in for the shoot tomorrow. Do you have any old costumes from movies you’ve done in the past? Mr. Miller wants to blow the whole budget on “the look,” as he calls it.
Sam Jackson: Well…let. Me. See, little lady. I do still have my mutton chops from when I played Vincent in Pulp Fiction. Will that work?
C.D: Perfect. What else you got?
S.J.: I’ve got some old mothafuckin’ samurai robes from a chewing gum commercial I did in mothafuckin’ Japan. Don’t MAKE me smell yo’ bad breath! That was the tag line.
C.D.: Fantastic. Anything else?
S.J.: Well, I really wanted to be in Valkyrie, so I bought an authentic Nazi uniform. A hat and everything. But that SONOFABITCH Toooom Cruuuuise said there WERE no Black Nazis. I said, “There weren’t no mothafuckin’ black Jedis either, bitch, but that didn’t stop George Lucas from putting me in there.” Oh, that reminds me, I have my purple light saber. Will that help?
C.D.: Yes to the Nazi uniform, hold off on the light saber. Aww, hell, bring it all! I don’t know how, but we’ll shoehorn all this stuff into something. Thanks!
S.J.: Hey, I’ve also got a huge plaster-of-paris Iron Eagle Nazi emblem. You know, just in case.
C.D.: Yeah, that’d be the props department. I’ll have Skipper give you a call.)Samuel Laura Jackson, you should know better. That’s just all there is to it. Maybe you aren’t BETTER than this, but you should certainly KNOW better than this. This…well, this is a mothafuckin’ horrible movie.
You know it had to be bad if he’s willing to take on Samuel Muthafuckin’ Jackson.
But he saves his special, SPECIAL attention for Frank Miller:
[speaking directly to Miller]
You clearly don’t have any idea what you’re doing. Someone, ANYONE, over at Lionsgate should have known this. Fuck, it’s their JOB to know this. But they didn’t. They somehow bought the idea that you “co-directed” (hah) Sin City, which even if it WERE true, doesn’t mean you directed the movie. It means you sat in a seat next to Rodriguez and took notes on what words to say when (we see Frank scribbling furiously into a steno pad, tongue out in concentration. Close up on the notebook: “Action” – say this at the beginning when you want the pretty people to talk. “Cut” – say this when everyone looks at you). How could the suits know that your direction to the actors was, apparently, “You guys’ve done this before, just do what you normally do.” (Look! There’s Sam Jackson doing Sam Jackson. There’s Eva Mendes playing sexy. There’s Eric Balfour doing…what the fuck is he doing in this movie?) Seriously, how on Earth could they know that your idea of direction is to place the camera on a tripod and have your two actors walk back and forth for five minutes in front of a dimwit committing seppuku? They couldn’t, of course, but they should have. You apparently storyboarded the whole film. Did they LOOK (like, with their eyes) at these? Didn’t they notice the length of the scene? Didn’t they notice the lack of dramatic action? Didn’t they know that high school plays directed by a middle school teacher who’s only directing because he hates his life has better staging than this? They SHOULD have.
Yeah, I think that’s enough pain and depression.
So I leave you with a question - do two bad films in a row signal the beginning of the end for the glut of comic movies that we’ve had? What if Watchmen actually comes out and totally tanks? Is it all over?
Will there ever be another good comic movie again?
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Some of you may remember that Josh Schwartz, creator of Gossip Girl, O.C., and Chuck, let it slip a few months ago that he was working on an X-Men movie script, followed by complete radio silence.

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