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"Oh fuck, I feel like I just got a movie lobotomy."
There really isn't enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a good movie. There's not enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a bad movie, either. Instead, The Spirit is a turd movie--composed of once-good things which have been so highly digested as to no longer be recognizable.
(It may then be fitting that before I was watching The Spirit I was listening to Lady Gaga, whose minuscule bit of talent has been autotuned into a coma from backbeat overdose. Then again, I'm also a queer, which means I am (according to our culture) genetically hardwired to love anything with a singable-but-insipid melody line and beat strong enough to knock out an elephant. See: disco.)
I did not actually see The Spirit to mock it, however. A while back, I read a review of The Spirit which pointed out that "[i]f there's any zone of action movie Miller's project looks toward, it's probably the Japanese tokusatsu film of the costumed hero type, very self-evidently artificial in special effects and gangly in action stylization - realism is often not the goal." Me being me, I decided it was imperative to see The Spirit and test this theory.
The author chose the remake of Cutey Honey as his example film, but I chose instead Takashi Miike's Zebraman. Though the author's point about Hideaki Anno is well-taken, Miike has a lot of Miller's same quirks with regard to violence and masculinity, without the whoreswhoreswhoreswhores.
(It's important to note that I don't think any tokusatsu film would automatically be better than The Spirit by virtue of being toku--Kamen Rider The First was by and large KR-As-Done-By Miller, up to and including the unnecessary grimness.)
So, why Zebraman? Because Zebraman is itself supposed to be a humorous-yet-slavish remake/reference to an earlier work and genre, the '70s tokusatsu show. Zebraman has the same quirky madcap sense of humor, a specialty of Miike's, to which The Spirit aspires. Both films also aspire to say something about heroism via their titular leading men.
With The Spirit, the film's problem becomes obvious four minutes into the movie: Miller has no idea how to create an visual tone that isn't relentlessly grim. In a comic, a creator can at times get away with tone-deaf writing because each reader is giving the lines their own mental interpretation. With film there is a threshold at which point all the visually interesting geegaws and style in the world can no longer make up for the fact everyone seems to be inexplicably reading their lines with the exact wrong emotion. Miller crashes across that barrier almost immediately. Even with Eisner's aim laid out for him in volumes of plain black-and-white, Miller simply doesn't understand the mechanics of lightening up, no matter the medium.
This is not so for Miike, who clearly loves and has studied the tokusatsu heroes of his childhood. Where Miller's film feels soulless because it can't seem to figure out what it believes in, Miike drives his point home: anyone can be a hero, even a 40-year-old fanboy in a homemade cosplay suit. As such, the reason Miike's film succeeds is the core of tokusatsu genre conventions around which the rest of the film is constructed. In example: the women of The Spirit prance about so blatantly half-naked it's insulting. Miller's visual eye commands you to be aroused by them, for if you're not then clearly you have a problem no amount of Viagra can solve.
When Zebraman segues into Shinichi's Zebranurse fantasy, the entire sequence is the nothing more than the hilariously unsexy fantasies of a ten-year-old boy, who only really wants to be the hero, but knows it's important for his female sidekick to have exposed cleavage just because. In comparison, Miller's women are what an adult man thinks every ten-year-old boy fantasizes about. Miller's fantasy is then painfully close to the surface, just below the earnest media images with exploit women as empty sex ciphers.
In The Spirit Miller tires to talk out of both sides of his mouth and create realism and escapism simultaneously, where realism stands for "important art" and escapism stands for "mindless entertainment." Though making great art that is also escapist is not an impossible task (see Jeff Smith's Bone), Miller's own clinging to these societal definitions of what is "important" makes it so. Miller's greatest fear is irrelevancy, the ability to prove that when it comes to film, he's hasn't mattered and never will.
Yet Eisner's comics were, for all their artistic importance, irrelevant. They're great comics but in the long run they mostly affected the medium in which they were produced. Cool as it would be, ultimately no political beliefs will be changed over which "dame" the Spirit hooks up with or whether or not Shinichi manages to fly.
If only Miller could embrace this fact like Miike. He would have had a much better movie.
PS: See Zebraman if you haven't. It's a brilliant film for anyone who likes considering the many ways superheroes evolve, and it stays very true to the Ishinomori hero, who just happens to be a lot like the very early American hero archetype.
PPS: I has made![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
kamenrider on DW for all one's KR needs.
There really isn't enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a good movie. There's not enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a bad movie, either. Instead, The Spirit is a turd movie--composed of once-good things which have been so highly digested as to no longer be recognizable.
(It may then be fitting that before I was watching The Spirit I was listening to Lady Gaga, whose minuscule bit of talent has been autotuned into a coma from backbeat overdose. Then again, I'm also a queer, which means I am (according to our culture) genetically hardwired to love anything with a singable-but-insipid melody line and beat strong enough to knock out an elephant. See: disco.)
I did not actually see The Spirit to mock it, however. A while back, I read a review of The Spirit which pointed out that "[i]f there's any zone of action movie Miller's project looks toward, it's probably the Japanese tokusatsu film of the costumed hero type, very self-evidently artificial in special effects and gangly in action stylization - realism is often not the goal." Me being me, I decided it was imperative to see The Spirit and test this theory.
The author chose the remake of Cutey Honey as his example film, but I chose instead Takashi Miike's Zebraman. Though the author's point about Hideaki Anno is well-taken, Miike has a lot of Miller's same quirks with regard to violence and masculinity, without the whoreswhoreswhoreswhores.
(It's important to note that I don't think any tokusatsu film would automatically be better than The Spirit by virtue of being toku--Kamen Rider The First was by and large KR-As-Done-By Miller, up to and including the unnecessary grimness.)
So, why Zebraman? Because Zebraman is itself supposed to be a humorous-yet-slavish remake/reference to an earlier work and genre, the '70s tokusatsu show. Zebraman has the same quirky madcap sense of humor, a specialty of Miike's, to which The Spirit aspires. Both films also aspire to say something about heroism via their titular leading men.
With The Spirit, the film's problem becomes obvious four minutes into the movie: Miller has no idea how to create an visual tone that isn't relentlessly grim. In a comic, a creator can at times get away with tone-deaf writing because each reader is giving the lines their own mental interpretation. With film there is a threshold at which point all the visually interesting geegaws and style in the world can no longer make up for the fact everyone seems to be inexplicably reading their lines with the exact wrong emotion. Miller crashes across that barrier almost immediately. Even with Eisner's aim laid out for him in volumes of plain black-and-white, Miller simply doesn't understand the mechanics of lightening up, no matter the medium.
This is not so for Miike, who clearly loves and has studied the tokusatsu heroes of his childhood. Where Miller's film feels soulless because it can't seem to figure out what it believes in, Miike drives his point home: anyone can be a hero, even a 40-year-old fanboy in a homemade cosplay suit. As such, the reason Miike's film succeeds is the core of tokusatsu genre conventions around which the rest of the film is constructed. In example: the women of The Spirit prance about so blatantly half-naked it's insulting. Miller's visual eye commands you to be aroused by them, for if you're not then clearly you have a problem no amount of Viagra can solve.
When Zebraman segues into Shinichi's Zebranurse fantasy, the entire sequence is the nothing more than the hilariously unsexy fantasies of a ten-year-old boy, who only really wants to be the hero, but knows it's important for his female sidekick to have exposed cleavage just because. In comparison, Miller's women are what an adult man thinks every ten-year-old boy fantasizes about. Miller's fantasy is then painfully close to the surface, just below the earnest media images with exploit women as empty sex ciphers.
In The Spirit Miller tires to talk out of both sides of his mouth and create realism and escapism simultaneously, where realism stands for "important art" and escapism stands for "mindless entertainment." Though making great art that is also escapist is not an impossible task (see Jeff Smith's Bone), Miller's own clinging to these societal definitions of what is "important" makes it so. Miller's greatest fear is irrelevancy, the ability to prove that when it comes to film, he's hasn't mattered and never will.
Yet Eisner's comics were, for all their artistic importance, irrelevant. They're great comics but in the long run they mostly affected the medium in which they were produced. Cool as it would be, ultimately no political beliefs will be changed over which "dame" the Spirit hooks up with or whether or not Shinichi manages to fly.
If only Miller could embrace this fact like Miike. He would have had a much better movie.
PS: See Zebraman if you haven't. It's a brilliant film for anyone who likes considering the many ways superheroes evolve, and it stays very true to the Ishinomori hero, who just happens to be a lot like the very early American hero archetype.
PPS: I has made
kamenrider on DW for all one's KR needs.Tags: