Truth That Goes Crunch

"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.)

( If only Miller had given the Spirit a theme song... )

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.