When we reviewed The Spirit during its theatrical release, we thought the experience might have been improved on DVD. The theory was the movie was so full of brilliant, distinct images and equally full of complicated action, we ached to seize the reigns ourselves, to have the opportunity to slow down that action (or skip it all together) and see, really see, what was there.  With the DVD (and Blu ray) out today, we got that chance, and all we can say is: “God bless the pause button.”

Also confirmed was our suspicion that director Frank Miller was overwhelmed by the party atmosphere on the set.  In the director’s commentary (more entertaining than most, art fans, he’s joined by producer/comic book fan Deborah Del Prete) he floats on a tide of gush for his celebrity pals.  Being by nature more visually oriented and probably star-blind and flattered, he let the story and the action get away from him.  You want to stand there and say that, Scarlett?  You go, girl.  You want to take over your scene and improv your own dialog, Sam?  Your call, bro.  It’s the director’s job to make the actors happy, right?

When he’s doing his actual job and focusing his actual talent, he scores.  The atmosphere and the look of the film really work, and one wonders if the editor and cinematographer were, in turn, dazzled by Miller, because he had them inspired to work at the top of their game.  The snow, those silhouettes, that city!

There’s a featurette on the green screen process they used to prep the scenes for background inclusion, and we learn that if the actor isn’t touching something in a scene, it isn’t there.  It’s legitimately impressive, and while we’ve been seeing and hearing about this process since Princess Leia’s hologram first beamed out of R2, the capabilities and opportunities the modern advancements provide are amazing.  You can almost literally do anything.  I mean, they used it to rescue this crazy movie.

There’s a cute alternate ending played out with Millier’s images, and having a living legend and cultural innovator as your storyboard artist doesn’t hurt at all.  Sam Jackson (The Octopus!) and Gabriel Macht (The Spirit!) come in to narrate, and it sort of solidified a thought I had during the movie but didn’t give voice to in the original review.  They’re playing rivals in the film, and it sort of played out for real during the making of the movie.  Macht, lord bless him, is trying as hard as he can to be an upright hero, do as he’s directed and make a great holiday hero flick.  Jackson is a force of chaos, cracking up and trying to see what kind of goofy nonsense he can get away with.  They let the Joker on the set and Commissioner Miller couldn’t quite put him away.

Packaging-wise, the Two-Disc Special Edition has a pretty super die-cut slip case and does a nice job of choosing eye-catching costumes and images from the movie.  It should stand out on the shelf.  The original trailer is on there too, so you can puzzle over the ad campaign.

It’s worth checking out to marvel over the effects and lust after the cast at your own speed.  The images are very strong.  That opening fight still gives the impression you’ve shown up late to a party where everyone else is crazy tanked and you have no chance of catching up to them, but Eva Mendes rising up out of the water will sober up even the drunkest reveler.  Have the remote handy.

Oh!  The second disc is a digital copy of the movie, which makes it easy to download to whatever platform you dig.  Dig?

The Spirit releases today on DVD and Blu-ray.

PS: I don’t have access to the Blu-ray, but  there are some intriguing notes from the press release.  There’s an interactive  function called MOLOG (Movie Log!) which lets you communicate online with other Blu-Ray folks and narrate or comment on the movie while it’s playing.  I’ve heard of it before, but never seen it.  I might want to ask the guys in our Technical Difficulties podcast to explain it to me, but the concept is pretty exciting.  This would be a fun one to shout about.  Like, you could make a little buzzer sound every time they show that photocopy of the rump or “dish” on the costumes.  I think it would be worth it to log on and hear someone across the country call The Octopus a “hot tranny mess.”

Let’s get it out of the way. The Spirit, in wide release Dec. 25th, is not a straight-forward adaptation of the Will Eisner comic strip.  That always seems to be the “concern” of the comic fan, and it rings hollow, a standard applied to justify having read the source material.  In essence, by asking if something is “faithful” to the source, they are saying, “I’ve read this, and I want credit for it.  I did Prague before they built the McDonalds.  I was into The Strokes back when they played in my friend’s loft.”  Get over yourself, Spirit “fan,” a movie needs to be judged on its own merits.  The majority of people who see it have never heard of the character, don’t want to hear you talk about it and don’t want fries with that.

So, what will they find, this fresh new audience?  After the previews (through which many will have fingers crossed for a glimpse of Terminator Salvation), they will be met with a disembodied voice over and a floating woman’s unseen face, all stabby light and murky moan, calling for the soul of the Spirit.  It’s disorienting, but hope remains.  We’ve just started, and maybe the light will clear up and we’ll see her.  She might be hot!  Then some credits and some atmosphere, and then Eva Mendes rising from the water, and it’s unclear whether or not she has super powers or maybe she’s the same woman from the pre-credit sequence, and then The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) is talking about eggs and throwing a toilet at The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), and people are killed but don’t die and you realize it’s a cartoon.  You’ve unwittingly paid to see an homage to Merrie Melodies.

This opening fight takes place in an unexplained battlefield of primordial ooze from which they pull kitchen sinks and lamp posts to smash each other with, and I suppose it’s a metaphor for the entire film – things pulled out of nowhere because they have the effects to do it with.  The Spirit and The Octopus are established as characters similar to Wolverine and Sabertooth, like, they can regenerate and can’t be killed and like to punch and karate chop each other because they can and it looks cool, but there’s no consequence.

Then the cops show up, and the film has a human center.  Dan Lauria is excellent as Dolan, banging out a pastiche of every noir cop he must have loved watching as a kid.  He’s got that “aw jeez,” face that served him well as the dad on the Wonder Years and is clearly having a great time.  His daughter, the Spirit’s personal physician, played by Sarah Paulson is the only real, read as “attainable by mortals,” woman in the movie, and hope returns.  It was a rocky Tom and Jerry start, but here’s something I can relate to and maybe there’s a story here, and we can settle in.

We start to enjoy the effects, the digital city and the colors.  They are, as expected, amazing.  The snow and the lights are beautiful, the city is beautiful, the Spirit looks cool.  Macht’s voice is great.  Like, the kind of cool, smooth, gruff commanding voice Bale should have used in Dark Knight.  What writer/director Frank Miller gives him to say, however, is, um…there’s a lot of inconsistency in how it’s presented.  Like, the standard way to represent captions is a voice over, and we get that sometimes, but then sometimes, The Spirit is telling the plot to a cat (!!?) and sometimes breaks the fourth wall and talks to you. Yes you, gentle reader.

Allow this departure. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus categorized people as either foxes or hedgehogs, with the distinction being “The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  The one thing the hedgehog knows is formidable, it works for him, so he keeps doing it over and over, and he survives.  He doesn’t quite please, but he sticks around.  Frank “The Hedgehog” Miller might dabble in other mediums, might sniff around other story models, but when it’s time to put it together, he pulls his body into a tight noir-ball and rolls spine-first towards the gritty part of town.

His great trick, his gift to comics, was to fuse a hard pulp sensibility into a cartoon narrative, to bring an adult, sophisticated sensibility to funny books.  He took the “luckless loser” model Stan Lee wowed ‘em with in 1963, basted it with Raymond Chandler sauce, set to three hundred fifty degrees and came out with a super-pleasing Dark Knight and Daredevil roast that reserved his hard-backed chair at the banquet hall of Sequential Narrative Greats.  It can be argued this had been done before but not with characters everyone knew and not as successfully.  He was an innovator, and his reputation is earned, but for thirty years he’s been a geriatric Mick Jagger croaking out Satisfaction or a Betty White trying to wink seductively.  He’s a rapping granny.

This is not to say he’s completely lost it, but what ultimately happened with this movie is everyone decided to do whatever they wanted, like do what they like best, and it all got the ok.

Jackson: “Hey, Frank, Frank, what if I do my makeup like the guy from Fall Out Boy on a crying jag?”

Miller: “My city shrieks…no. My city bleeds blood…  Yeah, Sam, fabulous!  I love it! My city chortles with infrastructure…hmm.  Just wear and say whatever you want, Sam, and tell Scarlett to wear the same thing. I trust you.  My city crackles with alternate side of the street parking rules…”

He probably should not have been the director, since he allowed the beauty or oversized personalities of the actors to overwhelm him.  A lot of the performances read as first or second takes, and I wonder if that’s Miller afraid to tell hot chicks they’re not perfect or their only having a few days with people, since the rest was needed for post-production.
This works OK with Lauria, since what he wanted to do was distinctive and based in historical performances, and it works nicely with Paulson and Macht, since what they wanted to do was earnestly impress, but when it comes to Jackson, ummm.

I like Jackson.  He’s totally cool, and at the press conference he was awesome.  Just smooth and personable and effortless.  He admitted a childhood love for Aquaman, and is really the only actual comic fan in the cast (Miller’s cameo as a cop aside), but he is out of control here, and why not?  No one helped him refine his ideas.  Scarlett Johansson, as Silken Floss, gets dragged into his trailer and tags along.  The relationship they set up for them in the film is essentially Harley Quinn and the Joker.  She makes a stately Harley, but was probably a little more “noir” in Match Point.

And with her mention, it’s probably a good time to point out how very beautiful they make the women look in this movie.  Like, mission accomplished.  Miller loves women in an, “I eat red meat and have scars on my knuckles from punching monster trucks” kind of way.  Like, pure testosterone ass worshipping dude-ry.  Mendes and Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris sizzle (my city sizzles) and enhance the overall well-done design of the movie.

There’s a lot that works but not always at the same time.  When it’s all clicking, and they’re not randomly coloring something, it can be cool.  In particular, a scene where Macht rips medical tape off his chest and demands a red tie is classic Miller and stirring excitement.  When they have him skitter like a computer cursor across an imaginary power line, however, it doesn’t matter how awesome his outfit or the snow looks, it’s just off-putting.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a movie that starts off pretty normally and then descends into batshit, eyes gouged out, gun-firing craziness, and maybe that should have been the model here.  Like, there we get a standard plot and then the bottom drops out, and we fall into the crazy well, trailing LOLs and WTFs?

The Spirit starts off crazy when we expect serious, then tries to pull it back in, then goes for weird juvenile sight gags then tries to be tough, and we’re disoriented.  Theres also a pathlogical fascination with a prop photocopy of Mendes’ rump.  If you took a shot every time the camera cuts to it, you would be wasted by the third act, and maybe “wasted” is the right word to end with here.  There’s a lot of work and opportunity that went by the wayside here, a lot of talented people and some great source material that never quite gels.  The parts that look good, look good, but maybe next time, they’ll hire a fox to put it all together.

Frank, If I give you the photocopy, will you take this thing out of my mouth?

Scott (Need Coffee), Jon, Michael (Views From The Longbox),  Serv, Sterling (New Bards Press), Ron, and Todd review some of the latest trailers to hit the interwebs and the movie theaters including: X-Files, Spirit, Watchmen, and Quantum of something or other.

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