I get the feeling that it’s a movie that I might ordinarily enjoy … if it wasn’t supposed to be about The Spirit.

I know that sounds incredibly childish – I can’t help it.

Hey, I totally get it. I KNOW I would have enjoyed Pulp Fiction a million times more if Tarantino had called it almost anything else. That whole movie I absolutely could not shut off the part of my brain that was saying, Pulp fiction my ass. Not set in the 30′s or 40′s? No Shadow? No hard-boiled private eyes or cowboys or Mongol warriors or alien invasions? No Doc Savage? This meandering Royale with Cheese monologue crap is supposed to be “Pulp Fiction”? I THINK NOT!!

Sometimes we just can’t control those involuntary fan reflexes.

I haven’t seen The Spirit yet. Not sure if I will before it hits DVD. From the trailers, though, I get the feeling that it’s a movie that I might ordinarily enjoy … if it wasn’t supposed to be about The Spirit.

I know that sounds incredibly childish – I can’t help it.

And that’s really not a big deal.

I don’t think it’s just a matter of people now having no power to say him no. Miller would not be the first creative person to be changed by success, and the changes are internal. The writer that is still trying to make it big is naturally more insecure and willing to try harder and also more open to influences. I suspect Miller himself had more of a crap detector back then.

Incidently, pretty much every one of my non-comic book reading, non-Aint it Cool News-reading friends seems to think The Spirit looks amazing (bare in mind it hasn’t come out here yet).

My only creators that guarantee a bad book to me are Jeph Loeb or Brad Meltzer. I believe anything written by those two are guaranteed crap without fail. Anything written by those two I automatically rank as the worst written book of the month.

If anything, this is another reason why people wait for trade these days.

Bringing it up in connection with THE SPIRIT, though, strikes me as ludicrous. Skipping a movie because it looks bad is an entertainment decision most people make all the time, and regular people usually get to do it without wild-eyed devotees of the work chasing them and demanding they account for themselves. “The trailer looks awful and I heard it sucked” are perfectly acceptable reasons for not wanting to see a movie and actually heard fairly often in casual conversation. “Gonna go see so-and-so?” “Nah, the trailer looked dumb.”. Trailers, reviews, and word-of-mouth are the three major ways studios PRESENT movies as an option.

THE SPIRIT marketing campaign was based largely on familiarity with the previous work of Frank Miller and (somewhat less) on the familiarity fans had with Will Eisner and the source material. So if we bring that familiarity to bear on what they show us, as we were invited to in countless ads, and that same familiarity tells us,.”Well, that looks like it’s going to be terrible,” the studio PR people have no one to blame but themselves. They ASKED to be pre-judged on that basis.

Now that the movie’s out and a lot of us are muttering, “Sounds like we made a good guess there about that one sucking out loud,” this pre-judgement accusation is coming up. It’s ridiculous. There’s no there there.

What is disheartening is the accompanying schaedenfreude. That part I don’t get, like Miller deserved it or had it coming or something. I have often thought over the last ten years or so that Miller’s excesses (that get excused as “satire” so often) might just really be where the guy’s head is and he thinks that’s how the non-satirical, regular version should be, and his earlier work that is so fondly remembered is the result of his editors and collaborators having more power to say no then. I think THE SPIRIT might be the time when the “satire” defense gets torpedoed once and for all.

But I don’t wish the guy ILL and I don’t understand all the fannish glee at his failure. I’m SAD that the Spirit movie is (apparently) so bad. I was rooting for it to be great. I ALWAYS root for these movies to be great. A rising tide lifts all boats and all that, and anyway Frank Miller is not some evil corporate guy that was screwing creators or stacking up a lot of bad karma or whatever. I mean, I don’t care for his recent work and I really wish there were people in comics willing to EDIT him, but that’s no reason to chortle at this national belly-flop with critics on his first movie. Come on, that hurts enough all by itself without a chorus of your former supporters all over the internet cheering for it. Frank Miller gave us a lot of good stuff, too, you know.

No, it doesn’t.

I was using a bit of hyperbole. I suppose a movie that receives more than 85% of negative crititcs qualifies.

my newspaper gave the Spirit four stars

I’m sure there are going to be a lot of reviewers who rate The Spirit highly… I reckon a lot of them will probably call it something like “a lighter, more humourous take on Sin City by the same Creator”…
Don’t forget a lot of people liked League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too…

The problem is, we as comic readers are a tiny minority of the people who will go and see these films. The majority of ticket buyers are after mindless action, cleavage and “Kewl” effects, and will never have heard of the comic…

Like DanCJ, I really enjoyed Howard, A New Breed of Hero, with things like Quack-Fu, and a nude Duck in a bath… Then I encountered the comics years later…. I have to think of the movie as a parody of the comics now…

I enjoyed Toys. As a kid I enjoyed Howard the Duck (or rather Howard: A New Breed of Hero as it was called over here for some reason) , but I tried to watch it years later and realised it was actually terrible.

Also the Butterfly Effect got fairly slated, but I thought that was great.

My parents won’t hear a word said against 1941

I loved Speed Racer, but:
A) I don’t know if 37 on Metacritic counts as “100% panned” — my newspaper gave the Spirit four stars.
B) I was in an IMax theater with friends consuming sugar and caffeine in bulk. I’m sort of afraid to watch it again.

You will know, with a high level of probability, at the very least whether you will like the work or not. All it takes is an educated opinion. Like anything else, just back up what you say with the reasoning behind it.

For instance, the Judd Winick/Ian Churchill Titans book, from almost the second it was announced, looked like a complete disaster to me.

And yes, I did frown a little on you commenting on Battle for the Cowl, Brian, but that’s only because it’s been so long since I or anyone else has read anything by Tony Daniel that I personally don’t feel comfortable assuming poor quality ahead of time, even if some of his previously written work wasn’t very good. I like to think I follow some strict guidelines when it comes to pre-judging comics since so many people don’t and since I’m so sick of arguing the point that it is perfectly acceptable so long as you’ve done your homework.

Maybe I’m just too vanilla in my tastes, but I don’t remember ever liking a movie that is 100% panned by the critics. I liked lots of movies that received mixed reviews, though.