Notes on The Spirit

The Spirit has been beckoning me, calling me. I even bought the $30 art book yesterday. I was prepared to see it last night but that 14 hour island-wide power outage got in my way. So tonight, after Sean went to sleep, I drove out to Koko Marina where Barack Obama was seen eating shave ice yesterday and watched it at the Koko Marina 8.

A lot of people seem to think that the film was smug or self-mocking. I think that Miller et. al. were actually very sincere. The problem isn't the intent behind the film. It's Miller's lack of experience.

MEDIUM
Miller doesn't yet understand the difference between comics and cinema. Cinema is literal. So a lot of things you can do in comics won't work in film. Having someone skulk around neck deep in water works fine on paper. But when you see it on film, all you can do is think about is how cold the water is and wonder why everyone isn't freezing to death and why is he skulking in the first place. It doesn't make any sense.

>You can't have sets that are that minimal. It just looks like bad theater.

>People on screen have to be doing something that makes sense. Miller blocks everything as tropes. People move here and there with no reason. In most of the film, there is no underpinning physical or emotional reality. Miller doesn't understand what makes a world a world. A world continues beyond the screen. It is not just about appearances.

>Scenes are very static. They look like moving storyboards but as such make no sense. A comic book panel of three people talking looks fine. But a few minutes of expository walk and talk with the person featured prominently in the middle saying almost nothing is just incompetent.

EDITING
It seems unlikely that Miller would have final cut on this film. But how else would you explain the lack of editing? Just getting rid of a lot of the cutaways/reaction shots and jokes that didn't work would have helped a lot. When it comes out on DVD I think I might do an edit getting rid of the bad stuff just to see if it works any better.

EXPOSITION
The problem isn't the actual words as much as the way they're used. It seemed like 90% of the dialogue was exposition. Correspondingly, none of the dialogue had any subtext. Everyone just explained what they were doing and if you didn't understand that, The Spirit explained it for you. Further, there was fighting but no action. This is a film. You have to have people -do- things, externalize to show how they're feeling and what they're thinking. You can't talk a film into existence. But the thing is crammed with words that have no function. The Spirit is walking around narrating and then a voice over narration of The Spirit immediately follows. Why? The thing feels like wall-to-wall talking, a cinematic horror vacuui.

EMOTIONAL SENSE
The film made no emotional sense. Imagine seeing your long lost love after years of separation and the encounter is treated like buying a loaf of bread. Miller was just outthinking himself here. Not wanting to go sentimental, he tried to play the scene against expectation. But without enough experience to make it work, the scene came across as nothing. It's almost like Miller took advanced classes in film criticism but no basic classes in film production. You can't do something complex until you can do something simple. Miller gives new meaning to the term "result directing." He knew how he wanted the scenes to work. He wanted to avoid sentimentality, to bring cool irony to the film. But he didn't know how to do it. He didn't as my typography instructor used to say, "stay within himself." Essentially, Miller doesn't know enough as a filmmaker to know what's important and what's not.

CONCLUSION
In the long run, I felt like I always knew what Miller was going for. He just didn't have the experience and know how to make it work.