I was dreading The Spirit. I didn't like the posters that showed up six months ago, the ones with the smutty writing on the women's faces, and I didn't like the look of the trailer. It looked weird, unpolished and campy. When some reviews showed up that called it, literally, one of the worst movies ever made, I felt a sigh of relief, thinking "Well, now I don't have to see it, that's a load off."  Ah, but then my big superhero project came along, and how was I going to not see the new superhero movie?

Christmas day rolled around, and I found myself in a town with nothing to do and, well, I like to go see a movie on Christmas, it's kind of a tradition 'round my place. I should have been working on a treatment I have due, but it was Christmas, and who wants to work on Christmas?

And I had talked with long-time reader The Editor earlier in the week, and I had said to her "I want to see something on Christmas, but I can't decide whether I should see Slick Hollywood Product, which I've heard is okay, or The Spirit, which I've heard is, literally, one of the worst movies ever made." And The Editor said "I think the wise thing would be to choose the truly awful over the merely bad."

But I was still dreading The Spirit, and so when I sauntered down to the local googolplex I plunked my money down for a Slick Hollywood Product, a highly-polished project with expensive production values and big-name stars, with a script by a name-brand, award-winning writer and a direction by a director I've long respected and admired, and I went into the theater hoping for two hours of thrills and drama, and was bored silly.

And then, events conspired to make a hole open up in the evening, and I had time to see another movie. Having felt burnt by Slick Hollywood Product, I was now determined to see The Spirit. The Spirit was either going to save Christmas for me, or destroy it.

And I enjoyed every eye-popping, confounding minute of it.

Now, don't get me wrong -- for those looking to find fault, there is plenty on display in The Spirit. The screenplay is wildly uneven, some scenes go on way too long, the story takes a real long time to get started and doesn't make a whole lot of sense once it does, the direction is unsure, as though the director didn't quite have a firm grasp on his tools, the acting ranges from obviously intentionally bad to not-so-obviously intentionally bad, the tone swings from camp to self-parody to broad comedy to sly jokiness to weird, w-t-f bizarreness. But it ain't boring, it's way too strange to be boring, and it's more alive than any movie I've seen since, well, probably since Grindhouse.

It may not be your cup of tea. It may infuriate you. It may baffle you. It may cause you to roll your eyes, curse the screen or head for the exit. When my screening ended, one guy in the back broke into applause, while everyone else in the theater turned to see who that guy was.  Who would dare announce, publicly, that they had spied the work of a true artist in The Spirit?  It's that kind of polarizing experience.

It is written and directed by Frank Miller, of course, and bears the green-screen expressionism of Sin City, which is, if nothing else, the most fetishistically faithful adaptation of a comic book ever, and it just bleeds Frank Miller-isms all over the place. Guys in trenchcoats, sexy women in ridiculous outfits, outrageous, cartoonish violence, very large guns, Nazis, macho posturing, references to ancient Greek culture, they're all here, over and over and over again, and all that sounds bad on paper but at least it's a point of view, a genuine vision, something that I haven't seen in a Hollywood movie in a long time, so long I've forgotten how much I've missed it, and I'd rather see a movie year full of passionate misfires like The Spirit than a long, dreary parade of competent product. (Whether it is a faithful rendering of its source material, Will Eisner's revered comic strip, is another question, one which I don't know the answer to. Like a lot of comics readers, I've heard much more about how great The Spirit is than I have actually read any of it. I know that Miller and Eisner were friends, and my guess is that Eisner would have encouraged Miller to make The Spirit his own. Which he definitely has.)

I've been trading emails with a cartoonist friend of mine (who knows Miller well enough to say hi to), trying to put my finger on the feeling The Spirit evokes. Then I remembered a time, right after Sin City came out, where this cartoonist and I were leafing through my copy of That Yellow Bastard, which contains some of Miller's absolute best work.  We were admiring this composition and that use of shadow and this wonderful sequence.  Then we came across this full-page panel:



The big head in the above image belongs to Roarke, the Mr. Big of the Sin City world. Not a lot of subtlety there -- his eyes bulge, his pupils are pinpricks, he's got a monobrow and no neck, acne scars and a mouth big enough to swallow the protagonist in one gulp. And it takes up the whole page.  And my cartoonist friend said "And then I see something like this and I just say "Okay, Frank, okay -- I GET IT." Which is what I felt through almost the whole running time of The Spirit -- the whole movie is turned up to 11. It makes a point, then makes it again, then makes it again.

And still, throughout the movie, I felt that I was in the presence of a mad genius instead of a crappy filmmaker. I could see that Miller loves this stuff, the potency and silliness of it, and he's made a joyful, personal work of demented glee. I hope he improves as a director, but I also hope he keeps his spark of craziness.

(As a side note, let me just add that I've noticed that, for some reason, a lot of people just can't stand Frank Miller. There is no topic more liable to start fights on a comics message board than saying you like Frank Miller. This baffles me -- if you don't like his work, fine, it's not for everyone, but the kind of I-want-to-stab-him-in-the-face viciousness that he inspires in some quarters goes way beyond personal taste. From the way he's treated by comics fans, you'd think he'd ruined the form instead of being one of the handful of bona-fide geniuses of his generation. And I say this knowing full well about his bizarre, reactionary politics.)