'The Spirit' Has Broken My Spirit

I used to love Will Eisner's The Spirit. I had all of these Warren magazine-sized comics from back in the '70s, plus some of the Kitchen Sink reprints, and even the new DC stuff by Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone wasn't so bad. Frank Miller's The Spirit, however, is a train wreck. Just watching the trailers depressed me so much that I never saw it in theaters, only recently watching the DVD. And it's awful. My brother got me a Spirit T-shirt for Christmas, and I will wear it like a brand, like a scarlet letter that will remind me to never let anything that horrible happen ever again. I've written about my five big problems with the movie, and what could have been done to make it better -- mediocre, even -- over at MoviesWithoutPity.com.

The Spirit: What Could Have Been Done to Save It

The Spirit: Some People Fear It

I'm a little nervous about the bad reviews coming out for The Spirit. Of course, the trailers have made it look bad for a while, but I was willing to wait to see them all edited together before I made a judgment. I'm still going to see it, but I'm worried no one else will, because nobody knows who the Spirit is. (And now, thanks to this movie, they won't know who he really was, because this movie seems to take a lot of liberties.) I wrote a guide to the characters for Movies Without Pity -- check it out.

Who the Hell is The Spirit?