Bob Thompson: Scarlett Johansson and company get The Spirit (National Post)

By Bob Thompson, National Post

If you can't wait to catch The Spirit, you are not alone. For those who might not know, The Spirit is the Frank Miller live-action film version of the classic 1940s Will Eisner newspaper strip and subsequent comic book series.

Opening on Dec. 25, the movie arrives with lots of anticipation and a question; as in can Miller translate the 1940s noir images onto the big screen? At least Miller gets The Spirit. He was an Eisner friend. And his resume suits the challenge. Plus his intention to shoot the movie in the fancy Sin City CGI style made sense to just about everybody.

After all, Miller co-directed and co-wrote the digital Sin City with Robert Rodriguez and wrote the popular graphic novels Sin City and 300 and restored Batman as the brooding Dark Knight in comics which inspired Christopher Nolan's hit movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

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Uslan and DeSanto Catch the Spirit (PW.com)

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By Douglas Wolk

Publishers Weekly

12/15/2008

From February through April, DC's The Spirit series will have a guest writing team: Michael Uslan and F.J. DeSanto, the producers of the Frank Miller-directed Spirit movie that's opening this month. Uslan hasn't written many comics since he became the producer of the Batman movies (aside from the Batman graphic novel Detective No. 27 a few years ago), but he wrote stories for The Shadow, Beowulf, Detective Comics and other series back in the early '70s, when, as he put it at a recent interview in New York, "I was a Junior Woodchuck at DC Comics. They didn't have the term 'intern' then, but it was me and that skinny kid—what was his name?—Paul... Levitz! Levitz! I don't know what happened to him, but he was a Woodchuck too."

The difficulty with creating new Spirit comics, DeSanto noted, is that the character is so closely identified with Eisner: "It's not like Batman, where you have 70 years of Batman stories by so many different creators that you can do The Dark Knight or you can do the Brave and the Bold cartoon—it's Eisner, and that's it." So, before they started writing, he and Uslan made a list of elements of Eisner's work they had to incorporate into every Spirit story.

"They had to have cinematic storytelling, influenced heavily by Hitchcock," Uslan said. "In terms of the heart of the story, they had to be influenced by Frank Capra. There had to be humanity in these stories. They had to be character-driven. Eisner's humor had to be there. Eisner's violence quotient had to be there. Eisner's over-the-top villains had to be there, and Eisner's femme fatales"—the three issues Uslan and DeSanto have written are built around Plaster of Paris, Silken Floss and Lorelei, all of whom also appear in the movie, and they're connected by a plot involving Eisner's foremost villain, the Octopus. Drawn by the former Shadowpact team of Justiniano and Walden Wong, they're full of other little nods to Eisner's work; the first page of their first issue echoes the first page of the classic Spirit story "Ten Minutes."

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Latino Review on "The Spirit" Movie: F

Reviewed by: Ron Henriques - 12.18.08

2008 has been an interesting year for movies, but what makes me laugh is that what may be the best and worst films of the year are comic book movies. Everyone knows what a sensation 'The Dark Knight' (and lets not forget 'Iron Man') was, earning not just the biggest box-office, but the highest praise from even critics who normally don't like the superhero genre. I think you know where I'm going with this so I'm just going to come out and say it. Frank Miller's 'The Spirit' is a piece of crap. And that's just me being nice because I'm not talking about the crap you may get on your shoe due to some fool who forgot to properly dispose of his chewing gum. I'm talking about the crap that each of us flushes every morning, 'Cept with all the advertising and TV ads we've seen for this flick over the past several months, this crap won't flush away easily.

I won't bore you with too many details or jokes because my job is to inform you on the quality of a feature, not do stand-up comedy. 'The Spirit' is a film that no matter how bad it looked or how bad I heard it was I still went into with an open mind. I wound up getting my mind blown and not in the fashion I like. This film is a complete mess from frame one and not even worth the film it was recorded on which should be burned immediately to save the participants from further embarrassment.

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Samuel L. Jackson IS Wiley E. Coyote, Super-Genius (MTV)

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“['The Spirit'] is a comic book. You can call ‘The Dark Knight’ a comic book, but no, it’s a graphic novel. There’s a difference between a comic book and a graphic novel.

“‘The Spirit’ is funny. It’s tongue-in-cheek, wry humor. It’s sort of Wile E. Coyote with real people. We hit each other with big things [and] we’re both kind of indestructible, so it’s funny in that way. We get shot up, we get stabbed up, we just don’t die.”
—Samuel L. Jackson, a lifelong comic book fan who, instead of reassuring fellow fans, wound up scaring them even more in an MTV Splash Page interview with Rick Marshall.