...In which our heroine (ridicules) reviews "The Spirit"

I didn't want to go see The Spirit last night. Like really didn't want to. But Benjamin Button is three hours long and I got voted down by the rest of the group to see it at ten.

I like Frank Miller. Sin City, the comics and the film, are goregous explorations of noir characters and themes. His ark of Batman comics gave us The Dark Knight, at least partly. While I don't consider 300 to be a "good" film, it falls into the category of movies that I think of as "Fucking Awesome" with its counterparts Wanted and Shoot 'Em Up.

But please, do not ever let the man write and direct another film on his own. While it is clear that Miller has a distinct vision, he needs all the help he can get translating that vision into a clear narrative form. To call the visual look of The Spirit something like Sin City Part 2 is a great insult to Sin City. I could say so much about the film, but all the fanboys beat me to it. A couple of shots are cool looking, but the plot and dialogue such as "I'm going to kill you all kinds of dead" are just horrifically bad. We even get Samuel L. Jackson dressed in full SS attire at one point...as he is a Nazi. Yes, it was serious.

I could say the one redeeming factor of the film was the femme fatales within, but they weren't even good eye candy. Eva Mendes looks pretty good (trust me, the semi-nude shot of her is the high point of the film) but they even make my #1 girl crush Scarlett Johansson look awful. One of the things I like so much about Sin City is that while most of the female characters are hookers, they own their sexuality and are never victims--they generally just kick a lot of ass.

Gabriel Macht plays the Spirit himself and my god, someone needs to stop watching Clint Eastwood movies. MOVE YOUR FACE, STOP GROWLING AND EMOTE GODAMNIT! Jackson needs to stop being in such campy movies, he's becoming a self-parody.

Don't go see The Spirit unless you are A. alright with wasting eight dollars in order to see how bad the medium of filmmaking can go; B. trying to escape death; or C. highly intoxicated.

However, the company was good. It was once again the dude fest of high school, with me as the only girl, and I couldn't have been happier sitting in Waffle House at one in the morning.