And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out (1/20/09)
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The Spirit. [Frank Miller, 2008. From a series of comic books written by Will Eisner.]
Dauntless tough guy Gabriel “Wille Zur” Macht [The Spirit, to you], who though he avows himself one of the living dead has apparently paid heed to the proverbial advice about leaving a good-looking corpse, bounds like a gazelle over the rooftops of a
Sin City landscape, silhouetted against a perpetually crepuscular sky flecked with gently falling atmospheric snow, fedora clamped unalterably in place, coattails fluttering behind him like a cape [or, yes, the wings of a dark angel], bloodred tie flapping in the wind — combating crime-with-a-capital-C in, uh, Central City, and attempting to little avail to thwart the nefarious schemes of his arch-enemy and nemesis Samuel L. Jackson [aka The Octopus], a baleful scientific mastermind whose minions include a dimwitted but invariably cheerful set of cloned henchmen and an apprentice evil genius bearing a startling resemblance to Scarlett Johansson, and whose Forbidden Experiments seem to have included the Frankensteinian accident that rendered both himself and his Manichean opposite invincible and immortal — though, at least in the case of Our Hero [“What year is it?” someone asks — “This year,” he helpfully replies] somewhat addled.
Macht does seem to be obsessed, to the extent that he is capable of focus, with the question of why his dirt nap has been interrupted, and in a steadily less interesting series of flashbacks revisits the life before his death, in which as a cute but rudderless lad of the tenements he wooed his childhood sweetheart on the front steps and dreamed of growing up to be a cop and a nobody just like his old man. Fate, alas, had other, more interesting ideas, and before you could say “What a bummer” the lovebirds’ fathers had managed to kill each other by meaningless accident, she’d left this stinking town never to be seen again, and he had muddled on into a career as a policeman and his assignation with the Angel of Death — aka Lorelei, and played fetchingly by Jaime King.
Macht is indeed irresistible to women, Death Herself included [“You ever meet a skirt you
didn’t chase?” asks the sourfaced old police captain][did I forget to mention him? still you knew somehow; somehow you knew], and the distractions provided by Ms. King, Ms. Johansson, Sarah Paulson, Stana Katic, and Paz Vega may suffice to explain his erratic attention to the mysteries of the afterlife and the riddle of personal identity. — Which makes a certain sense: it is the libido, after all, which lives beyond the grave, though memory and the conscious capacity for self-examination do not. Not that this would ever be mistaken for an essay in evolutionary biology. — But at last his longlost girl returns, now [didn't they do this in
Ghost Rider?] grown up into Eva Mendes; who is, in keeping with the logic of the Spirit-world, an internationally famous jewel thief, come to the metropolis to contest with Jackson possession of a couple of treasure-chests containing [no shit] the Blood of Heracles and the Golden Fleece. — Jackson wants the former to formalize his status as a demigod; Mendes wants the latter because — well — it’s so fucking cool. — After a preliminary tussle, she has what he wants and he has what she wants; complications ensue.
Alas, this doesn’t all add up to much: though we do for once find out just what the mysterious glowing McGuffin beneath the lid of the attaché case is, we don’t ever figure out exactly where we are, what decade it is [the Thirties? only with cellphones], why the Spirit’s familiar is a cat and not a crow [maybe it’s just that they’re easier to wrangle], or what imbecile decided that lines like “Shut up and bleed” and “I’m going to kill you all kinds of dead” were clever.
But whatever questions may remain unresolved, two things, at least, are clear: first, no matter whether Rodriguez can get that long-anticipated sequel out the door or not, the
Sin City look is long since over; second, the art of cutting a trailer containing every single good moment in the movie it purports to represent is not dead. Of that, at least, Hollywood may yet be proud.
____________Seven stories about Celeste (8/16/08)
