During Sony’s Comic Con panel for Pineapple Express, Seth Rogen jokingly wondered if his next project, a comedy based on the classic comic The Green Hornet might be in trouble, since though he’d seen people dressed as characters as obscure as the third guy from the left in Final Fantasy, there was no one walking around in a Green Hornet costume. Luckily for Rogen, his film has something else going for it besides whatever tiny fanbase the original property might have: it has him. No such luck for Frank Miller, who’s adaptation of The Spirit was met with resounding indifference and sometimes outright disgust during its panel debut at Comic Con.
To call The Spirit panel the biggest disaster of 2008’s convention is something of an understatement. This thing went off like a stale pop rock. Miller was cranky and unlikable. The producer they wedged between him and Sam Jackson was controlling, overbearing, and utterly annoying. Jackson was given nothing to talk about except the size of his guns, as if we’re all so stupid that the simple fact of him holding a firearm is enough to make anything he’s in automatically good.
The panel droned on and on and on, while Miller and the annoying producer next to him talked about what a cinematic genius he is, even though he’s only ever directed half a movie. A little humility might have been in order. Instead, we were treated to pre-emptive proclamation’s of Miller’s brilliance, and those who weren’t half-asleep within the first five minutes were eventually treated to never before see clips from the film… which were disastrous.
The first clip shown was footage of Eva Mendes under water, dodging bullets shot by Sam Jackson as the dastardly Octopus. Miller introduced the clip by explaining how they shot it. They wanted to show Mendes underwater, but without actually shooting underwater… because water smears makeup or some such. Apparently he’s never heard of water proof lip gloss. So instead of shooting underwater, they stuck Mendes in front of a green screen and told her to act like The Flash. I’m not kidding. They actually told her to act like The Flash. And once the footage was shown, not so surprisingly, that’s exactly what it looked like. Eva Mendes hanging in front of fake water flailing around as if she’s doing an impression of The Flash. Wow, this Miller guy is a genius.
The second clip shown was a dialogue scene, in which the Gabriel Macht as Spirit talks to a group of people in some sort of office. If you’ve seen old episodes of the George Reeves version of Superman, then you’v seen the sort of bizarre tone used in this footage. I guess it worked back then in sort of a campy, awkward way, but seen now in an actual movie it just comes off as bad writing and bad directing. I wonder if Miller told Gabriel Macht to talk like Superman?
By the time The Spirit panel was over, I was ready to consider abandoning Comic Con and heading back to Dallas. If this was the kind of watered down bullshit the convention was going to deliver, why bother? Apparently I wasn’t the only one, since for the rest of the weekend any time someone uttered the words “Spirit panel”, there was an instant expression of dread and a sickened or depressed shaking of heads from everyone around the speaker. Everything about The Spirit smells like disaster, and Frank Miller came off like such a miserable jerk in the panel that it’s hard not to end up rooting for its failure. The Spirit’s panel stands alone as the most awful, unbearable thing I sat through at Comic Con. I’d have been better off in the lobby eating an 8 dollar hot dog.
