Quotes of the Week: Ragging on the Spirit

It's totally cliché to rag on Frank Miller's Spirit movie anymore, but I can't help it if all the best lines this week came from Spirit reviews.

There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

--Roger Ebert.

...it doesn't seem to matter if people have read the comics or not. If you get what makes the character work, if you get what people like about it in its platonic ideal, you have a successful movie -- Iron Man being a lovely case in point.

Which, I suspect, is why Sin City and 300 worked. They were like having the comics happening up on the screen. The thing that people liked about it was there. With The Spirit, what the reader responded to is Eisner's lightness of touch and mastery of story, his humour and his humanity -- and a world that looks like Eisner drew it. The moment that it's obvious that that isn't there it almost doesn't matter what is there instead. According to Gaiman's Law, the more Sin City looked and felt like what people like about Frank Miller's work on Sin City, the more successful it was going to be with audiences, but the more The Spirit feels like Sin City and not like Will Eisner's The Spirit, the less successful it's going to be.

--Neil Gaiman, not so much ragging as being typically wise and insightful.

In comics, it took Miller decades to devolve into embarrassing self-parody. In film, he's made that leap over the course of a single disastrous film.

--Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club