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"The Spirit" was on Showtime. It is, by almost any estimation, a completely joyless mess of a movie that is pretty much unwatchable. But the cinematography is absolutely unbelievable - a live action comic book. It's like nothing else.
That's also the problem with it - the characters say things that are just ridiculous. From the opening sequence: "My city screams. She is my mother. She is my lover, and I am her Spirit... [sometime later] She provides for me, my city does. She gives me everything I need." What the hell does that even mean? It's like a mixture of some hippie pantheism bullshit and schizophrenia.
It's also set in the 1930s or 1940s? Or 2000s? It is hard to tell. Everything is mixed up. The cars, clothes, and dialog is 1930s/40s, but the technology is 2000s.
But, again, the comic bookness of it is really quite riveting. Comic books have an immediacy and intimacy - there's a lot of the reader's imagination that gets inserted into it. That's the problem with a lot of comic book movies - it tends to destroy this connection between the images and imagination, by putting a guy in a costume inside an action movie. It's like telling you what you've been thinking is wrong.
But, yeah, the movie is basically awful. I watched maybe 15 minutes of it. It's too bad the innovative visual style was used on a movie that was so dreadful.
