Short version: The Spirit is two hours of your life that you’ll never get back.

Screen Rant reviews The Spirit

Wow.

That’s the first word that comes to mind as I think about The Spirit. It’s an example of a movie that just leaves me plain dumbfounded. It’s so awful that I’m completely in the dark as to how a movie like this can ever actually get funded, produced and make it into movie theaters.

Hot off the heels of directing his first feature film (c’mon, we all know that on Sin City he basically just got to sit next to Robert Rodriguez while he was directing) The Spirit, it looks like graphic novel writer extraordinaire Frank Miller has his eye on another comic project to write and direct. No, it’s not one of his own (how many does he have left that haven’t already been spoken for?) but rather an adaptation of the classic 1930’s newspaper comic strip Buck Rogers.

However Miller’s version will be a lot different than the original:

“Miller will write and direct his own big-screen take on the comic serial; while the creator has only begun to sketch ideas, it’s expected to be a darker take, with many of Miller’s signature visual elements and themes, such as corruption and redemption.”

Click to continue "Frank Miller To Hopefully Not Ruin ‘Buck Rogers’"

More info: buck rogers, the spirit

Today we have a pile of new posters we’ve been collecting throughout the week from a variety of sources.

These include the final poster for The Spirit, the first posters for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and new posters for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Lost: Season 5, Red Sonja, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

That’s a lot of posters!

Here we have a short Christmas-themed TV spot/trailer for The Spirit thanks to Coming Soon. It seems like we’ve been getting an onslaught of marketing material for this movie, similar to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Maybe it just feels like it, because I don’t care for it that much.

When that happens in combination with trailers not getting much positive feedback, I get the feeling the movie will be bad and that the studios know it. It seems especially odd that this was released during the same week in which trailers for two other movies have been getting lots of love: Watchmen and Star Trek.

Yet another poster has been released for the upcoming graphic novel adaption, The Spirit.

The Spirit movie is adapted by Frank Miller, both in terms of writing and direction, but is based on Will Eisner’s old comic strip.  Although the trailer and images look plenty like Sin City, it is not a sequel.  Miller did work with Robert Rodriguez on his adaption of Miller’s Sin City, so it is Miller’s “style” so to speak.  And up until recently, that “style” was evident in the posters for the film.

Samuel L. Jackson & Gabriel Macht in a scene from The Spirit

There is another (and presumbaly, final) trailer for Frank Miller’s movie version of The Spirit. Up until now, everything about his film has looked ridiculous and pretty awful. I will say that this latest trailer is MUCH better than the previous one or the footage shown at Comic-Con this Summer.

But don’t take that as a ringing endorsement.

Here are two new posters from Frank Miller’s The Spirit. The first one is of The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), standing at the wrong end of two big guns, body full of bullet holes and not seeming to care. The other poster is the reverse angle of Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus, gripping said guns and looking mad as hell that his bullets can’t seem to take down The Spirit.

Interesting concept, but is it enough to rebuke all the rampant rumors stating that The Spirit is going to be crap?

So the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con is officially over - today feels like coming down from a “high.” Covering the Con is always a whirlwind, but at least this year (my second covering it) I felt like a was a bit more in control.

We did our best to bring you the lowdown on what is relevant to you although we couldn’t cover everything. That’s the problem with the Con - as far as movies and television almost everything is relevant to what we cover here at Screen Rant: Sci-Fi, superheroes, action and a bit of horror.

We managed to cover:

Comic-con has been the perfect starting point for the marketing machine behind the upcoming film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ genre-shattering, classic graphic novel, Watchmen, to start turning its gears. Since the Con kicked-off and that breathtaking teaser trailer premiered before The Dark Knight, the buzz surrounding Watchmen has gone from a few bees in the bush, to an eager swarm of anticipation.

Always ready to serve the will of the people, we here at Screen Rant thought it might be nice to pool a lot of the info about the Watchmen flick together into a nice focus piece - a Rorschach blot that you can look at and determine for yourself how this film is shaping up.

Doug Nagy from TheMovieBlog.com, Alex Billington from Firstshowing.net and me with the three stars of Bitch Slap at the Wrath of Con party

Another day at Comic-Con, another sore rear end from the uncomfortable seats in Hall H…

Today’s events included watching the Season 3 premiere episode of Heroes, which was a huge unexpected bonus. It looks like the show is getting its mojo back and if you’re a fan you’re really going to like it when it returns this Fall.

Gotta tell you guys, we’re having a blast. Somehow this year I’m relaxing more yet getting more posts out about the goings-on here at Comic-Con. Here’s a bit of a wrap up of yesterday (since it’s 3AM and no longer Friday).

I’ve enjoyed seeing some of my online movie buds in person again. Nice to actually hang out instead of just exchanging emails, Twitters and IMs.

Here’s Screen Rant’s live coverage of Lionsgate’s panel for “The Spirit.” It will be starting in about 10 minutes and I’ll be live-blogging it. It’ll be interesting to see if they have any new footage that will look better than the awful trailer that was released a while ago.

There was a Youtube, bootleg version of the first full trailer for The Spirit out a couple of days ago, but I refuse to put those crappy versions up here on Screen Rant. Once those pop up you just have to wait a day or two and usually a decent version pops up, so here you go.

Now by “decent” I mean video quality and not the content of the trailer itself because my first gut-check reaction is that this isn’t looking too good at the moment…

Welcome to another Weekend Movie News Wrap Up.

This week we feature news on: Val Kilmer and 5O Cent in Streets of Blood, Brett Ratner’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, Robert Rodriguez’s Barbarella, Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore to write a big screen Sci-Fi trilogy and see what Eva Mendes looks like in Frank Miller’s The Spirit.

So here we go…

Right on the heels of the first poster for the film, below you’ll get your first real look at the upcoming Frank Miller film The Spirit.

This one looks to have a very film noir look and suprisingly (to me) looks very similar in style to Sin City. I really expected a completely different look for this one, much like how 300 was quite different from Sin City. I’m also quite curious how this one will do at the box office… my gut feel is that it won’t do big numbers, but may end up with a very dedicated but relatively small fan base.

Ain’t It Cool News has scored the first super-hi-res look at the first (non-billboard) poster for the upcoming film adaption of Frank Miller’s The Spirit, by Frank Miller himself. If you don’t know, Miller is the same guy who brought us the highly stylized Sin City graphic novel and movie. Oh, and he also wrote the graphic novel that the movie 300 was based on.

So if nothing else, this film certainly won’t be boring or ordinary.

For a full look at the poster keep reading…

Last week I said that the next big comic book adaptation to watch was The Spirit. I stand by that statement with the release of two official pictures from Frank Miller’s film.

The Spirit stars Samuel L. Jackson as The Octopus and Scarlett Johansson as Silken Floss, Eva Mendes and Gabriel “Who did I sleep with to get this role?” Macht as The Spirit

Okay, Okay - I know that they look like Sin City, but that isn’t a bad thing. Didn’t 300 kind of look like Sin City? That turned out okay.

It’s also directed by one of the directors of Sin City, so you can allow him some leeway.

To see the images of Jackson and Johansson… yes…yes… continue reading!

We love a good comic book film here at Screen Rant. Sometimes we even love a bad comic book film, but what we really want to see is a great comic book film. While the other writers here await Iron Man like the second coming and I anticipate the new Batman film, that I’ve waited twenty years to see one could easily forget Frank Miller’s forthcoming The Spirit.

Forget The Spirit! I hear you scream. Never! How could you forget a comic book adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and Gabriel Macht.

No don’t worry… I’ve never heard of Macht either.