Remember that For Your Consideration Spirit trailer I posted a while back?  The one that just compiled the bad reviews?  This one’s like that, but a lot better.  It’s from Black20, they of Quantum of Bonds and Journey at the Center of the Earth.  They managed to find better quotes.  Quotes like, “This movie was so good I’m spinning in my goddamned grave,” says Gene Siskel.

See what I did there with the headline?  I put shit in it.

The most accurate assessment of The Spirit I’ve seen yet was from a Variety article about the premiere that dropped the line, “Producer Deborah Del Prete said director Frank Miller would rather draw than tell the actors what he wanted done on set.”  Today, this video’s been going around the blog-o-tubes.  It’s a “for your consideration” trailer for The Spirit, hoping you’ll consider it for the worst film of the year.  The video’s a nice little compilation of all the horrible reviews The Spirit got and a great watch if you like pictures and words.  Meanwhile, I photoshopped Schadenfreude Sloth into this picture of Frank Miller.  It’s been a hectic day, let me tell you.

If you watched football at all this weekend, you probably caught that ad (video after the jump) for The Spirit full of glowing review quotes.  You probably thought, “Wait, isn’t that the movie everyone says is a disaster?”  Yep, the very same.  Turns out all the quotes in the commercial came from some douche no one’s heard of. But if you want something more honest, you need only look at the short Variety article about The Spirit‘s premiere (in Variety parlance, The Spirit “preemed” last week at the Chinese theater – meanwhile, I wonder if Variety’s writers were “preemies”):

The After-party was across the street at the Roosevelt Hotel where producer Deborah Del Prete said director Frank Miller would rather draw than tell the actors what he wanted done on set. [emphasis added]

Yeah, that sounds about right.
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One of the things that bugs the F out of me about Hollywood is that people can become the new hot director or actor and book a ton of projects based on buzz about a film no one has seen yet.  Case in point: Odd Lot Entertainment has aquired the rights to Buck Rogers, and they want Frank Miller to direct.  Now, Frank Miller is a world renowned graphic artist, but I’m not sure if you guys have noticed this, directing movies and drawing pictures actually involve slightly different “skill sets”.  Nonetheless, Miller recently completed his directorial debut, The Spirit.  How’s that going, you ask?

Hollywood Reporter: “truly a mess. Fans of Sin City and 300 will populate theaters for the film’s opening, but boxoffice will fall quickly. The film’s campiness might then pull in a different sort of aficionados — those who celebrate films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show for their silly acting and overripe dialogue.”

Variety: “Frank Miller’s solo writing-directing debut plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air. Pushing well past the point of self-parody, Miller has done Will Eisner’s pioneering comicstrip no favors by drenching it in the same self-consciously neo-noir monochrome put to much more compelling use in “Sin City.””

And then of course there was this guy’s 2600-word ode to how much it sucked.

I’m not telling you you should trust any of these people’s opinions, because most people are idiots, and that goes double for anyone who writes about movies for a living.  Point is, there are a million people out there who want to direct movies, and this dude’s getting another shot before the returns on his first try are even in.  And by most accounts, it was a disaster.  But he does wear that handsome black fedora everywhere he goes, so I can see why people would think he has his finger on the pulse of today’s youth.

An AICN reader who caught an advance screening of The Spirit has written an early review, and in typical AICN fashion they’ve posted it, in all its 2,623-word glory. The reviewer sounds like a coked-up ADD kid who really really wants to tell you a story, but the gist is that The Spirit is bad, like, worse than Battlefield Earth bad.

The real Main Offender here is the company that thought this was good. Thought this was worthy of your twelve bucks. Because they, my friends, are assholes. That’s all it comes down to. They MUST know that this movie is a piece of shit…I mean, it is so bad they literally HAVE to know how bad it is, no matter how cynical you are about the intelligence level of Hollywood producers. Which means that they think so little of the movie-going public that they’ll drop this bomb on us and just expect us to go see it “‘cause it looks like Sin City.”

So, execs over at Lionsgate: F-ck. You.

You should know better. And if you don’t, I just got laid off, and I’ve got TONS of ideas. And none of them involve hiring a visually-overindulgent, first-time director and throwing $30 million at him. (I have no idea what this actually cost…if it’s less, congrats. If it’s more, double shame on you. I’m just guessing, based on your slate of releases and that you pride yourself on your budget-consciousness.)

Anyway, you get the picture.  Not just bad, a piece of shit.  Literally bad.  In fact, guy-who-wrote-a-2600-word-review found it quite self-indulgent.  Shame on you, Frank Miller.

[Thanks to RoboPanda for the tip]