eisner
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The most striking among the comments I read was to me, the following cold declaration, for a reason that appears in my final paragraph: thomas eisner wrote:
— Harry's Place -
against the state: an introduction to anarchist political theory the art of living: aesthetics of the ordinary in world spiritual traditions act like you know: african-american autobiography and white identity just watched the spirit, and it's got me thinking about comic books and movies. well, it is a failure as a movie, and it mystifies me a bit why that is. it's written and directed by frank miller, which ought to get some respect. the writing has a lot of wit: half campy hardboiled quasi-noir a la the original will eisner material, as in "i'm gonna kill ya real, real dead." the other half is pop culture references and high concept humor, as when scarlett johannson (playing silken floss) tries to explain why she's trying to help a madman
— eye of the storm -
v for vendetta. some of the failure has to do with pretty obvious stuff: it should be more of a tribute to eisner, and the decision to set it now instead of eisner's 1940s is questionable. and though eisner and miller's visual sensibilities have some affinities, probably due to direct influence, in a way miller erases eisner's look and substitutes his own, when trying for something more true to the original would have been appropriate (since eisner has himself become a god), and quite the little visual challenge. eisner's story arcs were short and often beautifully, perfectly constructed in their irony: i don't think miller actually gets that construction, which doesn't really serve the purposes of a feature-length film. other problems raise more general issues. i think film and comics have been in dialogue since there were comics. in some ways, of course, film and comics are very different. a comic book gives you a couple of hundred panels or whatever it may be. trying to get that kind of visual intensity into a moving image either breaks the cinematic flow into a series of frames
— eye of the storm -
- which miller does constantly - or it just visually overwhelms you: i almost felt assaulted by the visuals. sitting in a theatre, you can't put the thing down and come back to it later, and 2 hours can be an awfully long time when it's that impacted. comic books do not primarily rest on characterization, and eisner really did not. but if you don't feel anything for the hero, really, except vague admiration or something, you can't build a film around that character. that's precisely why
— eye of the storm -
v for vendetta worked infinitely better. it's also why, even though they are much less imaginative movies, the spider-man and x-men things have worked ok on the screen. again, what eisner substituted for that was perfect narrative construction; miller doesn't do that either. the visual atmosphere is stuck between the real world and a comic book world; different directors have negotiated this in different ways, for example setting the comic book characters into the real world a la spider-man, or on the other hand trying to come up with a whole comic-book atmosphere through set design or cgi, a la batman. or: merely presenting the manga as an animation. miller seems to want to take the real world and paint on it, which works beautifully at moments, but seems mannered at others. i still think the visual vocabulary is developing http: / / www. typepad.com / services / trackback / 6a00d83452259369e201156f99fb65970c Your comment could not be posted.
— eye of the storm
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