Okay, so now I’ve seen The Spirit, and I won’t say much till next week, except, well, you can see that red light over the righthand column. I have been thwarted in my psychedness.

I’ll say a few things that you can also see for yourself in the trailer above. One, Gabriel Macht’s Spirit never removes his mask, Macht’s hair is dyed black for the role (in real life he’s blond), and in the film he’s way more buff and his face is more chiseled than I’ve ever seen him before:

In other words, no one is going to recognize him as having been in this film. And he’s probably going to be glad of that.

Two, much has been made of the fact that drawing comic books is very much like making movie storyboards, and that’s true. But there’s a lot more to making a movie than creating storyboards. When one draws a comic book, one is not only the director but all the actors as well, but a film director has to cope with human actors who may have their own ideas about how to portray a character, how to deliver a line, and so on. Part of a director’s job is to rein them in and, you know, direct them.

Frank Miller has not, ahem, ever directed a movie before. Yeah, I know he got that “codirecting” credit on Sin City, but that was about the look of the film, and nothing else.

The Spirit opens in the U.S. on December 25, and in the U.K. on January 1, 2009.