Rewatch alert: The Crow
Feb. 19th, 2009 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenIn exchanging my comic collection with my work friend, I stopped to re-read The Crow the other week. Naturally, I then had to watch the movie again. It's still almost entirely brilliant and heartbreaking, for all that it should so overwrought it collapses under its own weight. I guess it pays to beat the emo train into the station.
What makes the difference between a good movie and great movie is that a great movie keeps getting better, keeps being different with each viewing. (The same is true of any work of art, really.) Watching The Crow last week, what struck me was how little you see of Eric's face. Now, part of that is due to the tragic loss of Brandon Lee--at some points, just to have gotten the film finished after his death, the director had to use standins. But I'm talking about the parts where we see Brandon Lee, sans makeup, as Eric Draven.
There are two scenes and only two where Eric, not the Crow, is seen. One is when he's clawing himself out of his grave and following the crow back to his old apartment. The other is at the very end when the rain has washed out most of his makeup. The rest of the time is spent with Eric as the Crow. Even in the scene where he starts to apply the makeup, you see only one shot of him without it mostly applied. (And even then, it is a dimly lit shot with a curtain of hair obstructing his face.)
The movie is called The Crow, so it makes sense not to linger on Eric. It makes a clean break with Eric at the very beginning, where, even as Eric has only just died, his face is obscured thanks to the blood covering it. But as we've learned with superhero movies, the hero is only as interesting as the man behind the mask. (Peter Parker syndrome, if you will.) The Crow explains Eric's situation, turns him into a creature of vengeance almost unrelated to the man he was before (there are no indications that Eric was a crazy ninja bad-ass in his mortal life), and then spends the rest of the movie drawing Eric back into the story.
The first person he kills in retaliation for the murder/rape of his fiance (and his own murder), is done quickly, sadistically even (again, not the sort of profile we see in the Eric of flashbacks). As the movie rolls along, the murders are more and more personal, the villains less and less ridiculously over the top. Tin-tin, the first victim, tries to make light of having raped Eric's fiance, ends up dead in two seconds. T-Bird, the second-to-last badguy, not including Top Dollar, gets a nice long trip in his penis-substitute-mobile with the Crow riding shotgun. He gets all the time in the world to cajole, beg, and bargain with the Crow, but he's the only one to immediately recognize the man he killed. And when he does, he brings Eric fully back into the picture:
"You're dead. There ain't no coming back! This is the really real world and there ain't no coming back!"
Eric still looks like the Crow, but you see some hesitation in his eyes, some awareness of pain despite this promised relief in vegeance. (He has duct-taped a man to a car bomb, for Christ's sakes.) It's after that that he reconnects with Sarah, the girl he and his fiance unofficially adopted as their kid sister. She sees through the makeup, too, and when she's in trouble, the makeup disappears entirely. Eric faces the Big Bad to save her life, and he is finally himself. He gets to go back to the grave as he was. Although there is a great expression on the ghost of his fiance's face as she regards him in his crazy goth gear and paint-streaked face. She knows it's him, but what has he been up to? She calls him home, and they are as they were.
It's so hard to parse a film that was interrupted prematurely, but I have enough faith in this director that the choice of having Eric's naked face almost never shown was intentional as much as it was necessary. Such a shame that Brandon Lee's last movie would obscure him so, but it is a better metaphor for it.
What makes the difference between a good movie and great movie is that a great movie keeps getting better, keeps being different with each viewing. (The same is true of any work of art, really.) Watching The Crow last week, what struck me was how little you see of Eric's face. Now, part of that is due to the tragic loss of Brandon Lee--at some points, just to have gotten the film finished after his death, the director had to use standins. But I'm talking about the parts where we see Brandon Lee, sans makeup, as Eric Draven.
There are two scenes and only two where Eric, not the Crow, is seen. One is when he's clawing himself out of his grave and following the crow back to his old apartment. The other is at the very end when the rain has washed out most of his makeup. The rest of the time is spent with Eric as the Crow. Even in the scene where he starts to apply the makeup, you see only one shot of him without it mostly applied. (And even then, it is a dimly lit shot with a curtain of hair obstructing his face.)
The movie is called The Crow, so it makes sense not to linger on Eric. It makes a clean break with Eric at the very beginning, where, even as Eric has only just died, his face is obscured thanks to the blood covering it. But as we've learned with superhero movies, the hero is only as interesting as the man behind the mask. (Peter Parker syndrome, if you will.) The Crow explains Eric's situation, turns him into a creature of vengeance almost unrelated to the man he was before (there are no indications that Eric was a crazy ninja bad-ass in his mortal life), and then spends the rest of the movie drawing Eric back into the story.
The first person he kills in retaliation for the murder/rape of his fiance (and his own murder), is done quickly, sadistically even (again, not the sort of profile we see in the Eric of flashbacks). As the movie rolls along, the murders are more and more personal, the villains less and less ridiculously over the top. Tin-tin, the first victim, tries to make light of having raped Eric's fiance, ends up dead in two seconds. T-Bird, the second-to-last badguy, not including Top Dollar, gets a nice long trip in his penis-substitute-mobile with the Crow riding shotgun. He gets all the time in the world to cajole, beg, and bargain with the Crow, but he's the only one to immediately recognize the man he killed. And when he does, he brings Eric fully back into the picture:
"You're dead. There ain't no coming back! This is the really real world and there ain't no coming back!"
Eric still looks like the Crow, but you see some hesitation in his eyes, some awareness of pain despite this promised relief in vegeance. (He has duct-taped a man to a car bomb, for Christ's sakes.) It's after that that he reconnects with Sarah, the girl he and his fiance unofficially adopted as their kid sister. She sees through the makeup, too, and when she's in trouble, the makeup disappears entirely. Eric faces the Big Bad to save her life, and he is finally himself. He gets to go back to the grave as he was. Although there is a great expression on the ghost of his fiance's face as she regards him in his crazy goth gear and paint-streaked face. She knows it's him, but what has he been up to? She calls him home, and they are as they were.
It's so hard to parse a film that was interrupted prematurely, but I have enough faith in this director that the choice of having Eric's naked face almost never shown was intentional as much as it was necessary. Such a shame that Brandon Lee's last movie would obscure him so, but it is a better metaphor for it.
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Date: 2009-02-20 03:26 pm (UTC)And, ugh, The Godfather. I'm sure I'll get there...one day...