Still thinking about #TheCrow and, among other things, genre purism.
By the time I was introduced to the character through the 1994 film, I had already been immersed in #goth culture for more than half a decade. That's more than enough time to be young and dumb and into the musical tribalism so common at the time. By the 1990s, however, I got all of that out of my system and so could recognise how the 1994 movie was goth but never purely so.
Even the soundtrack shows this. While it did have The Cure's "Burn," sounding like a 1990s version of "The Hanging Garden" (the lyrics of which were included in the comic) and one of my favourite Cure songs of all time, the song that seems most emblematic here might be "Dead Souls," not the Joy Division original but the Nine Inch Nails cover. A soundtrack gathering the Stone Temple Pilots, the Rollins Band, Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Pantera, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Violent Femmes, etc. is not notable for being a goth record but for being representative of the mainstreaming of alt-rock in the 1990s and the breadth and range of the sounds at the time.
It took another three years before I finally got around to reading the comic book, by the way, around 1997 maybe. While reading the comic drives home the sheer gothiness of it all--again we have lyrics and references to the Cure and Joy Division but also Baudelaire and Rimbaud and author James O'Barr's own poetry, etc.--it's kinda amusing that the additional Eric-Shelly flashbacks in the later special edition (that I don't have) include a Cheap Trick reference; "Surrender" is Shelly's fave song--not very goth, that one!
All this brings me to the upcoming Crow movie. If I have a worry with the film, it would have to be with director Rupert Sanders, whose previous movies Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell I didn't really enjoy. The cast seems great though. Main villain seems to be Danny Huston, who I've been absolutely entranced by since Thirty Days of Night. I also like Bill Skarsgård a great deal and though I've never seen FKA Twigs act, I not only like her music but also how she uses her body for expression. I'm really hoping to see her play to her strengths.
Some of the comments I've seen about the new Crow movie is really about how the movie looks, particularly Skarsgård as Eric. Yeah, he doesn't look as cool as Brandon Lee does, but it's really just hair and clothes that are radically different. I mean, his body is lean and muscular, sinewy, like in the comics. Perhaps the mistake here was making another Eric Draven story, which seems like an attempt to avoid the mediocrity of the Crow sequels by cashing in on nostalgia, a commercial decision that seems to have failed, since most people I know that remember Brandon Lee's Eric Draven hate Bill Skarsgård's Eric Draven.
I really wish FKA Twigs played the Crow. If they must, they can call her Erica Draven (but no, they don't have to). That said, I'm still looking forward to watching it, and I hope they didn't use up all the good scenes in the trailer.
So I did end up watching The Crow last night. I sometimes forget how overwrought and earnest 90s art could be, but I loved nearly every minute of it (the visuals, action, and soundtrack mostly) - it was like being transported back to 1994.
Today, October 30, on Devil’s Night in Detroit, Shelly Webster and her fiancé, Eric Draven are fatally attacked on the eve of their wedding. One year later, Eric will rise from the grave to avenge their deaths (The Crow, 1994)