Stuff I Love and Shit I Hate - The Crow

I had this idea that I'd do a sort of weekly series of posts going into depth about my favourite and least favourite things. I decided to alternate weekly between my loves and hates, starting with my one of my favourite movies, so if you come back next week you'll see me rant about something I loathe. Since I was going to be talking about stuff I love and shit I hate, I figured that was as good a title as any for this column.

So this week, one of my all-time favourite live-action movies: Brandon Lee's The Crow.

Based on the comic book by James O'barr, The Crow is the story of Eric Draven, a rock musician who was murdered together with his beloved fiance Shelly Webster by a gang of thugs one night shortly before their wedding. Long story short, a year later Eric rises from the grave as an indestructible force of vengeance, guided by a supernatural crow, to seek out and kill his killers. It's your basic revenge story, only with the undead. But it's the style, the details, the direction and the performances that make this movie one of the definitive revenge stories of our time, together with classics like Sweeny Todd and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Brandon Lee's Eric is a nightmare clown in black and white facepaint, like a member of Kiss gone psycho, but he manages to be one of the coolest characters ever to stalk the shadows. He revels in his invincibility, hurling himself off rooftops, inviting his opponents to take their best shot at him before he kills them and doing it with impeccable style and no mercy. In this he is matched by Top Dollar, played to perfection by Michael Wincott in the role of a classy, stylish, elegant, cultured complete monster. Wincott is absolutely magnificent as he deadpans his way through the movie with black humour, such as when he stabs a man through the throat with a rapier and exasperatedly tells him "oh for fuck's sake, die will you?" while the man chokes and gurgles on his last breath. But it's still Lee who owns the movie, rightfully so as this was the one that took his life when he was killed in a tragic accident with a prop gun. I once heard Lee's Eric described as being like a heroic version of Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight and the tragic irony of that does not escape me. It's also an amazingly adept comparison as like the Joker, Eric is just such a magnetic character that whenever he's on screen you're constantly waiting for him to do his next awesome thing. Like Ledger, Lee's presence haunts every frame, only even more so- while Ledger's real person was subsumed by the power of the Joker's character, Lee is actually playing a dead man walking.

The Crow is so many things. It's an action movie but it's also a tragic love story. It has an awesome hero and an equally awesome villain. It's a revenge story, but Eric also finds time to transform lives (the scene where he reminds Darla that her daughter is out on the streets while bleeding the morphine out of her veins is a personal favourite). It's Hollywood action, but it's practically art- just watch the early scene where Eric leaps across the rooftops as the crow leads him to his first victim. And the soundtrack is simply awesome, featuring such bands as The Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails and The Cure. This is one of the tiny handful of live-action movies I care enough about to buy on DVD and one I'll take any excuse to rewatch. It's a masterpiece of its genre and if you haven't seen it, you have a hole in your life.

(I was going to put the YouTube trailer here, but I can't work out how to embed it properly. I'll work on it for next time. For now, here's the link.)