Tag: 2024

Dub’s Take: The Crow (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

4 out of 5

“The Crow 2024” is metal: something I don’t think anyone expected.

Director Rupert Sanders doesn’t have a prolific filmmaking career, but he did helm 2017’s live-action “Ghost in the Shell”, which wasn’t terrible, and his Crow reboot isn’t terrible either, despite taking two years after shooting to show up in theatres.

Delays like that could mean all sorts of things, usually negative: a lack of faith behind-the-scenes from the people with the money. Howbeit this is odd, since Crow – which started out as a comic series in the late-eighties – has bounced back a few times in media from the tragedy of Brandon Lee’s death while filming the first film adaptation.

How much of the property’s enduring popularity, then, can be attributed to the singular act of Lee’s passing, or the straightforward immediacy of the source material? Rewatching the 1994 film, I was taken aback by how out-of-place its comedic relief resonated – particularly in the pawn shop scene – at the expense of thematic consistency. I’ve never read the comic so correct me if I’m wrong, but those one-liners felt more like additions to coalesce with the Lee family idiom * than to move the plot forward in a congruent way.

In complete contrast, 2024’s Crow doesn’t have any tonal brevity: it’s as emo as the tattoos on Bill Skarsgård’s face, and that could be one piece to its ultimate box-office demise. The film is so committed to its core concept that there’s hardly any fun to be had for passive viewers.

If you can roll with that, Crow is as much solid, stand-alone, yet disposable entertainment as “Madame Web” was back in February: I submitted to Skarsgård’s charisma; the reliable Danny Huston as the antagonist; the script’s spiritual leanings; and the central romance with a convincing FKA twigs. Holding it back from first-class territory were a truncated courting montage – which could have been longer to increase my empathy for the heroes – and some lame CGI in the finale that made me long for the classic squib work of someone like Paul Verhoeven.

In the film, twigs calls Skarsgård “brilliantly broken”, and I believed it. It’s a testament, then, to everyone’s craft that The Crow’s sixth outing to the screen (including the TV series) didn’t end up as another wounded bird.

*see my review of Brandon’s “Rapid Fire” for supplementary impressions.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Did you know that you can click on the posters in my recent reviews to link directly to the film’s IMDB page? Wicked Cool, and saves you from typing! Leave your suggestions for other unavailing accessibility options for the site in the comments below!

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Kubrick & cannabis and sex positions

A poem about compulsions,
with allusions to “2001”.

i haven’t seen any
good porn lately
oh baby, oh baby
who cares


i’m Silver-Surfing around Uranus
leaving my traces,
as we zoom out to the vastness of space –

there’s one old account still active:
a beacon;
a still, moldy vessel for public lice
with all the water-under-the-surface secrets of a
dirty-minded twenty-something’s
compulsionary vice,
frozen in time


and nothing’s going off there, either.

it’s not for lack of invocation:
putting on my web goggles;
tightening my gloves
like i’m the Baron, speed-cracking my knuckles,
despite no chance against Snoopy like
Charlie versus Lucy.
that’s a thousand hours of dedication
i could have poured into anything else.

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a metaphysical altercation in the parking lot at Macca’s

aka. ruining it

A poem about excuses and constants.

oh God,
my life.


it’s 11:59 on my Saturday night
and His phone is already on silent.
i wish i could afford the same capacity to ignore
knowing omnipresently that everything was
alright.


back to life.
back to reality.
however do you want me?

i’m watching a twenty-something YouTube partner from Australia
demonstrate a twenty-dollar iPod rip-off from China
while i dig into another box of Extra Toasty Cheez-It’s –
courtesy of Kellanova –
cronch-cronch-cronch
lip-smacking-sounds amok

and at the back of my mind, i can’t help to wander
why i still haven’t taken my two scoops of
smooth, orange-flavoured fibre,
of which consideration is by Procter & Gamble
and the cold enamel
of the toilet bowl i’ve yet to spackle.


the jester takes comparison pics between the knock-off,
his iPhone, and his Pixel
of his dog,
his mouser,
his fenced-in yard –
and i know how much pet food costs:
while i personally have none, i have family who does
and it occurs to me that’s probably where this was

and then the camera flips to face his quaff,
looking like i could have fifteen years younger
had i kept the same locks,
and avoided whatever life conundrum concocted the lump
what is the foreign organ from my father
in my tum,
and the fat it collected as it settled upstream
and the broken record’s excuse for skipping is that
some things in life are just worth repeating

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too bad: part three

The third of a short story in three parts.

“The night of Cassidy & Arthur’s dinner ‘date’ & its aftermath, and the story ends.”
Click Here for Part One & Part Two.

x

“Arthur? Is that you?“

Cassidy was confused to see him. She hopped on twenty minutes in to his bus ride, knapsack in-tow, to see him sitting near the front of the bus on one of the benches parallel to the aisle, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. She recognized his stubble. There wasn’t a spot next to him, so she hovered, still sporting her knapsack, holding on to the grip bar with clammy palms.

“Hm?“

She reached for his hood and flipped it off his head. He had some very noticeable scratches at the base of his nose and along his eyebrow line, but it was him, “What are you doing taking the bus?”

“Oh hi.”

“What are you doing taking the bus?”

“I couldn’t get my car started.”

“Oh.”

“…What are you doing taking the bus?”

“Somebody said they were driving later.”

“Oh. You couldn’t get a ride?”

“I didn’t think I needed one.”

“Oh. I had figured I’d just drive us wherever from the restaurant and then take us back to your car.”

“Never mind. I’m over it.”

“…We’re still going out after though, right?”

“How am I getting home?”

“…The bus?“

“Heh, you’re funny.” He wasn’t.

“I’m sorry, Cassidy. It kind of threw me for a loop, too. You’re on my route, though, so I guess we can just come back the same way together, when we’re done.”

“Sure.” They puttered silently for a minute as the bus rolled along, “How much longer does it take?”

“Only, like, ten more minutes.”

“That close, huh?”

“Yeah, it just rips by when you’re driving yourself. You don’t get all the little detours.”

“Actually, I usually have to take the long way around on the highway. If I could take the one-way roads like a bus, I’d never be late for a shift.” She snorted. Arthur grimaced.

The bus went over a bump, and Cassidy lost her balance and stepped backward, smooshing her knapsack against the face of someone sitting on the chair behind her, “Get off of me!”

Cassidy looked behind her, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” She took her bag off and put it on the floor next to her. She started to think of another one of those absurd porn videos she’d seen in those brief, intimate exposures online, where it looked like the Japanese schoolgirl was getting raped on a public bus full of salarymen. But those would-be idiots had better watch out this time! She had pepper spray ready! She just had to kneel down, reach into her knapsack after she took it off, and fish for it – in the meantime, her ass would be sticking out. She’d be a sitting duck.

Arthur started to stand, “Did you want to sit down?”

“…No. No, thanks, I’m fine. It’s not much longer anyway.” He could have offered earlier, “So what happened to your face?”

“What about my face?”

“Your face! You have scratches all under here.” She motioned around her nose with her finger. Arthur flipped his hood back up.

“I just cut myself a few times while I was shaving. It’s no big deal.” They didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride. Both justified the silence by being comfortable enough with one another to share the moments when neither had to speak. Or something.

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too bad: part two

The second of a short story in three parts.

“A flashback to the year before their encounter, when Cassidy was pining & unemployed, and Arthur wasn’t single but still wasn’t happy.”
Click Here for Part One.

v

Cassidy was nineteen. That she was on the Principal’s List her Senior year meant nothing now she had graduated.

But if strangers didn’t have a hard time ignoring her giant, six-foot-five-inch stature, then her double-d breasts were the deal-breaker, which she tried to offset from an otherwise tiny frame by only ever wearing dark tops.

She had ash-brown hair that fell to her waist, which she never combed as much as the time she spent considering she should, and as a result the ends were split and messy. Her mother offered to comb it for her, but it took too long when Mom did it, and it was painful, in more ways than one: Cassidy was at the age now that, if mother & daughter sat together too long, then the younger would get interrogated about all the maternal standards, like what it was Cassidy wanted to do now that it was approaching a full year that she was out of high school – motherly bundled with a few other unsolicited suggestions.

Cassidy’s jeans were two sizes too big for her athletic core, and today’s pair wasn’t any different. But that was her prerogative: if they were any tighter, they would accentuate her hips, and a lower body toned from taking PE class seriously. She didn’t need anything else on her person to stand out. She looked down at her belt: it didn’t feel so tight on her, but it was too tight for the pant, as the loose waistline hung all scrunched-up below the buckle at the front.

Did she lose weight? Again? She loosened the belt by a notch, grabbed the pant by the button, and pulled the baggy garment back up over the buckle, resting the space between her pant and the button on the top rung of the buckle, like a shelf.

She liked the way working out made her feel, and she loved the camaraderie of a friend group who all enjoyed spending time outside and away from their phones, unlike a majority of their peers. This afternoon, as she looked at her reflection in her family’s rose-trimmed bathroom mirror while wearing a simple black t-shirt, Cassidy grabbed her hair by its tuft and guided it through a tie and into a bun, stuffing its true heft within itself. She leaned forward and checked again for acne, in the small, inflamed clusters of blackheads that lingered near the caves of her eyes. She straightened up, and standing tall her eyes met the top edge of the mirror. It was like that for two years and counting, and she still wasn’t used to it.

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