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Tag: Alex Proyas

  • The Crow 2024 Is More Caca Than Caw-Caw, But That’s to Be Expected When Compared to the Original

    The Crow 2024 Is More Caca Than Caw-Caw, But That’s to Be Expected When Compared to the Original

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    In a perfect world, remakes and reboots wouldn’t need to exist at all. Or if they did, the final product would be the result of truly careful, measured storytelling methods that only served to elevate rather than insult the original. Alas, as most know, the world is far from perfect. In fact, it’s as much of a shitshow as the one portrayed in Rupert Sanders’ version of The Crow. And as Sanders’ third movie as director, it’s done little to boost his prospects for directing in the future. This further compounded by his previous credits being Snow White and the Huntsman (mired in scandal when Sanders, then married, was caught having an affair with the film’s star, Kristen Stewart) and Ghost in the Shell. The latter being yet another remake that was panned for more than just casting Scarlett Johansson in a Japanese woman’s role (though that didn’t cause nearly as much outrage as her brief bid to play a trans man). Still, the reviews for Ghost in the Shell seem utterly kind in comparison to what’s been lobbed at The Crow, and from no less than the film’s original director, Alex Proyas, calling it a “a cynical cash grab,” then adding, “Not much cash to grab it seems.”

    True indeed, for The Crow made just barely under five million dollars in its opening weekend. It had a fifty-million-dollar budget to recoup. Unfortunately for the studio (Lionsgate), it couldn’t even manage to beat out 2009’s Coraline, which placed at number seven in the United States’ top ten box office (to The Crow’s number eight) after being re-released in theaters in honor of its fifteenth anniversary. The likelihood of The Crow remaining in the top ten at all during its second week of release doesn’t seem promising. All of which is to say: what the hell what wrong? That question isn’t too hard to answer.

    For a start, with a movie like The Crow, which has such a strong and devoted following, the OG fans of the film were likely never going to get on board with an “updated” (read: far more “corporatized”) version. Especially one that so often feels as though it desperately wants to check off multiple boxes in different genres. For there’s the “romantic” aspect of it, which often mirrors what Joker and Harley Quinn seem to have going on in the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux, complete with Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA Twigs) meeting at a rehab facility called Serenity, the supernatural aspect and the Tarantino-level revenge and violence aspect. Something that FKA Twigs herself called out in an interview promoting the film, foolishly thinking that it was a good thing that The Crow has such “hodgepodge energy” by saying, “I was amazed at the juxtaposition between the front half, the middle and the end of the movie. It’s almost like there’s three genres in one. At the beginning, you have this incredible coming-of-age love story about these two outsiders who are just desperate to feel at home… and then in the middle, it’s this psychological thriller, and then at the end, you know, it’s kind of pure gore and horror…”

    In short, it’s all “kind of” whatever, trying to be everything to everyone perhaps because the writers were aware that it was never going to measure up to the 1994 version, so why not just try to appeal to as many audience members as possible? A “strategy” that, in the end, serves to appeal to no one. Save for, at best, those who have no knowledge of The Crow’s previous iterations as a comic book or Proyas film.

    Funnily enough, one of the writers in question of The Crow 2024, Zach Baylin, was not so long ago nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for King Richard (which lost that year to Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast). So yes, it’s quite an about-face to go from Oscar-nominated to more than likely Razzie-nominated. As for his co-writer, William Schneider, The Crow inauspiciously marks his first writing credit on a full-length feature. It seems both writers ended up on autopilot after a certain point, mish-mashing the timeline of the narrative and eventually losing all sight of anything resembling “logical time” with an ending that not only reverts to a lazy “rewind” tactic, but totally excises the original killers in favor of having the two OD as a reason for their death (or, in Shelly’s case, near death). And, speaking of being junkies, Skarsgård and Twigs have way-too-perfect teeth to fit that casting bill.

    As for the Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) of 1994’s The Crow, let’s just say there was a lot more depth to their characters that didn’t rely on the sole “trait” of making them drug addicts. Indeed, Eric and Shelly aren’t junkies at all in the original, just two “ghouls” in love (with Eric also being a musician). As though to highlight how “emo” they are in their love for each other (Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas-style) from the get-go, upon unearthing their bodies right after they’re murdered in their Detroit loft, Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson, of Ghostbusters fame) finds a wedding invitation for the following day, October 31st, prompting one of his fellow policemen to ask, “Who the fuck gets married on Halloween anyhow?” Albrecht replies, “Nobody.”

    That was the answer then. The answer now is: plenty of people. Some of whom were likely influenced by the “macabre” stylings of Eric and Shelly’s coupledom (later mirrored in such “unions” as the ones shown in Candy, Corpse Bride and even Only Lovers Left Alive). That sense of, “If you jump, I jump” (or, in The Notebook’s case, “If you’re a bird, I’m a bird”—an appropriate saying for The Crow). And yes, jumping off a bridge does come up in The Crow 2024, with Shelly asking Eric if he would, essentially, die for her. The answer is, needless to say, a resounding yes. But the “intensity” of their “love” for one another often feels forced rather than authentic—even though that’s clearly the aim of the actors involved. And yes, Skarsgård and Twigs seem to be doing the best they can with the material they’re given, with Twigs likely attracted to the project because it furnished her with her first opportunity to play a lead role. Though perhaps she might have been better off sticking to the periphery if this was going to be the result…

    As for the decision to add the demonic element into the mix (all in keeping with the trend of satanic panic this year) via Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), it’s utterly underdeveloped—along with just about everything else in the movie. But this isn’t to say that The Crow 2024 lacks style where substance is totally missing. The soundtrack, visual effects and, yes, “aesthetic” are nothing to be balked at, even if they can never capture (or even dream of recreating) the genuine “lo-fi grit” of Proyas’ film. The effect, instead, is a prime example of what happens when a corporate entity tries to commodify something truly artistic: the authenticity is lost, blatantly so.

    In many ways, an “update” (or “reinvention,” as Stephen Norrington, at one point attached to write the script in the early period of its development hell) of The Crow was always going to be doomed. The film was already known for being “cursed” after Brandon Lee died on set after an improperly loaded prop gun killed him. What’s more, in trying to get a “reboot”/“remake” off the ground, a number of actors so ill-suited to the part (e.g., Bradley Cooper) became attached that any fan of the original couldn’t possibly have high hopes.

    A few years back, when the project seemed permanently foiled, Proyas hit the nail on the head in terms of addressing the core issue of trying to remake The Crow at all: “It’s not just a movie that can be remade. It’s one man’s legacy. And it should be treated with that level of respect.” Obviously, though, there wasn’t much respect for the original if they weren’t even going to include at least a nod to Sarah (Rochelle Davis), who served not only as a key thread of the film, but also its narrator, the one who tells the audience from the outset, “People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens, that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.”

    Alas, “the crow” can’t right this particular wrong: The Crow 2024. Another one of its fundamental problems being what The Crow comic book creator James O’Barr boiled it down to: “I think the reality is, no matter who you get to star in it, or if you get Ridley Scott to direct it and spend two hundred million dollars, you’re still not gonna top what Brandon Lee and Alex Proyas did in that first ten-million-dollar movie” (Side note: it was originally a fifteen-million-dollar budget, with an additional eight added to it when Proyas decided to complete the remaining scenes with Lee with CGI and a stand-in.)

    But, if nothing else comes out of The Crow 2024 (apart from disappointment and tarnished reputations), there is certainly the silver lining that filming in Prague, with all its underground raves and nightclubs, ended up inspiring the sound and tone of FKA Twigs’ upcoming album, Eusexua.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Dark City: The Matrix’s Underappreciated Precursor

    Dark City: The Matrix’s Underappreciated Precursor

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    For some reason, Dark City remains little revered or appreciated not only as a standalone film, but as something of the unwitting source material for The Matrix. While the plotlines are theoretically “different,” ultimately the Wachowskis borrowed heavily (even if unintentionally) from the themes explored by Dark City director Alex Proyas (who co-wrote the script with Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer). Granted, Dark City was released just one year prior to The Matrix, so it could have been sheer coincidence that each “team” happened to have a similar style and narrative thread.

    After all, it’s often believed that the collective consciousness is tapped into the same zeitgeist at the same moment. And in the late 90s, the internet was becoming an increasingly prevalent and insidious force to be reckoned with (as no one could better attest to than Pamela Anderson). Whether they were fully aware of it or not, that “new reality” seemed to be weighing on both Proyas and the Wachowskis in various ways (not to mention Andrew Niccol, whose The Truman Show [released in 1998 as well] also mirrors Dark City at a particular moment when the protagonist reaches the end of the “city’s” limits). This being showcased through their brooding “anti-heroes,” John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) and Thomas “Neo” Anderson (Keanu Reeves) as they navigate through a world that, quelle surprise, proves to be a simulation.

    In Dark City’s case, the simu is created by a group of Hellraiser-looking aliens who want to understand if memories are what make a human, well, human—or if they’re fundamentally who they are no matter what memories they have. This experiment is conducted by swapping out each human’s “memory set” every night at the stroke of midnight via inducing a mass slumber (in such a world, Taylor Swift might never have created her concept album, Midnights). This means that no matter where a person is, or what they’re doing, they’ll fall asleep so that “the Strangers” (as the extraterrestrials are called) and their go-to human henchman, Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, getting as close to playing Igor in Young Frankenstein as he ever will), can “imprint” them with a new memory a.k.a. a new identity. For who are we if not the sum total of our memories?

    Unfortunately for Schreber, he’s dealing with an anomaly of a human in John, who wakes up in the middle of being imprinted with the identity of a murderer, prompting Schreber to flee. Coming to fully in a bathtub, John has no clear memory at all thanks to the interruption of the procedure. In this way, he becomes a “glitch in the matrix” that is the Strangers’ universe. Or rather, their patch of city in an infinite universe, as we eventually come to find out. With John in the Neo role in terms of taking on a sinister entity that wishes to keep humans in the dark (very literally in this scenario) about the true nature of their (non-)reality, both Dark City and The Matrix effectively remake the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. Fittingly, that allegory is placed after the analogy of the sun. As for the cave allegory, it essentially speaks to what Plato’s mentor, Socrates, said at his trial: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To remain in the dark might feel comfortable (in a comatose sort of fashion), but, in the end, it’s a vegetative state. This allegory was repurposed by the Wachowskis in the form of red pill/blue pill, with the former color leading one out of the darkness of their ignorance, no matter how painful it might be to deal with the knowledge they had previously been able to block out.

    John and Neo are both “inconsistencies” in the world that’s been built for their kind by the overlords that control it all. As such, they differ from their fellow humans in that the latter has no desire to leave their prison, just as the people chained in the cave, because they have no idea that another form of existence can be possible. This is the only “reality” they’ve ever known, so why would they try to alter it? Once the knowledge of the false reality is gleaned, however, one can start to make their way out of the cave and into “the light.” For John, that light is realizing that they’re in a manufactured city floating in the ether of space and, for Neo, that light is realizing his body has been marinating in a pod while being harvested for bioelectric power by artificially intelligent machines as his mind is placated with the false reality (“the matrix”) shared by all the other humans in their pods. Again, the cave dwellers in the allegory might argue that remaining in the dark is preferable. To this end, one might say The Matrix isn’t an unintentional rip-off of Dark City, so much as both movies are riffing on what Socrates and Plato were saying centuries ago.

    As for the similarities in theme and aesthetic, Peter Doyle, the visual effects colorist who worked on both films, laughingly recalled, “…I do remember sitting with [the Wachowskis] after they had just been shown Dark City. Because when they came through town with Barrie Osborne, the producer, the film hadn’t quite been released yet, so they’d set up to have a look. And then everyone just sitting around laughing, realizing that they’re just about to make Dark City again but called The Matrix instead.” So yes, they did see the movie while in the process of making The Matrix, but no one thought much of it. After all, a genre like that was so niche, the assumption was that nobody would complain about having another film of that “breed” added to the scant pile (“beefed up” in 1999 with David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor, released in rapid succession right after The Matrix). As it turned out, no one in the U.S. would really complain, for Dark City was destined to become an obscure 90s gem compared to the blockbuster status The Matrix would achieve in said country, parodied and copied ad nauseam over the next decade.

    In addition to the aforementioned titans of Greek philosophy, the influence of The Twilight Zone on Dark City can’t be underestimated either, with said show often presenting narratives where the reality experienced by the lead character was a fabrication of some kind (including the very first episode, “Where Is Everybody?”). As for the fabrication that is Dark City, Schreber explains to John and Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), “When they first brought us here, they extracted what was in us, so they could store the information. Remix it like so much paint, and give us back new memories of their choosing… Your entire history is an illusion, a fabrication—as it is with all of us.”

    With this in mind, the set design was key to giving audiences that “remixed memory” feel the population is experiencing. Per production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, “The movie takes place everywhere, and it takes place nowhere. It’s a city built of pieces of cities. A corner from one place, another from someplace else. So, you don’t really know where you are. A piece will look like a street in London, but a portion of the architecture looks like New York, but the bottom of the architecture looks again like a European city. You’re there, but you don’t know where you are. It’s like every time you travel, you’ll be lost.” In other words, since everyone is everyone (with “memory sets” being swapped back and forth all the time), then everywhere might as well be everywhere, too. As it increasingly is in “real life” thanks to the unremitting effects of globalization. Perhaps that’s how the Wachowskis also chose to view the similarities between their film and Proyas’ precursor to it: “every late 90s sci-fi neo-noir is every late 90s sci-fi neo-noir.” And yes, as though to highlight that point, they used some of the same “everywhere is everywhere” sets from Dark City for The Matrix.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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