In reading Neil Gaiman’s journal, I stumbled upon a link to a quite excellent essay about Sandman and the 90s.

Dream, on the other hand, and not just Dream but also Orpheus and Delirium and Lyta and Remiel and Duma and Haroun al-Rashid and Robespierre and Wanda, cannot go with the flow.  To the postmodernists they reply that some things are too important simply to accept as impermanent, that our lives may be brief but that for them to be worthy they must hang on a strong nail of meaning.  Dreams’s duty, Delirium’s openness to all experience, Orpheus’s sorrow, Remiel and Duma’s God, Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, Robespierre’s revolution, Wanda’s female gender, cannot be cast on the flowing waters and said a mere good-bye to.  Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me.  And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, I must still engage with the world on my terms.

I agree mostly with the blogger’s reading of Sandman, and of Gaiman’s characterization of Dream as someone who finds he must change or die, and would rather die.

The one thing I would point out, though, is that Dream does indeed change, and his death comes because he has changed enough that he realizes he can change no more. He dies because he HAS changed and cannot forgive himself for it, as much as because he will not change. (more…)

So all this talk of a remake of The Crow drove me to dig out the horrific VHS copy that I’ve got to watch it over again. Yeah, that’s right, not only is it VHS, but it was taped off cable. I’m that old school.

I slept under a poster of Brandon Lee from The Crow for a good chunk of middle and high school. I bought the comic because of the movie. I bought the soundtrack, learned to like Joy Division and the Cure because of the soundtrack and the songs quoted in the comic. For a brief period of time I even flirted with drawing, copying bits out of the comic. Yeah, that’s right.

So this isn’t just any comic movie that someone wants to remake. It’s one that shaped my impressionable teenage mind into the twisted thing it is these days. If not for The Crow, I probably wouldn’t have read comics. Certainly would never have loved things like Preacher. Probably wouldn’t like the movies I like, either. Since I watched the movie before I read the comic, it will always be the version that means the most to me, and no remake will ever be quite right.

But does it hold up? The answer is, perhaps not surprisingly, yes. You can see the hints of The Matrix and even Sin City in the muted colors and sweeping black overcoats, and every line of the film is informed by noir classics. And even, for a second, I saw Heath Ledger’s Joker in Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven. Not much but the wide-eyed, single-minded insanity, but it was there.

Maybe I was reminded by the fact that Lee, like Ledger, died tragically while working on the movie, and so will forever be defined by the film–and define the character.

Sarah, the wiseass street punk who serves as anchor for the story, is still a compelling character and a great acting job by a kid who apparently has never acted again. (And she’s my age. I’d love to know what happened to her.)

Brandon Lee is still heartbreaking, still delivers poetry and punishment in that cool voice that breaks at just the right moments, and the flashbacks are still romantic.

Thematically, the movie might even be superior to the comic–it adds motivation to the crimes Eric is revenging, real human relationships to the mix. Where the comic is a sheer outpouring of gutwrenching pain, the film gives Eric something to protect as well as something to avenge, and it’s stronger, I think, for it.

Even the music holds up, doesn’t sound dated, and for the most part the clothes don’t look dated either. There’s no CG or wire work, and aside from a few aerial crow’s eye view shots, everything is street-level, dark, bloody, and mean.

So the new version proposes to be “realistic, hard-edged”–but how? Drop the Crow’s makeup? Change the soundtrack? The movie is less informed by gothic horror (or the 80s goth music) than the comics, and the story is at heart a supernatural thriller. Yet the film was an action flick with noir dialogue and styling, made more “realistic” by Brandon Lee’s doing his own stunts. And how much more gritty do you get than Eric squeezing the heroin out of Darla’s arm after dumping Funboy’s corpse in the bathtub?

How are you going to make a movie about a man returned from the dead to exact vengeance, his face smeared in harlequin-from-hell makeup, “documentary-style”?

Whatever. I think I’ll save the money from the movie ticket and buy the DVD of this one instead. This movie’s still too good to watch on VHS.

I came home last night and decided to watch Sin City–it had been a while, and evening conversation about The Spirit movie had me thinking about Frank Miller’s work on film.

I loved the Sin City comics early on, loved the art and the retro-noir dialogue. Loved the smart, sexy women and the fact that they were as badass as the men. Loved Marv, especially.

Watching the movie while I was falling asleep, eyes closing, made me focus on the language of Sin City in a way that I hadn’t in a bit, if ever. The stylized language of noir has a code all its own, strong verbs, powerful adjectives like a gut-punch just when needed, the repetition of lines, of powerful words when needed.

Its voiceover is never overpowering because it’s so clean, simple. Lines like this:

I’ve seen his victims and their twisted little faces
all wide-mouthed and bug-eyed
frozen in their last horrible moment of living

provide just the right amount of imagery with words to complement the clean black-and-white and occasional splashes of brilliant color.

I love film noir from the ’40s, movies like Laura and The Lady from Shanghai, Night and the City and Gilda. But it was thinking about Shakespeare that made me focus on the words of Sin City. Thinking about the power of words that come from a specific time and place, and what they can do.

But unlike Shakespeare, the words of noir only fit in that setting, that place. Even Sin City works best because it’s hyperstylized, because it transmuted so much of the feeling of comics to the screen.

We read comics because we love the combination of images and words. Good comics require both, but though we notice when the words are lacking it can be hard to give them extra credit when they’re extraordinary. They tend to blend into the whole seamlessly.

And we so rarely get to hear those words translated perfectly to the screen, to hear them spoken by such perfect casting choices as Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen, whose voices were simply made for these words:

No reason at all to play it quiet
No reason to play it any way but my way

and these:

All kinds of death is about to hit less than yards ahead of us
And still it’s hard to take my eyes off her

Stylized. Even with line breaks, like poetry. And it is in itself a kind of poetry, with its own rules, conventions. And Miller is a master of it.