The superhuman protagonist of The Crow, the comic-book movie that went on to become a cult hit after its release 30 years ago, doesn't relish being undead and invincible. When he first shows his face on-screen, Eric Draven, played by Brandon Lee, is crawling out of his own grave in near-feral agony. His fingers claw at the mud around his tomb. His clothes, drenched by rain, cling to his skin. He never gets to his feet; instead, he writhes on his back, screaming in pain.
To say this isn't a standard superhero's welcome is an understatement-but then, The Crow didn't care to obey the genre's conventions. Grim, stylish, and brazenly violent, the film is a gothic fable about a young rock musician and his girlfriend who, on the eve of their wedding, are murdered. When Draven, the former heavy-metal guitarist, is resurrected from the dead a year later by a mystical crow-just go with it-he's not a noble crime fighter, but a wounded predator hunting the killers. "They're all dead," he snarls. "They just don't know it yet."
The Crow premiered in 1994, at a moment when superhero films themselves appeared to be in dire shape. Gone were the shiny Superman movies of the 1970s and '80s. In Batman Returns, released in 1992, Tim Burton refined his approach to the genre's aesthetic― less spandex, more noir-and delivered a much grittier story, but his Batman sequel fell far short of the boxoffice bar set by its predecessor in 1989. Films based on Marvel comics were forgettable, and although the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was successful, it was intended for children. Producing mainstream comic-book-based entertainment posed a challenge for the studios. Could a hero be fresh but familiar enough to spawn the next great franchise?
Denne historien er fra June 2024-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra June 2024-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors - In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.
Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so
Mapping Mississippi's Violent Past - I wanted to understand the forces that shaped my state's dark history. I ended up in Spain, holding an object I'd never known existed.
I'd come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow.
A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari - How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru
"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.
Boat Fish Don't Count
The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass
The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism
Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve
She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.
Men on Trips Eating Food
Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants
You Think You're So Heterodox
Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.
THE LOYALIST KASH PATEL WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP WANTS.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIKE LEE
IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.
