To the day.
When I watched the movie on July 26th, 2013, it was one of a handful I watched just after the rest of my family -- which was only two at that point -- left to go to Australia as the first stage of our move. I stayed back in Los Angeles for another three+ weeks to finish up at work, visit a friend in Chicago, say goodbye to LA friends and close up the house.
I don't specifically think the absence of others -- at that point it would have only been my wife who would be a meaningful factor, since my older so was not yet three -- was what gave me the go-ahead to watch The Crow, though I do think it's sort of a guilty pleasure. (And to confirm that notion, my wife actually sort of chuckled when she saw that I was watching it this past Friday night.) I think it just struck me as something I hadn't seen in a while and was eager to revisit, so I did, because I had no one else's viewing priorities to consider but my own.
Watching it Friday night -- July 26th, 2024 -- was an intended precursor to the release of the remake, which is scheduled for August 22nd here in Australia.
The fact that both happened to come on July 26th was, of course, just one of those coincidences I love.
The Crow was a movie I loved in my 20s. It was released in May 1994, so I would have seen it just a few months before I turned 21, when I was very susceptible to its angst and a couple other things we aren't so sold on these days (such as the woman who gets "fridged," thereby creating the seed for vengeance in our protagonist. It just so happens that in this case, he got fridged too, but was able to come back from that, at least temporarily.) I then watched it two or three more times in the 1990s.
When I watched it in 2013, I started out feeling a bit wobbly toward it, then came around to the old feelings by the end.
I'd say it is continuing to hold up less and less well, as I found myself nitpicking this time. For example, how is it that Eric Draven returns from the dead a year after he was killed, and upon entering his old apartment, finds it in the exact same condition as it was on the night he was killed, including the yellow police tape? When both occupants of an apartment die, don't you clear out their stuff and rent it to someone else -- especially an awesome penthouse loft like this one?
Another undeniable factor in this viewing: Stan, the streaming service on which I watched it, was playing up. The copy wasn't very crisp to begin with, but the stream was also doing this thing -- not super often, but at least once every five minutes -- where it would loop back about a second of images on the screen to play them a second time, and then race forward to catch up with the dialogue. A minor but undeniable annoyance.
There's no doubt The Crow will always be a sentimental favorite, and will always carry extra poignancy for me due to the circumstances of Brandon Lee's death on the set, right at a time when he was coming into his own as a performance capable of some nuance. But my 2013 viewing had been a positive enough experience that it had crept all the way up to #156 on my Flickchart, and that is obviously too high for this movie.
Would I have been better off not having watched it at all and kept the feeling that it could be my 156th favorite movie of all time?
It's the age-old question, but I think the answer is no. In order to really be one of your favorites, a movie has to live and grow with you, and stand the test of time. If it's not going to, I suppose any day is as good a day to know that as any other.
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