Hacker Cinema
The Crow
1994 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Alex Proyas
Exactly one year after young rock guitarist Eric Draven and his fiancée are brutally killed by a ruthless gang of criminals, Draven, watched over by a hypnotic crow, returns from the grave to exact revenge.
6 positive1 negative4 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&release_date=1994-01-01,1994-12-31
Pulp Fiction
Lion King
The Mask
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Dumb and Dumber
The Crow
Speed
True Lies
Interview with the Vampire
Natural Born Killers
Ace Ventura
Stargate
Clerks
The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
Oh and the black guy that was in hackers was ton tin in the crow. So what he "learned" was essentially bird flu. And milk makes you sick because birds don't drink milk. Did I mention there are swarms of crowd flying all over the city. Also someone put a rusty spring in the bathroom and so now I'm wondering if the headaches are caused by iron filings in my food that respond to radiation that end up in my brain.
Anyway. I'll keep writing this all out because A) based on this stupid fucking movie there may or may not be bird flu in San Francisco B) I don't like being poisoned and stalked across the city by idiots re enacting every type of media they can think of (oh look this "crow"/phylactery is the way you kill people good fucking job) C) it encourages people to stay the fuck out of San Francisco which is a dangerous hell hole D) no one is helping me and everyone actively is attempting to harm me F) it's the right fucking thing to do and if I can encourage as many people as I possibly can not to come here I will E) yes they did in fact say alphabetical order when they killed tin tin. Did I mention there a stupid fucking wizard of Oz play and security company?
I just don't want to be sick. I'm going to write all this shit out so long as I'm ill and hurting.
So. Bird flu. Fucking wonderful. It's probably nothing, the hundreds of crows on the embarcadero are just there for no reason. Is someone going to give me rabies? Are my kidneys going to fail now? When I write shit people don't like do they hack the free phone I have to fuck with the iron filings in my head?
I'm sick and I hurt. 555 Beule street San Francisco.
Also the crow. Yes the stupid movie. Stalking with idiots quoting the movie or acting out parts of it. Neat. You're assholes. I already knew that and now I can't enjoy this movie. Gee whiz you're so fucking sophisticated. What a waste of talent. You could have been doing literally anything else. Ugh.
This would also explain making me repeatedly sick and then seeing if you can field test a cure on me and use that as a pay off not to have me murdered. Like tin tin from the movie. Wonderful. Am I going to be made sick and hurt to every death of a character in every film ever until I die?
This is what they're doing rather than make buildings that don't fall over. slow clap.
And the water at 555 Beule street in San Francisco has been making me sick so I've been drinking large amounts of milk and now I wonder if it has morphine in it. I'm in physical pain all the time. These people are just so fucking evil and shitty. If I had a billion dollars I'd just put it in front of the ferry building and burn it out of spite.
They're probably just having sick homeless cough on my things when I'm not looking. They're a walking public health hazard. The best part is when idiots will cough on each other, throw a mask on so no one coughs on them, and then cough on someone else on the other side of the city. It's just so fucking sad.
Hard disagree. I liked the crow movies for the story - who doesn't like a deserved-revenge plot... I didn't even know who the lead role was, but that's not uncommon for me, I rarely care.
The crow tanked because it was crap. It didn't have the creativity of the original, and was just "generic Hollywood reboot". I'm not sure the lack of an Asian male lead had anything to do with it.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
What a great question! Many interesting movies to check out in these comments!
My own list, I re-watch movies the same way I re-listen to music, often to get in a particular mode of thinking, as they become familiar, I mostly daydream while appreciating some particular concept and whatever new minutiae, or ways of understanding, creeps into my mind.
Hackers - 30+ times, for dreaming about a world that never was and never will be, for reminding myself how cool computers used to seem.
The Crow - 20+ times, for thinking about the world
Koyaanisqatsi - 15+ times, for thinking about my life in the world
Alien - 10+ times, for thinking about the future that passed us by
Terminator 1 and 2 - 10+ times, for examining a time that never was, or passed me by, and because Arnold is awesome!
A Clockwork Orange, 10+ times, to reflect on violence and aesthetic
Event Horizon, 10+ times, mostly for the aesthetic, and who dosen't love spaceships from hell ?
1984 - 5+ times, for thinking about humanity and society
Requiem for a Dream - 5+ times, for thinking about the value of life, and what society is
Once upon a time in the west - 5+ times, for thinking about loss, revenge and justice
Genocyber - 5+ times, to think about what life is for anyway
Stalker - 5+ times, frankly, mostly to look at the pretty pictures.
Lots of other amazing movies, I probably forgot some (time to watch again?)
Bonus:
TV Shows I've watched more than 10 times:
Star Trek TNG
Neon Genesis Evangelion
For me the tone is big part of why I love it. It’s such a perfect distillation of what it was like being an angsty teenager at that moment in cultural time. Even looking back I still think it is just cool AF.
The closest comparison I can think of how I see it is like Brandon Lee’s The Crow, which is also still one of the most badass films ever made.
"Abashed the Devil stood, and saw how awful goodness is"
I heard that from the movie "The Crow" and as a huge fan of the movie I looked up _everything_ that the movie referenced. I eventually bought the book and read it through, over the course of a few days, twice.
English is not my first language, and it took me great effort, I felt dumb and ignorant throughout the whole thing, both times I read it through, but I still gleamed something from it, it's the best version of the story of the creation of hell and lucifers fall that I've read, and I loved how it didn't seem to take sides, it makes god look like kind of a malevolent dictator.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada: Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there). That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.
Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.
Yes, I have seen the film and it is quite good. The story itself and the cinematic execution are definitely above par, I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars for entertainment and quality.
Also, I'm reluctant to call it an underdog story. It's more a "coming of age" story, which is a different thing. There are many, many emotional aspects to the film (family dynamics - multiple generations in a home, absent father or a deported mother) which serve to enhance the overall themes of what happened.
Lastly, it's one of the few films I've seen recently that doesn't rely on CGI to show off important parts of the story. As the credits indicated, there were teams of robotics professionals who built the units used in the film.
I recommend the film and will buy it to have in my house to put on in the background when the mood strikes me. Others that fit that bill for me are Rush, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow, and The Big Lebowski. YMMV.
The first I can think of was "The Crow" (1994), where they digitally composited Brandon Lee into a few scenes that hadn't been shot/finished.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109506/faq