
Book Excerpt: It Can't Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal | Features | Roger Ebert
We’re extraordinarily proud to current an excerpt from a brand new e book about “The Crow,” out there at the moment. Alisha Mughal, who has written items for us about “Deadly Attraction,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and extra, has written It Can’t Rain All the Time. Get a duplicate here.
The official synopsis:
It Can’t Rain All the Time weaves memoir with movie criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance.
A passionate evaluation of the ill-fated 1994 movie starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting affect on motion motion pictures, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity
Launched in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences because of the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the movie: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set attributable to a mishandled prop gun. Nevertheless it quickly grew to become clear that The Crow was extra than simply an accumulation of its tragic elements. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s efficiency was “extra of a display screen achievement than any of the movies of his father, Bruce Lee.”
In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s dying by exposing the most difficult human feelings in all their darkish, dramatic, and visceral glory, a lot in order that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, reveals us that there is no such thing as a answer to despair or loss, there may be solely our personal inside, messy work. By the finish of the film, we notice that Eric has introduced us with an enormous vary of feelings and that masculinity doesn’t have to be onerous and impenetrable.
Via her reminiscences of looking for solace in the movie throughout her personal grieving interval, Alisha brilliantly reveals that, for all its gothic unhappiness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a film about redemption and hope.
A depressive episode begins as a gradual and regular sinking feeling, like being lowered inch by inch right into a grave. I really feel it construct over the course of a few days or generally even per week. I develop irritable, and my moods start to show putrid as damaging ideas lay roots. As my physique grows drained, the ideas change into a forest. The episode has set in.
After I was youthful, I used to be consumed by the muck of unhappiness, and plenty of instances, I virtually didn’t make it out. Now I’m on treatment, which doesn’t utterly cease the episodes however does permit me a take away, a distance from which I could make choices to assist myself. I’ve realized that the solely factor I can do is to let these episodes play out, permit them to peak after which fade after which, ultimately, recede. This takes time. Typically I watch motion pictures as the hours cross.
The primary time I watch The Crow is throughout a depressive episode at the starting of the summer time I flip 29. Scrolling by the horror streaming platform Shudder, I see the movie’s poster picture one empty night. It’s nonetheless gentle out, and I hear sounds that by no means fail to make me really feel like the loneliest individual in the world: individuals laughing, kids taking part in. I vaguely recall the movie’s affiliation with some type of disaster, which I realized about from on-line critic Marya E. Gates years in the past. In the state that I’m in in my darkening bed room — my eyes sore and my mouth feeling prefer it’s full of cotton balls — I can’t recall a lot else about the movie.
As I’m staring numbly at the display screen, my sleepy consideration is piqued by the poster’s suffocating darkness stained with the purple gash of a title: it’s a heavy black relieved solely by the lead actor’s title and a steely gray-white gentle, like a doorway simply opened onto one thing magnificent. “Consider in angels,” the movie’s tagline, framed in the gentle, advises. On the threshold, a small and menacing determine is seen as if in reduction, his arms dangle as a sentence lower quick, flexed at his sides, making him appear to be a panther about to pounce — he’s as darkish as the velvety black on the poster’s physique. He’s strolling towards the viewer, perennially. It is a moody picture, sinister and gothic, and, on this empty night, it enhances my melancholic insides, so I press play.
A horror overcomes me. I see Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven mendacity useless on the avenue after being thrown from his condo window after which crawling his approach out of a muddy grave moments later, screaming and wailing from the ache of a macabre rebirth. After I hear Eric converse for the first time in the film — he whispers his cat’s title, Gabriel — his voice low and gravelly from the pressure of life so not too long ago shocked into him, I flip the movie off and weep. I can’t end it. Not but.
Lee’s stature, his voice, his rain-sodden hair — all of it jogs my memory of an individual I’m attempting very onerous to overlook. “It hurts to observe since you look a lot like him,” I say after I handle to see him a number of weeks later, the first time in a 12 months. The Boy I Was Attempting to Neglect isn’t precisely the direct explanation for my unhappiness. It’s my very own unreciprocated and unbearably heavy emotions for him that go away me feeling unmoored, which then feed into the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. The whole lot turns into so dire, so tangled, due to and inside my thoughts.
It may appear anticlimactic or boring or unimportant, possibly even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination with The Crow was first sparked by a person who didn’t like me again. Nevertheless it’s the reality.
Later that summer time, it lastly dawns on me that he, the individual whose loss I ought to have the ability to take care of, would by no means change his thoughts about me. And it is just at this level, after I perceive that my hope won’t be sufficient, that I must take care of the finality of his indifference to me — that I sit myself down and watch The Crow in its entirety.
After which I watch it once more, and once more, and once more. Each night time that I’m unhappy and weeping, each night time that I really feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief misplaced at sea (a lot elaborate intricacy, a lot feeling, all wasted), I put it on. The primary time I go to one in every of my dearest buddies in San Francisco, I speak her into watching it with me. It is her first time. We suck gin gimlets by puckered lips, and I change into teary-eyed watching Eric Draven twirl and cost and weep and wail.
Now two years have gone by, and I’ve come to understand that I turned to The Crow so typically that first summer time as a result of it was a approach to keep away from actuality, a approach to keep away from countenancing and mourning and shifting on from the finish of a connection. The movie allowed me closeness with an individual who was distant and would by no means come close to. He wasn’t useless, however this was worse, I as soon as thought with self-pitying conviction. When a cherished one dies, you at the least have the assurance that there had been love. However this, after all, was a false comparability; it’s objectively not preferable to lose somebody to dying. Nonetheless, that certainty I as soon as felt was deeply, pleasingly maudlin, a type of gothic romanticism. Identical to all the things I really like about The Crow.
Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow relies on a graphic novel of the identical title by James O’Barr. It was launched in 1994 after a fraught manufacturing interval beleaguered by time constraints, delays, and mishaps. Hurricanes tumbled by the miniature metropolis Proyas had constructed, crew members suffered accidents, and, most notably, lead actor Brandon Lee died on set attributable to a misfired, misloaded, and mishandled prop gun. Throughout filming, in the face of so many accidents, many on set thought the movie was cursed.1 It was well-received by critics, with practically everybody noting the irony of a lead actor dying throughout manufacturing for a movie a few character introduced again from the useless. Roger Ebert said that Lee’s efficiency is “extra of a display screen achievement than any of the movies of his father, Bruce Lee.”2 The vital consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the movie is “crammed with type and darkish, lurid vitality,” and that it carries “a soul in the efficiency of the late Brandon Lee.”3
It made some huge cash, was thought of a sleeper hit at the field workplace, and spawned three standalone sequels which can be, truthfully, very horrible. Right this moment, the movie has a loyal cult following. At screenings, some followers costume up as Eric Draven, portray their faces black and white and caping their our bodies in a shiny black flowing trench coat. Typically, they adhere a prop crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal that serves as a shepherd and information and non secular conduit for Eric’s soul. There are some critics, although, who wonder if this film would nonetheless have a loyal following have been it not for the real-life tragedy.
The primary time I noticed the movie in a theater, some viewers members laughed throughout scenes that, to me, have been by no means very humorous. At one level, Eric, after arming himself with all method of weapons at a pawn store (the place he additionally recovers his useless fiancée’s ring), picks up an electrical guitar. The unplugged guitar moans: its strings, as Eric carries it away, vibrate, making a ghostly boing-oing-oing. Watching the movie with an viewers, I might see how that scene, the juxtaposition of weapons with a guitar, might appear a bit humorous — a person arming himself forward of battle takes solely the most necessary issues. Certainly a guitar is a bit too extravagant? However at the identical time, I needed to shush everybody. Couldn’t they see that the guitar is necessary to Eric, a musician, simply as a lot as the ring? To snort is to misconceive Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and all the things is important. Individuals laughed nonetheless, and at different moments, too, when issues grew to become a bit clunky and ludicrous.
“Very weird conditions are sometimes darkly humorous,” mentioned supporting forged member David Patrick Kelly in a behind-the-scenes interview for The Crow,4 reinforcing that the wry humor was purposeful and mandatory. The movie was pieced collectively beneath traumatic circumstances, and this generally comedic overwrought-ness is central to its ethos. The Crow is all a few romantic and melancholic ache like an uncovered nerve, which the movie prods and pokes with the identical macabre curiosity that prompts us to press on a young bruise and may make us snort in discomfort or dismay.
In The Crow, there’s a ache that’s an excessive amount of; it throbs and glistens with lifeblood, even in and round a lot dying, showing on characters in ways in which rail in opposition to logic’s expectations. The curious factor is that, though this heavy darkness is simple to slide into when unhappy, it’s not a straightforward watch exactly for this heft. The movie’s ache ricochets by me throughout each one in every of my rewatches, reawakening and corralling to the floor all my very own fanged reminiscences, which may be, in a kind of paradox, a celebration of life. Ache is messy, feelings are gooey, and so they bleed into each other. However finally, and most significantly, tears, concern, laughter, and grief are indicators that we’re alive, a reality that The Crow is a courageous and relentless reminder of.
1 “The Crow,” IMDb, accessed Might 3, 2024,
2 Roger Ebert, “Opinions: The Crow,” film overview and movie abstract, RogerEbert.com, Might 13, 1994,
3 “The Crow,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed Might 3, 2024,
4 “Behind the Scenes «The Crow» (1994),” YouTube, January 27, 2017,
Excerpted partly from It Can’t Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Revealed by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com