Book extract: he cannot rain all the time by Alisha Mughal | Features

We are extremely proud to present an extract from a new book on “The Crow” available today. Alisha Mughal, who wrote pieces for us on “fatal attraction”, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, and more, wrote that he cannot rain all the time. Get a copy here.

The official synopsis:

He can’t rain all the time Memory woven with film criticism in order to identify The crowcultural resonance.

A passionate analysis of the unhappy film of 1994 with the late Brandon Lee and its lasting influence on action films, cinematographic sorrow and emotional masculinity

Released in 1994, The crow He first attracted the public thanks to the well -published tragedy that took advantage of the film: the main actor Brandon Lee died on the set due to a poorly managed propeller pistol. But it quickly became clear that The crow was more than just accumulation of his tragic parts. The famous critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more a success on the screen than any of his father’s films, Bruce Lee”.

In He can’t rain all the timeAlisha Mughal maintains that The crow Transcended the death of Brandon Lee by exposing the most difficult human emotions in all their dark, dramatic and visceral glories, so much so that he generated three suites, a remake and an intense fandom. Eric, our protagonist in mourning in mourning and mourning, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal and disorderly work. At the end of the film, we realize that Eric presented us with a wide range of emotions and that masculinity does not need to be difficult and impenetrable.

Through her memories of comfort in the film during her own period of mourning, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all her Gothic sadness, The crow is, surprisingly and touched, a film on redemption and hope.

A depressive episode begins as a slow and regular sinking feeling, like being lowered in thumb in a grave. I think it is built in a few days or sometimes even a week. I become irritable and my moods start to become putrid while negative thoughts lay roots. As my body gets tired, thoughts become a forest. The episode has settled.

When I was younger, I was consumed by the mud of sadness, and several times, I almost did not get out of it. Now, I’m under medication, which does not stop the episodes completely but allows me to remove, a distance from which I can make decisions for myself. I learned that the only thing I can do is let these episodes be played, allow them to culminate and then fade and then, back. It takes time. Sometimes I watch movies over the hours.

The first time I watch The crow is during a depressed episode at the beginning of the summer, I am 29 years old. By scrolling the horror streaming platform shivers, I see the image of the film poster an empty evening. It’s always light, and I hear sounds that never fail to make me feel like the most lonely person in the world: laughing people, children playing. I vaguely remember the film’s association with a kind of disaster, which I learned by online criticism Marya E. Gates years ago. In the state I am in my darling room – my painful eyes and my mouth feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton balls – I don’t remember much else on the film.

While I digest the screen in a digital way, my sleeping attention is stung by the suffocating darkness of the stained poster of the red entrance of a title: it is a heavy black relieved only by the name of the main actor and a light of braie-gris-deveilleuse, like a door which has just opened on something magnificent. “Believe in angels,” advises the film’s slogan, framed in the light. On the threshold, a small threatening silhouette is visible as if in relief, his arms hang like a cut sentence, bent alongside him, making him look like a panther about to jump – he is as dark as the velvety black on the body of the poster. He heads for the spectator, still. It is a bad mood image, sinister and Gothic, and, tonight empty, it completes my melancholy bowels, so I press on the game.

A horror overcomes me. I see Eric Draven of Brandon Lee lying dead in the street after being thrown from his apartment window, then crawling when leaving a muddy grave a few moments later, screaming and moaning with the pain of a macabre renaissance. When I hear Eric speaking for the first time in the film – he whispers the name of his cat, Gabriel – his low and gravelly voice of the tension of life so recently shocked in him, I turn off the film and I cry. I can’t finish it. Not yet.

Lee’s stature, her voice, her rain – all that reminds me of a person whom I try very much to forget. “It hurts to look because you look like him so much,” I said when I can see him a few weeks later, the first time in a year. The boy I was trying to forget is not exactly the direct cause of my sadness. It is my own non -specialized and unbearably heavy feelings for him that leave me without feeling unstrupted, which then feeds the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. Everything becomes so disastrous, so tangled, because of and in my mind.

It may seem anticlimatic or boring or unimportant, perhaps even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination for The crow was first triggered by a man who did not love me. But it’s the truth.

Later that summer, he finally makes me on me that he, the person I should face, will never change my mind on me. And it is only at this stage, when I understand that my hope will not be enough, that I will have to face the purpose of his indifference for me – that I sit down and that I look The crow in its entirety.

And then I look at him again, and again and again. Every night that I am sad and that I cry, every night that I feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief lost at sea (so much elaborate complexity, so much feeling, all wasted), I put it. The first time I visit one of my dear friends from San Francisco, I’m talking about looking at him with me. This is his first time. We suck the gimlets of Gin through the pleated lips, and I become a wasting eyes by looking at Eric Draven Twirl and loads and crys and groans.

Now, two years have passed, and I realized that I turned to The crow So often this first summer because it was a way to avoid reality, a way to avoid the face and mourning and move from the end of a connection. The film allowed me a proximity to a person who was far away and who never approached. He was not dead, but it was worse, I thought once with a condemnation for self-applied. When a loved one dies, you have at least the assurance that there had been love. But it was, of course, a false comparison; It is objectively not better to lose someone to death. However, this certainty that I felt in the past was deeply, pleasantly gloomy, a kind of Gothic romanticism. Like everything I love The crow.

Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow is based on a graphic novel by the same name of James O’Barr. It was published in 1994 after a heavy production period besieged by time constraints, delays and misadventures. The hurricanes have released the miniature city that the proyas had built, the crew members suffered accidents and, in particular, the head actor Brandon Lee died due to a propelled, badly deformed and poorly managed pistol. During the shooting, facing so many accidents, many on the set thought that the film was cursed.¹ He was well received by criticism, almost everyone noting the irony of a main actor who died during production for a film on a character brought back from the dead. Roger Ebert said Lee’s performance is “more a success on the screen than any of his father’s films Bruce Lee”.² The critical consensus on rotten tomatoes is that the film is “filled with style and dark energy and lurid” and that it carries “a soul in the performance of the late Brandon Lee”.³

It made a lot of money, was considered a success at the box office and caused three autonomous suites which are, honestly, very terrible. Today, the film has a devoted cult. During projections, some fans disguise themselves in Eric Draven, painting their faces in black and white and capulating their body in a trench of brilliant fluid black. Sometimes they adhere an accessory crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal which serves as shepherd and guide and spiritual conduits for the soul of Eric. There are criticisms, who wonder if this film would still have devoted follow -up without the real tragedy.

The first time I saw the film in a theater, some public members laughed during the scenes which, for me, have never been very funny. At one point, Eric, after having armed himself of all kinds of weapons in a lender on wages (where he also recovers the ring of his dead fiancée), takes an electric guitar. The unplugged guitar groans: his strings, as Eric transports him, vibrates, creating a ghostly Boing-org-org. Watching the film with an audience, I could see how this scene, the juxtaposition of firearms with a guitar, might seem a little funny – a man stopping before the battle takes only the most important things. Is a guitar a little too extravagant? But at the same time, I wanted to lower everyone. Could they not see that the guitar is important for Eric, a musician, as much as the ring? Laughing is to misunderstand Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and everything is important. People were laughing nevertheless, and at other times too, when things have become a little clumsy and ridiculous.

“Very bizarre situations are often dark funny,” said distribution member David Patrick Kelly in an interview behind the scenes for The crow,,⁴ Reinforcing that ironic humor was determined and necessary. The film was reconstituted in traumatic circumstances, and this sometimes comical over-user is at the heart of its philosophy. The crow It is romantic and melancholy pain as an exposed nerve, which the film provokes and pushes with the same macabre curiosity which encourages us to press a tender bruise attempt and can also make us laugh of discomfort or dismay.

In The crowThere is too much pain; He throbes and sparkles with a standard of living, even in and around so much death, appearing on characters in a way that is achieved against the expectations of logic. What is curious is that, although this heavy darkness is easy to slip when it is sad, it is not an easy watch precisely for this weight. The pain of the film Ricoche through me during each of my reproaches, reappearing and going to the surface all my own memories, which can be, in a sort of paradox, a celebration of life. The pain is messy, the emotions are sticky and they bleed to each other. But ultimately, and above all, tears, fear, laughter and sorrow are signs that we are aliveA truth that The crow is a courageous and relentless reminder.

1 “The Crow”, IMDB, accessed May 3, 2024,

2 Roger Ebert, “Reviews: The Crow”, summary of film and film criticism, Rogerebert.com, May 13, 1994,

3 “The Crow”, Rotten Tomatoes, accessed May 3, 2024,

4 “Behind the backstage” The Crow “(1994)”, YouTube, January 27, 2017,

Partly extract from He can’t rain all the time by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com