Saturday night I purchased this new version of J.O.Barr's story from Youtube. I've just seen it once so my impressions are - well, impressions, and I need to have another look before making any deep deductions. So far I think the opera was a good point, and most was very superficial. But I'll have a better look and judge after that.
Now I've been watching the old version to half way through and the difference is immense: layers after layers, details, whole city instead of tattoos and limos... Maybe the matter is that I can't read the signs like tattoos the way I can read signs in the old one... The old one has gangs and drugs, streetfight, knives, booze and needles - the new has heaven, hell and limbo, highly organised crime and money. Old people instead of young ones... So the drama in the new one is more structural than personal as in the older version.
The old Crow has a city, gangs, boss, all kinds of traditions, places and types of crooks, bars, churches, police, many kinds of cars... The new has a limbo, hell and heaven perhaps somewhere. Crooks are the rich and bad people in limos and in opera... or something... It's very vague, the power structure kind of has no real in it. In the old it is straightforward and depending on violence. To me the old Crow is more believable. The new is like the fourth season of 'Charite': soap, idle and meaningless hype. No katharsis in it. And Shelly and Eric are fourteen-fifteen, not strong enough for their feelings. Yeah, I know Romeo and Juliet were young too but the culture in their time Verona was very real, violent and bloody...
In the old one innocence died, in the new it doesn't. It just floats like a simple bubble untouched. Innocence and trust, the two great ones that hold the heaven and earth, and then death whose reliability is not doubted, ever. Is it religion or philosophy? I don't have religion so it must be philosophy of a kind.
I'm not going to watch the new version another time. I don't want to, it is not worth it... But the original drawings of J.O.Barr's comic book... I have it somewhere, but where? It was interesting how his style got more exact and fluent from the first fumbling pictures, and the characters got stronger personalities... even those bad and corrupted had their own personalities, quite different.
