More reviews: The Crow and Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy

The Crow

I'm not sure what I expected going in to this movie, knowing mostly that the star died during filming (conspiracy theories ahoy!), that it's very gothy and that it has cult status for many.
The Crow starts off at a crime scene, where we see that a goth couple was murdered a day before their wedding on Halloween. A year later the guy from the couple gets out of his grave, paints his face Joker-style, and gets revenge on the people who killed him and his girlfriend. On the way he plays rock music on the roof above his apartment, discovers that he's invincible, and has a crow constantly directing him and helping him out. There's also a little girl that he and his girlfriend used to take care of who functions as a Symbol of Innocence throughout the movie, and the cop we first saw in the opening scene who turns out to have a heart of gold. On the villain side we have T-Bird and his gang of psychopathic misfits, and the big boss, who is a hot long-haired Anarchist Goth and has a big scary-looking black dude working for him as well as a weird Asian girl who really likes eyes and who spouts off cryptic and mystical stuff.

I think that either the movie hasn't aged gracefully, or else it was intended as a sort of self-parody, because The Crow isn't just goth, it's Goth, so much so that it's difficult to take it seriously. The Goth stereotypes and symbolism are constant and heavy-handed, including but not limited to: Undead Goth's rooftop guitar solos, the ever-present crow following him around, the fact that there was a petition to kick the goth couple out of their apartment before they got murdered because No One Understood Them,  the way that Undead Goth repeatedly tells other characters that they should give up their drug/smoking habits because it's unhealthy for them, the little girl as an obvious Symbol of Innocence in an otherwise uniformly dark setting, the constant rain and moody atmospheric lighting..
The funny thing is that despite the imagery being so overblown, it pretty much works. Well, I was drawn in.

In the style of lotusvine , I give The Crow 3 out of 5 goth stereotypes

The Age of the Five, by Trudi Canavan

I'm a moderate to big fan of Trudi Canavan. She writes stories about strong female characters who kick ass on their own merits while tending to fall in love with male characters who are in a position of power over them. Rawr. She also creates well-realised worlds that are changed by the actions of her protagonists. In fact, I was enjoying her strong female protagonists so much that I didn't notice that they're practically the same character until someone mentioned the name 'David Eddings' in connection with Trudi Canavan*. Having said that, I still really enjoy her books, I just expect that in another trilogy or two I'll have had enough of that particular story.
Onto the trilogy itself: Auraya is kind and empathetic and strongly magically Gifted and loves the gods. These traits lead her to be chosen as one of the five White, the supreme leaders of the continent who get to hear the gods directly and read the thoughts of everyone else using the magic given to them by the gods, who are the only gods still alive after the Age of the Many.   All is relatively well until they get invaded by the Pentadrians, who believe in a different set of gods and think that the gods of the White aren't real. The other main players in the world are the Immortals, who are immensely powerfully Gifted people (who are immortal, yes) who have to live in hiding because the gods will kill them if they get a chance, although the reasons for this aren't made completely clear until near the end of the trilogy. As events occur it becomes apparent that Auraya is more powerful than anyone suspected and that the world (and the gods) are far more complicated than she ever knew. At the end she's the pivotal part of a world-changing event, and then lives happily ever after except for the people who hate her guts for enacting the world-changing event, especially this one particular character who's presented as an adversary of Auraya but never really gets any good screen time or satisfying resolution. Sequel bait? Could be.

*For those not in the know, David Eddings is moderately skilled at writing the same story with the same characters over and over again with only minor name/role changes. It's an enjoyable story, but I got sick of it and jumped off the bandwagon after the first two big series and the first standalone after that.