Tag: jim jarmusch

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A shot of a black man standing in front of an elevator in Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control", with the text of the film title.

La vida no vale nada: On Jim Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control” (2009)

I remember watching Jim Jarmusch’s film The Dead Don’t Die when it was first released, and being thoroughly unimpressed, even slightly insulted. I understood that Jarmusch was a “name” to cinephiles the world over (especially here in the States), and that he had a kind of maverick, too-cool-for-school appeal, so I was definitely intrigued by what seemed to be a deconstructed zombie flick. Turns out, the movie was rather dull, way too devil-may-care for my taste, and—perhaps the worst sin—dreadfully unfunny. A lot of off-kilter conversations going nowhere and oddball characters doing oddball things and Bill Murray deadpanning for nearly two hours.

It’s possible I’m remembering it uncharitably, since it came out in 2019 (which might as well be an eternity ago), but all the same, it has since been my only brush with Jarmusch. I know that Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is worth watching and perhaps a couple others—The Dead Don’t Die, however, was enough to put me off Jarmusch’s filmography for a good long while. He is certainly a name but there are other names, and other films, and life is much too short to survey every single one. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A stylized shot of Paterson and the Japanese traveler who loves Williams Carlos Williams, as featured in Jim Jarmusch's "Paterson".

As Is: Reviewing Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” (2016)

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a film about a week in the life of a bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, and writes poems. We witness his routine, his aversion to change, the overheard conversations, his life with his wannabe artist wife (Laura, played by Golshifteh Farahani), his English bulldog, and that’s about all. What makes this film interesting, however, is the everydayness of his life, and while we’re at it, that his poems are not doggerel, but simply bland. Granted, this banality ultimately works as a strength because this isn’t a film about a great, neglected writer working a ‘regular job,’ but rather, a regular guy who happens to write regular poems. 

Set in the birthplace of William Carlos Williams, Paterson goes about his daily routine (he is so stuck in his ways that he doesn’t even want a smartphone), while his ‘artsy’ wife remains home. Ironically, the two could not be more different, as she seems to jump from passion to passion depending on the day. From starting her own cupcake business, to painting, interior decorating, guitar playing, she doesn’t seem to know what she wants but is rather content cheering on her husband. (She purchases a guitar online with DVD instructions in the hopes of being the next Tammy Wynette or Patsy Cline, and the guitar also happens to match her outfit.) Convinced that Paterson is a great poet, she encourages him to publish his poems, or at minimum, make copies. (He promises her that he’ll make copies by the weekend, but unfortunately, their English bulldog, Marvin, chews up his notebook.) […]

Film by Marc Magill
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A screenshot of Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog Way of the Samurai

How the World Rots: “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai” by Jim Jarmusch (1999)

Jim Jarmusch. His filmography is complicated. Generally in his better outings his films tend to be uneven, lopsided; in Dead Man (1995), a promising opening and set-up degrades into predictability. Stranger Than Paradise (1984) manages to turn lacklustre set-up into rich commentary. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai alchemically alters a boring, hack set-up into something that draws power from its own predictability in character and setting – it manages to take all of the familiar elements of schlubby gangsters and badass hitmen, and it somehow manages to find sympathy in all of them while also dismissing them as ridiculous. Their ridiculousness serves a purpose, because in the world of Ghost Dog nobody truly understands each other.

Jarmusch is a Jim-of-all-Trades, master of very little. What is easy to admire is his rejection of tradition and accumulated wisdom, in pursuit of making something more reflective of his own sensibilities. This is the terrific contradiction of his filmog, in that there is very little to be found that is completely boring and also very little to be found that’s technically well-executed. It almost reads as a kind of brattitude. He insists on the filmic qualities taking a back-seat to his vision, but he doesn’t always have a clear vision of what exactly his vision entails. He’s said himself in interviews that he tries to communicate with a film, and coax it into telling him where it needs to go. This has worked twice in his career: Stranger than Paradise and Ghost Dog. Otherwise this is a recipe for neurosis taking over proceedings, and the wrong qualities being blown up to integral structural mechanisms (ala Dead Man, Paterson, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Dead Don’t Die, Coffee and Cigarettes). It is for this reason that the following discussion is mostly free of technical execution, as Jarmusch has to be read on his own terms in one of his few successes at what he is going for. As a quick note on his camera-ism, he manages to make the action somewhat fluid despite its absurdity – though, it ultimately fails – and the occasional scenes of pigeons flying about are nice. […]