I loved Ghost Dog, and would swear it had a point, but I couldn't tell you what it was. Perhaps the samurai quotations. However, the descriptions of his style make me want to run away.

I loved Ghost Dog, and would swear it had a point, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

Well, there was all that Zen stuff about always being ready for your own death. That stuck in my mind the most. Also, pigeons.

Weir's adopting William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. No casting yet, but I'm stoked.

This is awesome!

Night on Earth was my first Jarmusch, and I recently watched Ghost Dog. My husband just bought Dead Man because he'd seen it a few years ago and it had really stuck with him, and yet he's been unable to explain it.

To me, Jarmusch seems like an auteur rather than a straightforward director, but his movies seem...uneven. But they have memorable tones.

Weir's adopting William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. No casting yet, but I'm stoked.

Weir gives me hope that someone can actually make a William Gibson story into a good film.

And bleach my brain forever of Johnny Mnemonic.

I posted something about this the other day:

September 7, 2005 - It was recently announced that Marvel Entertainment has secured a $525 million loan package that will allow it to produce 10 films based on its comic book characters, specifically Captain America, the Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, Shang-Chi and Ant-Man. Paramount will distribute the films, which will carry a price tag somewhere between $50 million-$165 million each.

Well....

IGN FilmForce has learned that British filmmaker Edgar Wright is poised to direct Ant-Man. Wright apparently plans on making Ant-Man a comedy.

Neither Wright's reps nor Marvel responded to our inquiries for comment.

Wright is most famous for doing Spaced and Shaun of the Dead.

[link]

Link has a picture of Ant-Man.

Ant man sez: "Stop him, my pets! Obey your leader! The Ant Man commands you!

IMDb tells me Weir's adopting William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. No casting yet, but I'm stoked.

Oooooh. I'm 1/3 of the way through, and I kept thinking how lovely a movie it would be.

The last scene should have been cut, but everything that led up to it was brilliant.

Huh. I always thought the last scene was ambiguous enough that it fit the rest of the movie (ie it could be really happening, or it could Chamberlain imaging, Chamberlain having a vision, or Chamberlain hallucinating because he's gone insane )

Re Jarmusch, I love DOWN BY LAW and DEAD MAN. The only other one of his I've seen is MYSTERY TRAIN, which I also remember liking, but it was too long ago. I need to get caught up on the rest of his stuff.

To me, Jarmusch seems like an auteur rather than a straightforward director, but his movies seem...uneven. But they have memorable tones.

He may literally be the definitive auteur, becuase he works financing out so that he owns his movies after they are released.

Wright is most famous for doing Spaced and Shaun of the Dead.

Huh. That could actually be really fun.

Yeah, Jarmusch is definitely an auteur. Night on Earth is definitely uneven (as are Mystery Train, Stranger than Paradise, and Down By Law), but I love Ghost Dog and Dead Man with unbridled passion. I do think that Jarmusch is interesting even when he's not completely successful. I think the Deep Thought behind his movies, to the extent that there is a unifying theme, is that people overcome their essential isolation through a complex interaction of coincidence and pop culture.

In Ghost Dog, the lead character discovers samurai culture presumably through the Wu-Tang Clan, has a deep connection with his best friend (in which each understands the other perfectly although they speak no common language) based on an obvious (and it is obvious - the actors convey their characters' closeness with a palpability that is hard to define) but ineffable bond, has a connection with the little girl through a shared love of reading, and lives his life through a code he learned in books. The deeper message (which I'm sure I'm not conveying very well) is that people are completely shaped by chance encounter and bastardized understanding of amorphous pop culture, and that this way of learning - this way of being - is beyond reproach, but just is. Dead Man furthers this, where Blake is led to his final resting place by the 19th century equivalent of amorphous pop culture gone mad: a Native American besotted with the poetry of William Blake. Dead Man has the existential picaresque feel of a Western serial, but it is a Pilgrim's Progress of sorts. The Blake who (finally) dies at the end of the movie is an man actualized by his experiences, a man who has left civilization far behind but has rejected the Rousseaun (Rousseauxian?) vision of the perfect state of nature for the more complex Schopenhauerian idea of dynamic & enfolding/unfolding nature. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Anyway, I like the Parisian section of Night on Earth best and absolutely hate the LA and Rome sections. I love the Japanese couple in Mystery Train (and, of course, the Screamin' Jay Hawkins sections, 'cause god-DAMN they are fantastic) and hate the ghost section. Stranger Than Paradise was best when they finally got to Florida, because suddenly it became obvious that the characters really were all talk. I loved every second of Year Of The Horse, but that wasn't the typical Jarmusch movie. I haven't seen Coffee and Cigarettes or Broken Flowers.

OK, I need a crash course in Jarmusch. What am I looking for with his movies? Why do I never seem to get what his point is, although I generally feel like I like the movie?

He described his first movie Stranger Than Paradise as The Honeymooners as directed by Ozu. I think both of those fit pretty well in describing his vibe. I think he likes to take the mundane and slow it down until moments are isolated and have a lot of breathing room around them. Sometimes that makes them feel strange, or comic or haunting.

Some of the best laughs in Stranger are just from the blackout cutaways. You really get seduced into his particular, languorous rhythms. I don't think he's aggressively quirky, but he likes actors who have a very strong screen presence so they can hold the screen during all that space he allows around them. He's got a great comic sense that's very dry, or just likes to back up a bit and let a performer go around the bend (like Benigni in Night On Earth with his fantastic comic rant). He's also very masterful at composing iconic imagery which really stays with you, and scenes which are very distinctive and haunting. Plus, he's got fantastic taste in music.