It's a sad and beautiful world: the Jim Jarmusch poll.

I'm sorry to have to let you know his highest-profile role is in Star Wars

well i was assuming perhaps naively that people would judge him on an acting appearance.

btw history sez they are Iggy's band, deal with it

Paterson is really wonderful.

Stooges doc was surprisingly shoddily made. Parts with Iggy talking were good but the whole design and editing of the movie was very much cheap VH1 rockumentary.

talking heads format in the trailer put me off

“For some time now, Jim Jarmusch has been operating as an autocritical dialectician in his fictional features,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum for the new issue of Trafic. “Politically as well as commercially, The Limits of Control [2009] offers a sharp rebuke to his preceding film, Broken Flowers [2005],” and he elaborates. “But even more striking is the radical contrast between Jarmusch’s most elitist feature (and in many ways my least favorite), Only Lovers Left Alive [2013] . . . and Jarmusch’s most populist feature (and one of my favorites), Paterson [2016].”

https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2017/06/jarmsuchs-lost-america-the-pleasures-of-paterson/

spoilers within

from Film Comment:

Jim Jarmusch is filming The Dead Don’t Die, a “zombie comedy,” in upstate New York, with a cohort of actors both familiar in the director’s oeuvre (Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi) and new (Selena Gomez). Just don’t call it a zom-com, please.

Sounds great

I should get around to Patterson i suppose

Eh

you're eh

I’m usually slow to getting around to his latest releases but rally the only one that I didn’t like at all was that assassin one.

(Not Ghost Dog, the other one)

Only Lovers Left Alive? was he an assassin in that or just a stoned vampire

The Limits of Control, right? v forgettable

Yes that one

Vampire one was great

paterson was really nice, i'm still mad about how shitty the stooges documentary was though

I was sure Paterson was gonna suck (I hate Adam Driver) but it was really good. I know I saw The Limits of Control but I have absolutely no memory of it. Only Lovers Left Alive was better than it should have been. I'm not going anywhere near this zombie thing, though.

^^ co-sign

Paterson is Jarmusch's best film, imo.

His last two are.

I really loved Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law (and Broken Flowers to some extent), but I think I agree the last two are the best

I've liked a couple of the recent films, but I don't think they're anywhere near as good as Stranger Than Paradise.

will have to see it again, it's been forever

eff off with the zombie crap.

that was addressed to the world.

xp I remember at the time an older artist friend, an idol of mine, thought that Stranger Than Paradise might have been just about the best movie of all time

(xpost) I saw it five years ago (checked back in the last-x thread; can we start a new one? it's an ordeal checking 5,000+ posts) and thought it held up very well. I don't know if I can think of another film with a better control of deadpan.

Stranger Than Paradise is definitely his best film - I've never seen anything else like it - and Down By Law is right up there.

Kinda broad, but hey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs5ZOcU6Bnw

Came to post that too...Some good deadpan in there, but it'd have to be really, really funny, I would think, to justify an idea that's been done to death.

(And if not that, have the greatest soundtrack ever.)

man, Stranger Than Paradise blows. Permanent Vacation is better in every way: compelling lead, interesting score, more variety in the vignettes, beautiful no budget cinematography. STP... Lurie is fine, the girl is good, but Edson is annoying as fuck. fedoras and no style, whereas the kid in PV has so much more range and does a lot more with nothing. anyone know if the final shot is an explicit reference to News From Home or was that ferry shot fairly common?

Love Stranger Than Paradise--when it came out, 10 times since, and again when I watched it last year. I can't think of another film that sustains deadpan humour so perfectly for 90 minutes.

Which is exactly what I said six posts ago last year...I need new words.

I watched Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise this past week with flappy bird’s comments in mind, but I thought Stranger Than Paradise was so great, that it was much better realized in its look at alienation, manners and fashion than the first film

it was meandering but ultimately meaningful I thought. I loved that the two leads were such doppelgängers. aunt Lotte stole the show in the middle third.

I also like that it was shot in flattened shades of gray, that each scene was basically static and was comprised of a single shot, that each scene was separated by a blackout that felt like a power outage, correlating with the expressionless quality of the whole story.

It is great. Flappy’s got a lot of whack opinions.

lol

Permanent Vacation is the only Jarmusch movie I’ve never been able to finish

the thing about Stranger Than Paradise for me is that I find those guys unbearably annoying. in a movie with more going on, this wouldn't necessarily be a fatal blow for me, but in a mood piece, it's a non-starter. PV hits me but obviously if you don't like the main guy it's gonna be hard to finish. STP, I'm just disengaged from the beginning. I watched One Sings, the Other Doesn't recently and really liked it a lot, despite how didactic and formal it is. I'm won over by the leads and Varda's sensibility. another director, different stars, maybe a different story.

I'll give you another example: I saw a movie called Soy Cuba last week. Shot with a telephoto lens with tons of distortion, looks like it was shot from inside a snowglobe. Malick must've seen this movie because his style of roving handheld cinematography is all over Soy Cuba. and I couldn't get into it. I was disconnected from the beginning, and all my friends loved it. it's not an intellectual disagreement, it's a gut reaction. the spell was broken. Altman's slow zoom is another device that calls attention to itself and attempts to say something w/o words. that's something that hits me at my core, but I understand people that find it hokey or artificial or even distracting.

and it goes w/o saying there is no right or wrong with this. if a movie moves you, you're willing to forgive a lot more than with something where you might be disconnected from the start. there are some stunning shots in Soy Cuba, and probably some things in STP I like, but enough to win me over.

Are you talking about the 1964 Kalatozov film? It's been ages since I saw that, but I remember it being both stylistically dazzling and massively hyperbolic about the pre-Castro regime.

Am I the only one who thinks the cult of early Jarmusch is tied up with nostalgia for pre-Giuliani New York? Mind you, I took The Limits of Control as an extremely loose take on Don Quixote, so I could be wrong.

Yes, that's the one. I liked it more than any Malick movie but like I said I found the style really tiresome. technically impressive but emotionally vacant for me. and yeah it was partially funded by Cuba so it's pretty much just propaganda.

Is there a cult of early Jarmusch?

STP stands as just a phenomenal drifting hang-out movie. Still the most enjoyable thing he’s done, front to back.

phenomenal drifting hang-out movie is a great description

Saw the trailer for the new one again. What is with every zombie whatever having a samurai sword wielding zombie master? There's one in World War Z (the book), there is one in the Walking Dead (books and show), and there is one in this one.

(By my math, I think that's all of them.)

maybe should do another poll in a couple months once people see TDDD. since 2007 there's been The Limits of Control, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Paterson. only saw the latter two but I know all three have their ardent fans. I hated Only Lovers Left Alive and didn't like Paterson but could see myself rewatching it in a year or something and loving it. that one has stuck with me, and the people I saw it with, more than most movies do.

Loved STP as a teenager, mainly because it completely fit with my parallel obsession with the aimless drifting of early Wenders (the blackouts between scenes are straight out of WW's 70's notebook). I don't remember much of STP except the vibe and how OLD it seemed, probably due to the grainy b&w and Screamin' Jay Hawkins. I should re-watch it.

“It's Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and he's a wild man, so bug off.”

Okay, so just saw The Dead Don't Die: shaggy dog laconic Jarmusch, just meta enough, hardly perfect but perfectly entertaining. One plotline left totally hanging but maybe that was the point.