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

dead man is like one of my top movies of ... uh ... ever?

Dead Man is amazing from beginning to end, and back round again.

I do have a weak spot for Ghost Dog, I admit

i haven't seen year of the horse, but the neil young score (if you can call it that) to dead man is one of my favorite soundtracks.

i'm with remy, noodle and tipsy. one of my all-time favourites.

Strangerthan Paradise by a ocuntry mile.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

xxxpost: I love Dead Man except for the soundtrack (and I am a Neil Young fan). It's really lazy and boring. I mean, compare it to Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas.

really? that's interesting, because i was never a neil young fan till i saw dead man. but ry cooder's st for paris, texas is fucking awesome.

Everything about Dead Man sets it apart. The entertaining ugly violence, the score, his best-looking black & white film and his best cast: Depp, Robert Mitchum, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, Alfred Molina, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bishop.

dead man is like one of my top movies of ... uh ... ever?

-- remy bean, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:56 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Link

that soundtrack

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i don't get 'dead man'. it's going great guns until he meets the indian guy then it's zzzzzzzzzzz all the way, though the end is nice.

wow me and alex in sf have the same jarmusch preferences

i don't get 'dead man'. it's going great guns until he meets the indian guy then it's zzzzzzzzzzz all the way, though the end is nice.

if you would like more entertainment from your tragedies, i would refer you instead to the film 'ghost dog', which has gunshots

i guess dead man has those too. but it's in black and white. also, ghost dog has, like, dope beats and stuff.

yeah 'ghost dog' is the freshness.

but with 'dead man', you get the feeling the mystical shit is for real.

yes, all those people did die

http://www.ica.org.uk/Jarmusch%20in%20Context+22863.twl

this looks rad, londoners. chance to see the cameraman, they live by night, l'atalante and branded to kill.

Wonder if I voted in this. Would've been Ghost Dog, probably.

if night on earth had a few votes in favour of how much fun it is, the results would be pretty much otm.

I didn't get dead man either. what was the point?

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/acid-western/Content?oid=890861

still don't get it

good read! i like Dead Man, but i haven't seen it years. review will probably prompt a re-watch in the near future.

xpost

Add me to the list of those who didn't get Dead Man when it first came out--I remember drifting and fidgeting through the whole thing--but liked it a lot better tonight. (Saw it right after Imitation of Life...I won't pretend it was a double-bill--two separate theatres.) I wish Iggy Pop's bit of silliness weren't there--he's a needless distraction--and the series of fade-outs right at the start seemed excessive. But the violence and the overall mood registered this time, and there were a number of really beautiful shots. Liked the music fine. I'll have to mull over all the William Blake and millennial undercurrents, but they're evocative.

http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/deadman/

I love Dead Man but haven't seen it for years. My first viewing was with a friend who didn't really know anything about Jarmusch, and when we came out he said, "That was like a European movie about America." Which I think makes sense in ways he didn't even mean.

And I didn't know Marcus was a fan of My Twentieth Century. There's a movie that deserves its own thread, if there was any way to actually see the thing any more.

I remember being surprised when it showed up fairly high on decade-end polls, somewhere in the 10-20 range on a couple that I remember--it didn't seem to get a lot of attention on release. I can understand that better now; it does capture something. (Never heard of My Twentieth Century.)

Stranger Than Paradise held up well for me. I saw it four or five times in the '80s, but not since then. I was very susceptible to its mood and its look at the time--it seemed like such an emphatic no to where American film was then headed. I was more mindful tonight of certain affectations--the blacking out especially--but I still think it has a kind of small-scale perfection, and probably lots of Reagan-era resonances (intended or not) too. A lot of lines came back to me immediately--when Aunt Lottie walked away in disgust as the three of them headed out for Florida, I said (in my best Hungarian accent) "Son of a bitch" a second before she did. Richard Edson's priceless, and I still have a crush on Eszter Balint. (There was a record store in Toronto in the '80s that had an Eszter lookalike working for them.) I didn't know then who Rammellzee was, so that was nice. Not sure if I'll get around to watching Permanent Vacation, which is included on a second disc.

Permanent Vacation is at least worth watching once. It's interesting to see what Brooklyn looked like a million years ago.

yeah you're off by nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and sixty seven years.

gabbneb was so unpleasant, glad he hasn't turned back up *knocks on wood*

otm.

i love 'stranger than paradise' a lot, and like-to-love everything else i've seen of his.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_limp7oRAHp1qis5gbo1_500.jpg

Screamin' Jay is still my main man.

Or, as gabbnebb might say: they are all alive except the one on the right and the one on the left.

― roxymuzak, Thursday, December 13, 2007 1:27 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol six years later..

finally watched dead man - p much loved it

Another bounty hunter (Michael Wincott) sleeps with a teddy bear and muses at one point, "Ever wish you were the moon?" When Wilson happens upon the corpses of two marshals (named Lee and Marvin), he notes that the head of one of them "looks like a goddamn religious icon" and promptly crushes it like a cantaloupe under his heel--an image of astonishing, shocking beauty.

things u want to c&p over&over

Bump because I saw Only Lovers Left Alive last night and feel the need to say something about it. It's gorgeous, but since I keep calling it "the hipster's Twilight," I feel guilty about liking it.

think jarmusch is p on point in prefixing all discussion of 'guilty pleasures' with 'there are no such things as guilty pleasures'
saw this last night, too & was intermittently charmed - tilda dancing to the 45 was goosebumps - but also found it just kind of unintentionally loose like his last couple, in a way that kinda just poignantly emphasises the cohesion of his original experiments with this type of structure. strong in trad jarmusch mode (as a sorta mystery train reimagining), then generally less confident as a modern/digital film. it's nice to be in his head for a couple hours, though. jeffrey wright stealing the show.

Local press went apeshit when it played the Miami Film Festival last month.

there is a pink & blue embroidered bedsheet in it that will make you lose your mind

Really want to see this film, vampires be damned.

er... no pun intended.

I was totally into this. Found it endlessly amusing - the hyper-coolness, the sunglasses, Ian, Jack White's house...

If you asked a movie-making computer "I want a Jim Jarmusch flick about vampires" this is what would come out

It was pretty good!

for those who care about such things, the action at a distance stuff wasn't total bullshit, and i feel like jarmusch must have known that the canonical way of explaining einstein's idea about quantum theory (which turned out to be wrong fwiw) is with ... gloves!

I'm watching this atm and I just need to say that I feel like I'm splitting in two as I watch it

grown up me is going omggggggggg its so corny with the marlowe and the guitars and the books and the everything

and yet

18 year old me is literally peeeing her pants over this whole thing. its so jarmusch, its so what i wanted a vampire movie to be back then WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG JIM

Its killing me. i think i love it even though i am so aware of how big of a facepalm it should be

this was only my second exposure to jarmusch after ghost dog. i thought it was so dreadful and tedious. to me it was laughable that these characters were supposed to be cool. all they did was namedrop and use their vampire powers to do things well. i'm astounded that so few critics found this movie similarly awful.

it's the viiiibe, man

I'm not much of a Jarmusch fan beyond Stranger Than Paradise, which probably set me up well for liking Only Lovers Left Alive more than I thought I would. Seemed to be about a few things simultaneously: junk, Detroit, the end of history. (Also thought it might have been about Jim Morrison--what he might be up to today if, you know--but that's my own projection.) Thought it was great getting in a few seconds of Charlie Feathers' original "I Can't Hardly Stand It," because--honest truth--I was thinking ahead of that that this was a film Lux Interior might have liked. (I wish there'd been more than a few seconds, though.) Tilda Swinton gets off one terrifically funny line; if you've seen the film, you'll know which line I mean. I would have liked a longer look at Tom Hiddleston's wall of I-don't-have-heroes--only managed to pick out Keaton, Joe Strummer, Kafka, and Einstein.