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

^^ 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.

looking forward to it

I think I like Down By Law as much as Stranger Than Paradise, Waits and Lurie had such amazing chemistry

seems clear by the end of the story that they will end up together even though they go their separate ways

I like how they try to outdo each other with their cool guy schticks. It's a funny take on their real life personas.

yes!

I'll meet up with you again in a wee whiley - in the cemetary!

Tilda’s all-right angle turns walking up to the police station had me cracking up

Loved this

A black comedy of the anthropocene (polar fracking screwing with the Earth's tilt and rotation is intriguing and timely). Tilda Swinton's otherworldly performance is delightful. But I can only say "Meh" to the rest of the film.

I liked it ok, but wasn't really on board with the repetitiveness of some of the jokes. There were people in the theater who laughed out loud the third time the Sturgill Simpson song played though, so maybe I'm the weird one. It was a good song, so hopefully I'll stop being sick of it already sooner or later. I don't know - I haven't actually seen a Jarmusch movie since the early 2000s, so maybe I just need to reacquaint myself with the feel of his other work. Everybody's performances were excellent though.

And there was obviously a lot of bleak social commentary about climate change and materialism and racism, but I was kinda left wondering how it all tied together.

Yeah this was pretty much exactly what I was prepared for & expecting – a totally light, silly, largely aimless goof, mostly just an excuse to enjoy the screen presence of a bunch of interesting performers, which I’m totally fine with.

My only real nitpicks were that I didn’t like the meta stuff between Murray and Driver, especially the ‘script’ routines at the end – ymmv but I hate kind of schtick, reminds me of bad 90s mel brooks movies. Was honestly kind of surprised that Jarmusch would do such a corny & overdone gag like that, but w/e. The only one of those bits I liked was when Bill Murray snapped “are we improvising?”, which made me laugh, but mostly due to his delivery.

Also weird that the plotline with the three teens in blue goes nowhere (Ned I assume this is what you were referring to upthread?). Unless I missed something, did the reappear in the finale or something?

I generally hate how streaming TV has sucked up so much film talent over the last bunch of years, but watching this I thought that this mode of Jarmusch would be kind of a perfect fit for that medium – I can totally imagine enjoying something like this movie extended over twelve 30min episodes or whatever, just a total no-stakes Andy Griffith-style ramble through a weird town with an endless succession of character actors and celeb cameos doing charming little scenes, interrupted by occasional zombie attacks, with no real plot to resolve or anything.

it felt like Jarmusch’s version of one of those comedy films that parodies a genre, scary movie or whatever

i read a comment about how the zombies seeking out things from their life was poorly done and i’m like... that’s the joke?

i read a comment about how the zombies seeking out things from their life was poorly done and i’m like... that’s the joke?

Shawn of the Dead did much better with the metaphor of zombies as people going blindly through their lives.

Also weird that the plotline with the three teens in blue goes nowhere

Unless they're somewhere in the final zombie melee, their plot was left hanging. Could they have been a Stranger Things shoutout (difficulty: I haven't seen ST)?

No, not a Stranger Things shoutout to be sure.

It stood out that this small sleepy town that seemed to have a population of about twelve would have this crowded juvenile detention center with roided-out skinhead guards.

i read a comment about how the zombies seeking out things from their life was poorly done and i’m like... that’s the joke?

― mh, Monday, June 17, 2019 12:37 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's been 40 years since Dawn of the Dead and the whole "zombie people wandering blindly from day-to-day at things like malls" thing. I think a zombie Iggy looking for coffee is a real funny version of it. I think zombies wandering around going "wi-fiiii" "blueee-toooth" is too close to trenchant WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY DO U SEE for my personal comfort, but I can't exactly blame a 66 year old for not being on my level of internet irony

see also movie geek gas station guy DRINKIN A DEW

xxp I dunno, giant crowded detention centers are pretty much a main industry of sleepy small town America at this point honestly

I guess the whole "zombies are sheeple" thing was the OG Dawn of the Dead, and the "Zombies gravitate to what they like" thing is a little more contemporary