Jim Jarmusch
108 connections found
Filmography
Mystery Train 1989 
Paterson 2016 
Only Lovers Left Alive 2013 
Night on Earth 1991 
The Limits of Control 2009 
The Dead Don't Die 2019 
Broken Flowers 2005 
Dead Man 1995 
Coffee and Cigarettes 2004 
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai 1999 
Stranger Than Paradise 1984 
Down by Law 1986 
Permanent Vacation 1981 View:
Connections, in both directions
(The movie is well-stocked with film-culture references, and this notion of zombie consumerism echoes George Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead —although here we have zombies wandering the streets in search of wi-fi and Chardonnay.
Much of its in-universe rules are borrowed directly from Romero: like 1978’s Dawn Of The Dead , these ghouls are all obsessed with the one thing they desired as living beings.
That’s a clever gag, but the more prominent theme that humans are already mindless zombies due to their materialistic impulses was already handled in a far more meaningful manner by George Romero in the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead , the one in which the natural urge of the walking dead was to head straight for the mall.
You don’t watch mainstays of the genre, like George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “Dawn of the Dead” (1979), in the hope of spotting familiar faces.
“The Dead Don’t Die” leans hard into the consumerist satire of George Romero’s 1978 classic “Dawn of the Dead,” in which all the zombies went to the mall.
Not only does it not work on its own—it is a conceit that is way too overt for its own good—the additional level of ironic self-awareness will only remind most viewers of films like “Shaun of the Dead,” “Planet Terror” and “Zombieland” that wore their self-awareness on their sleeves but still managed to create engaging and interesting stories at the same time.
Without skimping on gore, Jarmusch has positioned his film on the comedy end of the horror spectrum and, although it’s neither as funny nor as engaging as Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, it has its own peculiar charm.
There’ll be no slapstick or zaniness on the level of other zom-coms like Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead .
The Dead Don’t Die has nothing to add to the accomplishments of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland , and offers instead only a vague, timely sense of concern.
It goes back to “Shaun of the Dead,” to films like “Planet Terror” and “Re-Animator” — and, of course, to “Dawn of the Dead” itself, which laced its grisly spectacle with a ripe satire of the consumer culture.
You don’t watch mainstays of the genre, like George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “Dawn of the Dead” (1979), in the hope of spotting familiar faces.
The couple goes out once together, to see the 1932 Island of Lost Souls, after which Paterson compares Laura to the feral, fractured-English-speaking Panther Woman.
The weekend feels no different, except when the couple go to a movie: an old horror flick, “Island of Lost Souls” (1932), which is pretty much the opposite of their domestic routine.
Here it feels like a tic left over from the 20th century — something he all but acknowledges when Paterson and Laura go out to see the 1932 “Island of Lost Souls” at a movie theater.
One night, Paterson and Laura go to the movies to see 1932’s “Island of Lost Souls.”
The jangle of the digital present is all but absent here; even when Paterson and Laura go to the movies, it's a revival of the 1932 horror classic Island of Lost Souls.
At one point, Paterson and Laura go to a local cinema to watch Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls , but you can’t really see why movies would matter in these people’s lives.
Having captured the strange suburbia within Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Elmes assists in highlighting the poetic beauty Paterson from Paterson sees within his hometown, which permits Paterson to soak up inspiration from the town and its people for his own poetry.
Frederick Elmes, who previously shot things as stylistically varied as Blue Velvet and The Ice Storm, sticks to muted, warmer tones, recalling faded family snapshots from the 1970s.
The stunning camerawork and expressive lighting by Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet; River’s Edge; Synecdoche, New York) add further dimensions to Jarmusch’s storytelling, and the original music written and performed by Carter Logan, Sqürl, and Jarmusch lend Paterson a noodling quality that provides an aural equivalent to the reworking of lines of verse.
Lensed with a painter's eye by the great Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet"), the movie conveys an aura of Blakean mysticism through such homely sources as an 8-by-10 mugshot of Lou Costello; the connections to previous Jarmusch releases — Masatoshi Nagase, the Carl Perkins fan of the made-in-Memphis "Mystery Train," returns as a tourist — posit the film as the latest chapter in a bemused serial epic that is Knausgårdian in its appreciation of life's epiphanies and humiliations.
It’s a Groundhog Day-like existence, numbing and constricted, but Jarmusch makes it seem as if Paterson is his very own garden of Eden.
The film follows Paterson for seven days, and it’s almost like a crazy-mirror version of “Groundhog Day” in which every morning is a pleasure, an act of quiet satisfaction to get up at the same time, go to the same job, jot poems in the same notebook, make small talk with the same people, and go home to the same beloved wife to see what new interior design project or dubious recipe she will have embarked on today.
Imagine a version of “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray’s prickly frustration replaced by Driver’s soulful reserve, and you’re halfway there.
I’m not the first to notice this film’s formal resemblance to Groundhog Day (Variety’s Justin Chang got there first ).
I think Jarmusch has actually remade “Groundhog Day” as a work of spiritual ecstasy.
Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it's wifi and chardonnay.
As evidenced by sequences in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the zombie subgenre provides ample room for comedy, with films like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland fully exploiting the post-apocalyptic situations' comedic potential.
The film's political references are somewhat scattershot overall, as are its efforts to comment on modern consumerism by using mindless zombies as a metaphor (a la what Romero's Dawn of the Dead did).
It's an homage to Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead first and above all, from the Pennsylvania setting to a pin being worn by genre geek Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones), who is with Ronnie one of two characters who seems quite aware that he's in a zombie movie, to the themes of social atomisation that Jarmusch has borrowed without altering them even slightly from Dawn.
This is a nod to Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” where the zombies return to a huge shopping mall, endlessly roaming its corridors — basically indistinguishable from any shopping mall on any weekend afternoon.
From the science mumbo-jumbo exposition explaining why the zombies have risen (cleverly packaged in a real-life topical environmental message) to the Canada Dry-dry reaction our heroes have to the carnage that surrounds them, this is zombies as a fashion-statement on a typically solid Jarmusch film – not Art House Dawn of the Dead.
Instead, it’s reminiscent of the artsy sterility of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man , except you don’t get the sense that Lowery hates the genre he’s working in.
Lowery's obsessively crafted mise en scene occasionally brings to mind the work of director Robert Eggers (“The Witch,” “The Lighthouse”), though movie buffs will likely also detect the influence of trippy midnight fare like the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and cult curios like Jim Jarmusch's black and white Western “Dead Man.”
Buyer beware: this extremely peculiar medieval movie owes less to “Game Of Thrones” and more to acid Westerns like “El Topo” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man.” (A more accurate title might have been “The Assassination of the Green Knight by the Coward Sir Gawain.”)
The Passenger (1975)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
influenced The Limits of Control (2009)
Themes
They don’t, however, and this is where Jarmusch differs from Antonioni: Antonioni formed architectural commentaries around characters cipher-like but fully integrated into their surroundings (The Passenger, Antonioni’s largely Spanish-set anti-thriller, is a masterpiece of undermined subjectivity and metaphysical longing that The Limits of Control doesn’t even approach); Jarmusch’s Lone Man is simply a cipher, and the world around him doesn’t echo or counterpoint any actual qualities he might possess.
The movie begins with a brief depiction of Blake's train ride across the frontier, which is presented as a sort of homage to the 1931 version of "Dracula," another film in which a nerdy clerk travels into an exotic, timeless and deadly other world of wild mountains and forest.
The movie is an original take on the vampire genre (although there’s a nightclub scene that nods in the direction of Tony Scott’s vamp-camp classic The Hunger).
The first movie to plow this turf — vampirism as a playground for attractive bohemians — was “The Hunger,” the 1983 Tony Scott film in which David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon went elegantly at each others’ throats.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
This is followed by a variety of bus passenger conversations overheard during Paterson’s shift (featuring the now-adolescent Moonrise Kingdom actors Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), followed by his commute to a local bar while walking Laura’s disgruntled dog.
Whatever the real Paterson may be like, the fanciful city portrayed here suggests a shabbier, more racially diverse version of Woody Allen's imaginary Manhattan: a bohemian fairyland of farmer's markets and chess tournaments, where a cinema shows old horror films on Saturday nights, a little girl cites Emily Dickinson and a teenage couple – played by the leads from Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom – proves improbably well-versed in local history.
On the number 23 bus Paterson drives we meet a grown up Suzy and Sam (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom , as they discuss Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci.
Paterson isn’t totally free of cameos or celebrity cachet; Method Man shows up for one scene, spitting rhythms at the laundromat as an aspiring emcee, and the film also quietly arranges a Moonrise Kingdom reunion, as a kind of communion with a kindred spirit of American deadpan.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) after ” Moonrise Kingdom ” ended, well, I can happily confirm that they are still together and attending college in Paterson, NJ, where they ride the bus and talk knowledgeably about late-1800s Italian-American anarchist leader, and sometime Paterson resident, Gaetano Bresci.
It contains many little treats, from a tribute to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom to a tribute to the Wu Tang-Clan.
And it might be objected that the vampire-junkie parallel has already been done to (un)death, notably in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction .
The film is all the more impressive in that it is consciously put together out of the hoariest clichés - drinking blood, improbably extended life cycles, the connection (à la Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction ) between vampirism and the heroin lifestyle.
And surely Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction had said everything there was to say on the equation of vampirism and the junkie lifestyle?
Farahani is quite adorable as Laura in a similar way as Maria de Medeiros was in Pulp Fiction, in that her precocious nature makes it hard to get angry about her sometimes selfish and erratic behavior.(Coincidentally…
That’s especially so at Paterson’s home, where his partner and muse Laura (Golshifteh Farahani, channeling the playfully alluring foreign ingenue that Maria de Medeiros brought so vivaciously to life as Butch’s girlfriend Fabienne in “Pulp Fiction”) undertakes a different art project each day, mostly turning whatever it is she touches (curtains, cupcakes or a random wall in the small ranch home) into a black-and-white tiled mosaic, and the racially integrated bar where a pantheon of Paterson’s famous are hung as photos above the till.
Paterson and Laura together remind a bit of the relationship between Butch and Fabienne in Pulp Fiction --or, at least, Laura reminds me a great deal of Fabienne.
Paterson at times recalls Richard Linklater’s Slacker, another story about characters casually going about their day.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Paterson (2016)
Visuals Characters
In its optimism and good-heartedness, Paterson is a counterpoint to Taxi Driver which is visually quoted throughout.
Adam, a musician, is brought a set of guitars by his human friend, a scene visually reminiscent of Travis Bickle buying the guns from the black market salesman in Taxi Driver.
She’s not wrong – he’s recently procured a wooden bullet for himself from his miscellenia-dealer (Anton Yelchin, playing an alt-rock version of Steven Prince’s Taxi Driver character) – and so she jets off to Detroit to re-energize her beloved.
Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
The device of playing with time will remind some of Pulp Fiction (and so will Lola and Manni), and also of Jim Jarmusch's brilliant Night on Earth.
Of course, most of this smacks of wish-fulfilment – and the idea of the hidden village within the city recalls Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke – but it’s a timely antidote to the kind of pumped up misery that is usually paraded as authenticity itself (see American Honey).
As the undead lovers, Ms. Swinton is a feline fashion layout, and Mr. Hiddleston, as a dead rock star who looks like Mick Jagger in Performance, is a bare-chested poster boy for bohemian allure.
Having lived in recent years as a cult rock musician, he’s gone into reclusion in what seems to be the last house standing in Detroit—a crumbling mansion stocked with sound equipment, a place so dark and cluttered in its bohemian splendor that, as rock-star retreats go, it makes Turner’s Notting Hill pad in Performance look like the winner of a Neatest Nest competition.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
Driver, who is most famous now for playing Star Wars villain Kylo Ren, is ideally cast as a figure who seems slightly out of step with the digital age (he refuses to even back up his notebook of poems).
En términos narrativos, la película cuenta la historia de un tal Paterson (Adam Driver, en una performance muy contenida en relación a lo que hace en GIRLS o STAR WARS) que vive en la ciudad de Paterson, New Jersey, cuna del poeta William Carlos Williams.
El actor de la serie Girls y, sí, el Kylo Ren de la última Star Wars interpreta a un chofer que vive con su bienintencionada y servicial novia Laura (la iraní Golshifteh Farahani), una chica que se la pasa diseñando cosas en blanco y negro y cocinando cupcakes, y con un bulldog que es protagonista fundamental de la historia.
The cinematography by Frederic Elmes, who started out doing “Eraserhead” with David Lynch and has partnered with Jarmusch on several projects, captures the town in somber, reflective ways that mirror Paterson’s words and Williams’ observations.