Category: Directed by Jim Jarmusch
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Mystery Train is a comedy. It’s many other things–an examination and comparison of various kinds of differentness–but it’s also a very funny comedy. In fact, Jarmusch keeps characters around for nothing else. Train is the interconnected story of seven people (across three chapters) all culminating at a Memphis hotel. Cinqué Lee is the suffering bellboy,…
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Coffee and Cigarettes II stars twins Cinqué Lee and Joie Lee as twins having coffee in Memphis. Why are they in Memphis? They don’t know, but it seems like it’s Cinqué’s fault. Jarmusch le’s the twins bicker though most of the short, which is funny enough but then there’s Steve Buscemi too. Buscemi’s playing the…
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Technically, Coffee and Cigarettes is most impressive at the beginning. The short’s simple–Steven Wright meets Roberto Benigni for coffee. When Benigni makes room for Wright, Jarmusch’s handling of the process is amazing. It’s a quick series of shots; beautifully composed and edited together. As for the rest of the short, it’s a fine diversion but……
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Someone–Ebert maybe–is going to laud The Limits of Control. The nicest thing one can really say about it is it isn’t abjectly terrible. There aren’t many bad performances (Tilda Swinton’s lame and Bill Murray’s awful and Isaach De Bankolé is weak when he has more lines than the Terminator) and Jarmusch really does know how…
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Dead Man is not a strange film. I haven’t seen it in ten years and I’ve probably seen the majority of the Westerns I’ve seen in that interim. So the opening, as Johnny Depp watches the familiar Western trappings pass from a train window, probably didn’t resonate on my last viewing. What Jarmusch doesn’t get…
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If I had any foresight, I would have realized Broken Flowers wasn’t going to end well. Actually, most of the film is just a ruse to disguise that fact. Instead of thinking about how the film was going to turn out, I spent all my time marveling at Jarmusch. His composition, his dialogue, everything, just…
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I’m having a hard time thinking of something to say about Ghost Dog. It’s perfect. Jarmusch doesn’t just do a bunch of good things or a bunch of right things. Every single thing he does is perfect. And Ghost Dog is perfect pretty early on too–in the first five or ten minutes, I was completely…
The Stop Button 