How come whenever I fall in love with a great new American director I always fall out of my bed ? Recently I've watched many Jarmusch films following my coup de foudre ( love at first sight ) with his Down by Law. With Ghost Dog the Jarmusch touch seems overstretched. He is ambitious alright, he is also multi-cultural and won't make a total lemon soon ( things I'll always cherish best when evaluating a director in the long term ) but watching Ghost Dog can be a hard endeavor. After the neo-psychedelic Dead Man teaching us about the shortcomings of the white men ( still with a few great short scenes the Ghost greatly lack ) here we are with yet another Blue Velvet bad guy, yet an other aging-mafia-guys movie. What's new : Jarmusch's Taxi Driver 's homage because of city horizons and street-wise lingo's... Dead Man was flawed but at least indirectly amiable. Ghost Dog is not so heart warming. I felt, the whole movie, Jarmusch's eagerness to make The Great American Movie maybe he's not supposed to make in the first place. He's much better at home in low-fi...A Clue : Jarmusch's seriousness is equally related to the number of fade-outs he uses. In the Coffee in Cigarettes films he is short and sweet but the two hours sniper rigmarole the Ghost Dog is is way too long even with the Samurai sub-text.
In Dead Man and Ghost Dog it's much more about the values of Jarmusch's than about his true vitaly as a filmmaker. I like him being ambitious but there's no excuse for the blandness of the little black girl scenes in Ghost Dog. In Down By Law the sheer quality of his writing was in synch with his newly found director skills and par with the excellence of Robby Mueller's cinematography. With the Ghost, Robby's still there in great industrial colors; the Americana loves multi-cultural is still there but the writing is not At times it even reminded me of the multi flash yet monochrome flavor Tarantino treats his love affairs with
In Dead Man and Ghost Dog it's much more about the values of Jarmusch's than about his true vitaly as a filmmaker. I like him being ambitious but there's no excuse for the blandness of the little black girl scenes in Ghost Dog. In Down By Law the sheer quality of his writing was in synch with his newly found director skills and par with the excellence of Robby Mueller's cinematography. With the Ghost, Robby's still there in great industrial colors; the Americana loves multi-cultural is still there but the writing is not At times it even reminded me of the multi flash yet monochrome flavor Tarantino treats his love affairs with