Nice 'puff' piece about one of my favorite directors, Jim Jarmusch, and his new movie, Broken Flowers, with Bill Murray as the main character. The Last of the Indies:
Jim Jarmusch, the paradigmatic outsider filmmaker, is about to release his most mainstream movie to date. Not that it is any less shaggy or weird.
...His films, with their immediately recognizable idiosyncracies, testify to his independence. In 1986, he followed ''Stranger Than Paradise'' with ''Down by Law,'' the story of two deadbeats in New Orleans who are joined in jail by an eccentric Italian, played by Roberto Benigni, who plans their escape. Like all Jarmusch films, ''Down by Law'' combined cool, apathetic hipsters with flashes of poetry and wisdom. (For instance, Benigni's character quotes Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but in Italian.) In 1989, Jarmusch set his protagonists in a seedy hotel in Memphis for ''Mystery Train,'' a film with three related stories, all influenced by Elvis Presley. In what has become his custom, Jarmusch cast musicians in key roles -- Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the Clash, starred in ''Mystery Train,'' just as Tom Waits and John Lurie did in ''Down by Law.'' Benigni resurfaced in 1992 in ''Night on Earth,'' which featured five separate narratives, each set in a different city, all centering on the relationship between cabdrivers and their passengers. ''Dead Man,'' a psychedelic western, was released in 1996, and ''Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,'' which starred Forest Whitaker as a conflicted hit man who lives by an ancient Japanese-warrior code, came out in 2000, with music by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. ''Ghost Dog'' was chiefly about the blurring of belief systems, cultural lines and ethnicities -- a common theme in Jarmusch's films. Like the bebop music he loves, his movies begin with a familiar melody and then adapt that tune into something else, something new.
See them all, if you haven't already....
Technorati Tags: B12 recommended, Film
