Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai finally gets its overdue Criterion DVD release, just in time for holiday gift-giving. My review is at PopMatters:
An out-of-time transmission from the late 1990s, when auteurs were fully embracing genre and pre-millennium jitters was tossing old artistic certainties out the window, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a spectacular oddity that still confounds expectations…
The trailer is here:
In an interview published in Projections 11, director Jim Jarmusch talked about all the influences he put on screen in his 1999 genre mash-up Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai:
I’m not going to play a game like all those ideas are original and they’re mine: I want to talk about where they came from, because if someone sees Ghost Dog and it leads them to see films by [Jean-Pierre] Melville or Point Blank by John Boorman, or the films of Seijun Suzuki, or to read Don Quixote or something that I mention in the credits, then that’s a good thing…
If something inspired you to write, there is no reason to hide it. Putting that out there could lead somebody else to be inspired as well.
Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it wont be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap. Fast, cheap and good… pick (2) words to live by.
-Tom Waits
Do with that what you will. But cheap and good sounds like a good combination for your average writer.
One of the most surprising and rewarding movie treats of 2016 is Jim Jarmusch’s quirky yet heartfelt Paterson, about a poetry-writing bus driver in New Jersey. It reminds you not just how great Jarmusch can be but renews your faith in a particular brand of American independent filmmaking.
Paterson is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:
Proudly reinforcing the at-times under-siege notion that there is great, grasping life yet in American filmmaking, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a simple story told with power, complexity and vision. Like many of the Frank O’Hara or William Carlos Williams poems that the film’s namesake protagonist (Adam Driver) reads and re-reads, the film is a poignant portrait of the mundane, a singing symphony of the everyday. It’s also a comedy, a romance, a paean to American post-industrial resilience, and a sublimely enjoyable work of art about a bus driver who writes poems that he doesn’t seem to care if anybody ever reads. There’s a lot here, folded like tightly coiled wires under the seemingly placid surface…
Here’s the trailer.
Chris Barsanti 
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