I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #234 - Mystery Train (1989, dir. Jim Jarmusch)

            Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 anthology film Mystery Train gathers up all of the uniquely Memphis things and presents them to us through the eyes of aliens, people who aren’t natives but who have come to Memphis. The film consists of a trio of short stories that all take place on the same night in Memphis; of a young Japanese couple, an Italian widow, and a Brit as they search for the real Memphis - or at least what they think is the real Memphis. These stories all have common threads that are typically Memphis: a seedy run down motel, Elvis, and a touch of that feeling that maybe locals aren’t so kind to folks that aren’t from 'round here (there is a skepticism in the voice of every Memphis native in the film). Jarmusch takes you on a ride through the nighttime streets of Memphis and leaves you with a mysterious feeling, like maybe it didn’t, or couldn’t, really happen.- Anna Lathem

            Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a Japanese couple, Italian widow and Joe Strummer walk into a seedy hotel in Memphis, Tennessee…. In Mystery Train that’s exactly what happens, along with a ton of other things. Like many of Jarmusch’s films, there is a common thread that flows through all of the stories that in the end connect them all together. This time it just happens to be the lovely Arcade Hotel. I use the word "hotel" lightly - this place might not even count as a motel; they don’t even have TV’s in the room! Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee are perfectly out of place as the Night Clerk and Bellboy of the Arcade Hotel. They play off each other well, snarky and strange the entire time, almost as if they had snuck in, replaced the normal staff, and decided to set up strange shop running this hotel. The “hotel” sees all of our characters come and go at some point in the night.

            I think there is a law somewhere that says you can’t talk about Memphis without talking about Elvis, and there is plenty of that in this film. In the first story “Far From Yokohama” Jun and Elvis-obsessed Mitsuko make a pilgrimage to Sun Studios, experience strange American customs like tipping the busboy, and argue over who is better - Elvis or Carl Perkins. In “Ghost” Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi) gets firsthand experience with the phenomenon of everyone having a “ghost of Elvis” story, including getting conned out of twenty bucks by a very enthusiastic story about a man picking up a mysterious hitchhiker that turned out to be the ghost of The King himself just trying to catch a ride back to Graceland. She also experiences her own ghostly vision of The King - or maybe it was all a dream. “Lost In Space” shows us that while Memphis natives might love The King, a surly Brit named Johnny (Joe Strummer) absolutely hates being called Elvis because of the way he looks, stating that he would much rather be nicknamed “Carl Perkins Jr.” as he gets in trouble at a bar and a liquor store.

            Mystery Train, oh how you capture the dirty, dusty and hazy feel that Memphis still has to this day. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another film that captures what it looks, feels and sounds like on a hot summer night in the south, but somehow Jarmusch manages to do just that. It could be because all scenes interior or exterior that were set at night were actually filmed at night, which gives the film a consistent southern nighttime buzz. Jarmusch brings Technicolor to the darkness of Memphis; polarizing street lights along a pitch black road, railroad crossing lights that beam across a deserted intersection. It is the perfect mysterious setting for these three stories.

- Anna Lathem

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #160 – Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (1999, dir. Jim Jarmusch)

Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch’s beguiling 1999 mash-up of genres and styles might just be the best movie in an exceptionally eclectic and historically relevant career. Jarmusch has made many films that walk the line between filmic tribute and cutting-edge cultural critique, and Ghost Dog does so with style and energy. In one of his greatest roles, Forest Whitaker is Ghost Dog, an urban assassin, who, in a lifelong debt to an old-school Mafioso, carries out gangland hits using the philosophy and techniques of the Japanese samurai as portrayed in the classic Japanese text Hagakure. By night he murders gangsters, but by day he is an eccentric, yet integral part of his community. It is precisely this humanizing conflict that makes this film rise high above its inherent stylistic limitations and enter the class of groundbreaking modern film.

Ghost Dog succeeds on many levels, but they are all thanks to Jim Jarmusch and Forest Whitaker. Whitaker’s Ghost Dog is a complex mountain of a character, whose lethal understanding of murder is matched by his authentically tender relationships with others in his neighborhood (in an unnamed, gritty, East-Coast city). He carries on a telepathically satisfying friendship with the local ice cream salesman in spite of the fact that they don’t speak the same language, bonds with a young girl through books, earns the respect of the local gang-bangers and, most interestingly, he cares for a flock of pigeons, using them for communication while showing them a humanity he denies his victims. In a performance of very few words Whitaker conveys a colorful palette of emotions through his expressive eyes, world-weary bearing and delicately menacing physical enormity. The true samurai, he glides through the city invisible to his enemies, but surprisingly approachable to the folks in the ‘hood.

For his part writer/director Jim Jarmusch has created a modern classic. While occasionally veering into the Tarantino school of style-over-substance-hyper-violence, he keeps an eye to the moral center and fills the motivations of the central character with such convincing ambiguity that the reprehensible moral choices he makes seem somehow understandable. Through his terse dialogue and the creation of an atmospheric world for Ghost Dog to inhabit, the characters and events feel like real life (or maybe dream life). That world is the other uncredited star of this film. Ghost Dog pulses with the sights and sounds of the city. There are dark urban realities juxtaposed with beautiful, ponderous shots of the moon or birds in flight. And then there is the music. Jarmusch masterfully weaves together deep soul and reggae cuts with the brilliant beats and insistent rhymes of the original music created by The RZA (who makes an effective cameo himself toward the end of the movie). Like many of Jarmusch’s best movies, the soundtrack almost becomes a character in itself.

The central conflict of the film comes from the fact that in the execution of one of Whitaker’s scheduled hits something goes wrong, and suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted. The mob now has a hit out on Ghost Dog and thus, as they say on the street, “it’s on!” Lots of blood gets spilled in a very short period of time in the last quarter of this movie, and yet an equal or even greater care is given over to showing Ghost Dog as a man of honor and thought. He lays the seeds in his neighborhood for those he cares about to sprout new growth.

Like all movies which busy themselves with the feelings of the killers, rather than those of the victims (which is virtually ALL modern movies), I question the believability of some of the characters, or why I should give a rat’s ass about them, but the overall effect of Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai is like that of an epic poem. Forest Whitaker is a modern Odysseus trying to make it home through a world filled with evil to a place of moral serenity. He gets there, but if he’s better off for it is for you to decide.

-         Paul Epstein

I'd Love To Turn You On: At the Movies #1 - Dead Man

Dead Man (1995, dir. Jim Jarmusch)
One of my favorite film critics described Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man as an “acid western.” It’s a fitting label, but misleading. It makes you expect lots of aggressive camera work, special effects and color. Dead Man has none of that. It’s black and white, and the pace is slow. But it’s a total trip just the same — one of those rare works of art that exists in four or five or eighteen different dimensions.

At its core, Dead Man is a simple story. A man sells everything for a train ticket to the western frontier to fill an accounting position he’s been offered. By the time he gets there, though, the job has gone to someone else. He spends his last dime on a bottle and winds up getting shot in a fight over a girl. He flees into the wilderness where an Indian finds him, tries to save him but is unable to remove the bullet from next to his heart. Duty bound, the Indian delivers him to the Pacific Ocean for a proper send off into the afterlife.

Where the film gets really heavy is in its cultural allusions. The biggest is the lead character’s name, William Blake (played by Johnny Depp). This William Blake knows nothing about the British poet, painter and printmaker. In fact, none of the film’s characters do except for the Indian, who, it turns out, actually studied Blake’s work in England after he was captured and hauled across the ocean in a cage and paraded around Europe as an oddity from the New World. When the Native character (who calls himself “Nobody” and is portrayed brilliantly by Gary Farmer) learns Blake’s name he assumes that he’s the real William Blake. He recites a chilling stanza: “Every night and every morn / Some to misery are born / Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to sweet delight / some are born to endless night.” This moment in the film combines with others like it to suggest a theme or message that’s never exactly clear, but still makes sense on multiple levels.

Dead Man is about America and the Manifest Destiny, that much is obvious. During the early shoot-out scene, for instance, when Blake discovers a gun under his lover’s pillow and asks her why she has it she says, “Because this is America,” as if it’s the stupidest question she’s ever heard. Also, the film’s plot line clearly moves from east to west. And throughout the film, Nobody refers to European settlers (invaders) as “stupid fucking white men” and reveres Blake as “a killer of white men.” It gets really deep, though, when filthy fur trappers sit around campfire reading Bible verses about Philistines or when a cold-blooded bounty hunter finds a corpse looks like a “goddam religious icon” or even in the scenes with Robert Mitchum, which are clearly crafted in homage to all the cool and kind of cheesy Westerns he starred in as a young man. It’s funny, too — full of sight gags and inside jokes, including a couple that only people who speak Cree or Blackfoot languages would understand. (There also a lot of rock and roll nods: appearances by Iggy Pop and Gibby Haynes, characters named after musicians and songs.)

It sounds like a recipe for pretentious muddiness, I know, but Jarmusch pulls it all together artfully with the simplicity of the story and with a mesmerizing soundtrack by Neil Young (a must-have in its own right; it’s all solo guitar with a little bit of pump organ with a few key dialogue scenes from the movie and a Blake poem read by Depp mixed in). The slowness of the plot offers time and space for contemplation. I’ve owned a copy of the film for years, watched it dozens and dozens of times, and I always feel profoundly moved after the final scene — one of the most beautiful and poetic in all of cinema. I always walk away with a mixture of disgust and awe about America, which, to my way of thinking, is absolutely on point.

- Joe