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Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai |
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USA ,
1999, 116 min, color |
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Awards:
Cannes 1999 - "Competition" ; Nomination for “Cesar” 2000 for foreign language film; Nomination for “Independent Spirit” 2000 for best film
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Jim Jarmusch serves up spirituality with a hip-hop beat in this offbeat satire of modern gangster films. Forest Whitaker gives one of his most compelling performances yet as Ghost Dog, an enigmatic Mafia hit man who sees himself as a modern samurai and ends up fighting a one-man war against his mob employers. When he's not wielding high-powered firearms like they were samurai swords, he leads a monk-like existence in his inner-city tenement building. Aphorisms from the 18th-century “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai” lend their austere poetry to the film, with text appearing onscreen as Ghost Dog recites it in voice-over. Adding to the confluence of ancient and modern is a haunting soundtrack by hip-hop legend the RZA, one of the founders of the Wu-Tang Clan. Though there is much violence, as well as dry humor, in Ghost Dog, it is tempered by Jarmusch's unique brand of humanism, and his affection for his oddball characters, who often converse in a language deeper than mere words.
Gregory Baird
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Jim Jarmusch |
With his trademark shock of white hair and ultra-cool rock star persona, Jim Jarmusch is the archetypal auteur of American independent film. Steadfastly resisting the sirens of Hollywood, Jarmusch has fashioned stylish, worldly, and thoroughly hip movies that have been the toast of the international film circuit.
Born on January 22, 1953, in Akron, OH, Jarmusch was the son of a former film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal. As a child, he spent much of his time watching B-movie triple features. After graduating from high school in 1971, he ended up in New York before venturing to Paris one summer on an exchange program. He loved the place so much that he stayed there for a year, soaking up French culture, literature, and particularly films, spending much of his time going to the cinématheque instead of to classes. At that time, the hallowed French New Wave movement was still a recent memory and such luminaries as François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard were still regularly making movies. Upon his return to New York, Jarmusch transferred to Columbia University, where, though he eventually received a degree in English literature, his love of film continued to inspire him. With no film experience, he was accepted into New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and soon found himself a teaching assistant to legendary maverick filmmaker Nicholas Ray. Ray helped him get funding for his thesis project, Permanent Vacation (1980). Though the film was later released to critical acclaim, his professors were underwhelmed by his final project and Jarmusch never got a degree from N.Y.U.
The stamp of Jarmusch is his tendency to a gently absurdist, understated comedy, which affectionately punctures the cool, hip pretensions and delusions of his self-consciously laconic loners. The compositions are uncluttered, often static and oddly formal, stressing the essential solitude of characters seemingly obsessed with self-definition. The sparing dialogue, generally minimalist performances and a preference for long takes evoke lives plagued by problems of communication, misunderstanding, rootlessness and inertia. At the same time, Jarmusch’s elliptical, dedramatised, episodic narrative style is symptomatic of his restlessly experimental interest in the method and structure of cinematic storytelling. Crucially, however, this interest in formalism is balanced by subtle wit, the warmth he clearly feels for his characters and a bemused, intelligent interest in the unfamiliar backroads of American life (the underrated Dead Man was a decidedly different western), so that he remains one of the most accessible, original and influential of that country’s independent film-makers.
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| 1980 Permanent Vacation |
| 1984 Stranger Than Paradise |
| 1986 Coffee and Cigarettes |
| 1986 Down by Law |
| 1989 Coffee and Cigarettes II |
| 1989 Mystery Train |
| 1991 Night on Earth |
| 1993 Coffee and Cigarettes III |
| 1995 Dead Man |
| 1997 Year of the Horse |
| 1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai |
| 2002 Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet |
| 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes |
| 2005 Broken Flowers |
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