B Plus Movies

With any given movie, there needs to be a reason to watch it rather than read the book or listen to it on CD, something that is unique to the medium. The movie Swordfish is entirely an excuse to do the opening bullet time scene, for instance.  Sex and the City worked because of the visual style which works better taken all in one glance than to have it described over time.

One person who understands this is director Jim Jarmusch  as proven by the movie Dead Man.

On it’s surface, Dead Man is a simple story: An innocent man is pursued through the Old West for a crime he didn’t dot, chased by bounty hunters and aided by an Indian. In the short pitch version, you’ve seen this movie a dozen times.

Now take a look at the details. The man is an accountant who arrives in a mining town only to find the job he came for has been filled while he travelled from the East Coast. The thing he didn’t do is kill a woman who showed him kindness and turns out to be the daughter of the head of the mining company. The indian is named Nobody and thinks that the accountant is dead poet William Blake, with whom the accountant shares a name.

The story is still linear. People chase Depp’s character, he runs. But this isn’t a movie to watch for the plot so much as the characters.

The actors that stared in this piece are amazing and were given quirky, dark and strange roles all of which were played to perfection:

• Lance Henriksen as a sadistic, possibly cannibal, bounty hunter.
• Michael Wincott (head villain in The Crow and badass with an eyepatch in Disney’s The Three Musketeers) as a glib bounty hunter with an inability to shut up.
• Iggy Pop as a the mother of a trio of nutjobs living in the woods.
• Crispin Glover in a cameo as a coal shoveler on a train.
•  John Hurt and Robert Mitchum… who cares what they’re playing.

This is a movie for film geeks and people who watch films for the sake of the impact of imagery and it’s marriage to motion and dialogue.

I can give this movie a B+ without hesitation, though I have a hard time saying what kind of movie it is. Saying it’s a western isn’t right, neither is it a drama. It’s just cinema and one that if you’re in the mood for something a bit out there, I recommend you watch.