caramia2002
My favorite movie of all time. Everything works as few others do. And Neil Young completes the picture with his incomparable soundtrack.
Nobody
When I first heard the strum of a distorted guitar ten minutes into the movie, I thought "wow, that was annoying, I hope that never happens again'... If only I knew that the entire score was the same f***ing sound repeated for every literal beat of this movie.Nothing about this movie works:-the editing was so poorly executed that I thought my Wifi went down.-Every transition is just a fade to black as if it was made for TV in the 70's-The writing feels like a flower child wanted to write about his inner workings, but was too pretentious, high, and incompetent that it comes off as such. Any symbolism or spiritual undertones are so incredibly flat and obvious that it's ridiculous to even be labeled as 'cerebral' on Netflix.-the acting (aside from the young Depp) was so poor that it felt like a soap opera. everything from the stuck up, angry old man in his office, to the stereotyped Indian cut-outs to the shoot-out at the very end of the movie that made me burst out laughing at how lazy, stupid, and melodramatic it was.-there's no reason to film in black and white, nothing else was ever attended to in cinematography because it looked semi-artsy enough to hold over a regular audience without making anything original or coherent.-every act of violence in this movie appears to be baby's first SFX, the man's head getting crushed looked like f***ing clay. the child getting hit with a rifle didn't even come close to contact. The makeup of Depp's face looks like it was made of crayola wax.Don't watch this movie unless you have a hard-on for style over substance. but even then, there is no style to this movie, it's garbage. the only way this kind of laziness could be accepted is if it was made in the 30's. This came out the same year as Braveheart, 12 Monkeys, Heat, Se7en, and The Usual Suspects...This is 2 hours of your life that not only will you not get back, but they will be forced out of you like a f***ing laxative.
classicsoncall
There is so much symbolism and allegory in the picture that it's impossible to comment on it all. Reviewer 'Soul Western' does an excellent job detailing a handful and I recommend reading it.I was struck by Nobody's (Gary Farmer) story of his childhood and capture by white men who paraded him like a zoo animal in a cage. Unwittingly, Nobody marvels at the idea that people from one city would all simultaneously move to the next city before he arrived there so they could see him again. This observation perhaps is meant to convey an apparent condemnation of group-think or herd mentality that settles on a population that has been numbed into acquiescence by popular culture or technology. A movie like "Dead Man" then, invites the viewer to consider ideas outside the parameters of what one might consider normal.The accompaniment of Neil Young's guitar provides a disjointed, fractured framework that's disorienting as much as it is guttural, portending a finality that the picture's journey takes us on. At virtually any point along the way, one might consider that William Blake (Johnny Depp) is already dead to a world that rejected him as soon as he stepped into the town of Machine. Nobody instinctively knows this, reinforced when he observes Blake's face as a skeleton, a symbol used extensively in the story with multiple animal skulls on display in Machine, and again in the walled Indian village just prior to Blake's journey into the beyond.My summary line is taken from a sign in the remote trading post where Blake was accosted by the shopkeeper - "God damn your soul to the fires of hell" he says, recognizing Blake's face from a Wanted Poster. Knowing that there's no turning back now, Blake replies "He already has". The rest of Blake's journey will symbolically take him back to the place from which he came.
NateWatchesCoolMovies
Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is a truly one of a kind film, a film that I have been entranced for over a decade by, and constantly revisit it's haunting beauty, poetic absurdities and stark, gorgeous black and white cinematography (holla to Robby Muller). Johnny Depp basically plays a meek, downtrodden east coast boy mired in a wild, violent and confusing journey through a western outpost town and after a love triangle ends in murder, possibly his own, he embarks on a strange, spiritual walk through a Pacific Northwest netherworld of pine trees, outlaw bounty hunters, and oddball characters, led by a Native named Nobody (the excellent Gary Farmer). Is he dead? Was he even there to begin with? Jarmusch abandons logic for an expressionist approach, and the film ends up as a hypnotic tone poem and visual palette of events that don't really make sense, and may frustrate some. But to those open to its idiosyncratic writing and determined, enigmatic style, oh what a film it is. The cast is absolutely to die for. Depp is incredible in the best performance of his extremely uneven career. The character arc he inhabits here is wonderful, taking a feeble, checkered suited mess of a man and morphing him into a ghostly, predatorial, terrifying wilderness archetypal bandit, a force of nature among the trees and mountains. Haunted eyes, quick draw kill streak, moody contemplation, it really is his finest work. Michael Wincott steals his scenes as a chatty assassin and Lance Henriksen is scary as hell, playing a hired killer who "fucked his parents, then cooked them up and ate them." (Don't ask, just go with the film's demented flow). Gabriel Byrne, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Robert Mitchum, Milli Avital, John Hurt and an especially weird Crispin Glover all nail their cameos, and Neil Young's beautiful, melodic, elemental score is the beating heart of the film. Dead Man isn't a traditional film in any sense, and in fact seems to take place in a cliché free, bizarro alternate western dream universe where the rules don't apply, but all the beauty, mysticism and rugged frontier intrigue of the genre still remain. Fine with me. One of my all time favourites.
AD
