A make-shift village – more accurately, an inhabited rubbish dump – in the dust-blown margins of California is home to Raphael (Johnny Depp) and his impoverished family. Scavenging is survival, but Raphael is determined to give his kin a better life. Desperate for work, he meets a man who offers a chink of light at a price: Raphael’s death.Read More »
Jeanne Bécu, was born as the illegitimate daughter of an impoverished seamstress in 1743 and being a young working-class woman, she was hungry for culture and pleasure, accordingly used her intelligence and allure to rise step by step to the highest levels of society. She became the favourite of King Louis XV who regained through her his appetite for life and fell madly in love. They went to the extreme on the verge of their love to each other and, against all propriety, etiquette and convention, Jeanne moves to Versailles where her relationship with the king scandalizes the Court. Afterwards, she, by the verdict of the Court, became his last official mistress.Read More »
From IMDb:
Traces the Beats from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s meeting in 1944 at Columbia University to the deaths of Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in 1997. Three actors provide dramatic interpretations of the work of these three writers, and the film chronicles their friendships, their arrival into American consciousness, their travels, frequent parodies, Kerouac’s death, and Ginsberg’s politicization. Their movement connects with bebop, John Cage’s music, abstract expressionism, and living theater. In recent interviews, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Mailer, Jerry Garcia, Tom Hayden, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and others measure the Beats’ meaning and impact.Read More »
Quote:
With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.Read More »
Quote:
Allison is a “square” good girl who has decided she wants to be bad and falls hard for Cry-Baby Walker, a Greaser (or “Drape” in John Waters parlance). Spoofing Elvis movies and Juvenile Delinquency scare films of the ’50s, this movie follows the adventures of Cry-Baby who, though he is sent to juvie, is determined to cross class (and taste) boundaries to get Allison back.Read More »
Quote:
An Innuit hunter races his sled home with a fresh-caught halibut. This fish pervades the entire film, in real and imaginary form. Meanwhile, Axel tags fish in New York as a naturalist’s gofer. He’s happy there, but a messenger arrives to bring him to Arizona for his uncle’s wedding. It’s a ruse to get Axel into the family business. In Arizona, Axel meets two odd women: vivacious, needy, and plagued by neuroses and familial discord. He gets romantically involved with one, while the other, rich but depressed, plays accordion tunes to a gaggle of pet turtles.Read More »
A rare book dealer, while seeking out the last two copies of a demon text, gets drawn into a conspiracy with supernatural overtones.Read More »
Ode to a Director Who Dared to Be Dreadful
“Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s very good film about a very bad film maker, has a cheerful defiance that would surely have appealed to Orson Welles, who was Ed Wood’s hero. Late in the film, Welles appears (played deftly by Vincent d’Onofrio, who really looks like him) to advise Wood that independence is everything and that an artist’s visions are worth fighting for. Mr. Burton, currently Hollywood’s most irrepressible maverick, has taken that credo to heart. Read More »
Jonathan Rosenbaum Review:
When we speak of “seriousness” in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death. –Thomas Pynchon
Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, a disturbing, mysterious black-and-white western, opens with someone named William Blake (Johnny Depp), a recently orphaned accountant from Cleveland, traveling west on a train with the promise of a job at a metal works in a town called Machine. He keeps dozing off and waking to new sets of fellow passengers, including several who fire their guns out the windows at a herd of buffalo. (Such occurrences were common in the 1870s, encouraged by the government as a means of wiping out Indians by eliminating one of their staples; in 1875, over a million buffalo were slaughtered.)Read More »