Word: jarmusch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what're you doin'?" Jack (John Lurie), a pimp, asks one of his girls sitting outside in the New Orleans dusk. "Just watchin' the light change," she exhales. But watchin' the light change is the big payoff in a Jim Jarmusch movie. Stranger Than Paradise, a cult hit of 1984, cased its lowlifes with the metallic impassiveness of a closed-circuit monitor in a 7-Eleven store. You could find the proceedings funny or tedious; Jarmusch was too hip to care. He does have an eye, though, and aided by Cinematographer Robby Muller he makes Down by Law a ravishing...
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch...
...Jarmusch's Down by Law is one of the better examples of what can be done without a real plot. His movie does have a story of sorts: two New Orleans hipsters are set up by their shifty friends, end up in a cell together and, with the help of a homicidal Italian with bad English, they escape...
...plotline is so secondary to the action that Jarmusch doesn't even bother to explain how the threesome escapes from their swamp-bound prison. The setting is just a convenient way for putting three strange people in the same room for a long time, just as Jarmusch did in his first film, Stranger than Paradise. In Paradise, the long pauses and spaced-out banality of the dialogue was so odd that it quickly became funny, similar to what might happen while watching 200 laundry detergent commercials in a row. Jarmusch dishes out more of the same in Law, only with...
...GOTTA Have It follows in the noble independent film tradition that also includes Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. Like Stranger, the low budget heavily dictated the nature of the script, but it didn't dampen the spirit of the film. Filming in 11 days, with minimal sets (either Nola's boudoir or the streets of Brooklyn) and a small no-megastar cast, Lee made the most of what he had. And that includes a terribly talented family circle: his father, the esteemed jazz pianist/composer Bill Lee, furnished the splendid score as well as a nice cameo performance as father...