Word: jarmusch
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Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel. But though Roper is often at gunpoint, Murphy wasn't when he agreed to make Metro. In his bumpy tryst with filmgoers, how long will he make us wait for another Nutty Professor? How long until we can love Eddie again...
...Carter thought the project was a smooth vehicle that Murphy could simply ride in, when it's really a hunk-a-junk the star needed to transform. Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel...
Ironically, "Dead Man" is so strong in terms of style and sound that the script ends up being the weakest part of the film. Though Jarmusch intended the Native American character to break the two stereotypes of either "the savage who must be eradicated...or the all-knowing sage...that must mix in completely with nature." The character Nobody seems to resemble the latter. He is both overly noble and gratingly mystic, even if his mysticism is related not to "nature" but to the writings of William Blake. Gary Farmer portrays Nobody with the kind of inscrutable poker-face...
...choice of the poet William Blake as a central reference for the script was serendipitous, according to Jarmusch, yet the cloying axioms of the self-obsessed Blake are not any less cloying when they appear here. Still, the work of a more verbally interesting poet could have potentially overloaded this tautly balanced film...
...Dead Man" is a strangely compelling creation--unconventionally paced, vaguely plotted, preoccupied with elements of sound and image which would be background in other films. That all this material can be plumbed from the rather sterile idiom of the Western is a major achievement for Jarmusch, and an intense, sensual experience for the audience. While the William Blake theme is somewhat inconclusively handled, it does create a literary feel to the work which increases its intellectual potency. This is also true of the epigram from Henri Michaux which opens the film and gives it its title: "It is preferable...