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(COOLLIST) _Dead Man_ Tells No Lies

[This is also being sent to rec.arts.movies.reviews -- Ben]

Jim Jarmusch makes movies.  He makes art films.  He explores concepts,
and he usually does a competent job.

I saw _Mystery Train_ about two years ago and found it interesting,
but not too special.  _Night on Earth_ sits on my video shelf, but I
never found time to watch it.

This evening, I went with my friend John Oakley to see _Dead Man_,
Jarmusch's take on the American western.  It was playing in the
Egyptian room at the Dobie.  We got good seats, I MSTed the slide
show, and after a couple of previews, the film started.

First thing: it is in black and white.  This was a plus.  Jarmusch's
lighting and composition were perfect for the monochrome medium.

Second thing: it stars Johnny Depp.  Mr. Depp always seems to do
excellent in B&W films.  _Ed Wood_ was the most recent example.  In
_Dead Man_, he plays William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland.  He
plays the character well, showing real emotional growth.

The title is quite appropriate, although a plural form might have been
better.  There are many deaths in the film, most from bullet wounds.
Almost every major character dies.  Shakespeare did it, so why change
the formula?

Two elements of the film really grabbed me.  One was Jarmusch's use of
fade-to-black to represent the passage of time.  These fades were
frequently and consistently used, and they produced a neat, unifying
effect.  During the occasional recollection scenes, he negated the
fade, going to white to indicate a memory.

The second element was the dialogue.  The first half of the film was
quite dialogue heavy.  While not exactly Tarentinoesque, the
conversations reminded me of a Western _Pulp Fiction_.  There were
some very funny lines.  The second half wasn't as colorful and the
conversations were scarce, mainly due to the lack of characters.  It
became more abstract and surreal, but still poignant.

This is an important film.  It ranks very highly on my list of films
for 1996, up there with _Fargo_ and _My Flower of the Secret_.

On the Combee scale of [-4..+4], it gets a +4.
-- 
Benjamin L. Combee (combee@techwood.org) <URL:http://www.yak.net/combee/>
that public-access-TV-making, video-game-collecting, cryptography-pushing,
World-Wide-Web-explaining, fem-music-loving, bad-pun-creating guy in Austin
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