Robot Check. Enter the characters you see below. Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai . A little of the unreadably deadpan in that remark - and something of its flourish - is detectable in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch's arresting new serio- comedy about a professional killer, Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), who lives alone in a rickety loft, and communicates with his single employer, a wheezing Mafia hood, by means of the carrier pigeons he keeps. Always, he devoutly follows the way of the samurai warrior. In between tuning up his weaponry and slouching with Antarctic cool around the tough city streets, Ghost Dog studies an ancient samurai text in his ascetic lair, and its lessons and saws are periodically flashed up on the screen as captions. It is a movie with Jarmusch's intriguing unlocatability of tone. Forest Whitaker's Ghost Dog is glacially, massively serious in everything he does and says. As he unsmilingly pads the sidewalk with a mean rolling gait - head, neck and spinal column perfectly straight while each shoulder rocks up in turn almost touching the side of his face - Ghost Dog gets respect from everyone on the street, underscored by a soundtrack from RZA of the Wu- Tang Clan. And yet this gangsta poise coexists with a weirdly playful quality. Unlike Jean- Pierre Melville's Le Samourai or John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven, something distinctly whimsical is at work in this grafting of Eastern martial codes on to the gun- for- hire culture of the United States. After Ghost Dog takes someone out, it is his custom to wave his gun- plus- silencer around in the air, describing the circular figures an ancient samurai might have done, before returning it to his scabbard. One of his few friends is French- speaking ice- cream salesman Raymond, likeably played by Jarmusch regular Isaach de Bankol.
His only other friend is Pearline (the precocious Camille Winbush), a little girl who inaugurates a little reading club with him, with Ghost Dog in the Oprah role, discussing literature on a park bench: Rashomon, Frankenstein, The Wind in the Willows. The effect is comic and a little absurd, and the movie is almost daring us to laugh at, or maybe with, Ghost Dog and the eccentric belief system he has constructed for himself. It all creates for this film a taste which has to be rolled around the mouth for a little while to see if you like it and, in terms of type, it is pretty well sui generis . But the effect Jarmusch achieves is so enjoyable and distinctive, and it shows something individually and engagingly developed in its approach to cinema gangland - something which our dire Britpack, with its callow, saucer- eyed reverence for gangsters, could study. The chief complexity, or maybe the chief implausibility, of the film is the relationship of the black hero, Ghost Dog, to the white Italian- American who is employer or . Ghost Dog is supposed to have formed this romantic loyalty - albeit one he is well paid for - when Louie (John Tormey) stops Dog from being beaten up by some white guys in an alley. Ghost Dog evidently thinks it no dishonour to be the bonded servant of Louie and the Italian wise guys who are his ultimate masters: a trio of crackling performances from Cliff Gorman as Sonny Valerio, Henry Silva as Vargo, and Gene Ruffini as an Old Consigliere. No explicit comment about the racial politics of his situation passes Ghost Dog's lips, but Ruffini's Consigliere, a man given to strange Tourette- squawks, jeers that he is . Ghost Dog effectively reclaims his self- respect - if that is, in fact, what he has lost - when the mafiosi turn on him, and he has to take them out with his usual inscrutable self- possession. But not before Jarmusch has established a kind of rapprochement between their two cultures and codes of honour. They are, says Ghost Dog, like two ancient tribes, who in this film come to accord each other, if not exactly friendship, a kind of wary recognition. And Sonny himself turns out to have a bit of a penchant for Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. In Summer of Sam, Spike Lee stepped back and made the white wise guys the heroes of a classic New York story; for his part, Jarmusch envisions a kind of guarded respect between the black and Italian tough guys of urban and celluloid history. But always with this strange element of comic deflection: a sense that at least some of the fable of Ghost Dog is tongue- in- cheek. Some may find this mixture of genre and tone thin or unsatisfying; I found it increasingly beguiling - it really grows on you. Jarmusch finds in the brutal world of the professional killer not merely black comedy but sadness and his own strand of wistful poetry. Buy Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: Read 422 Movies & TV Reviews - Amazon.com. Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) sees himself as a retainer of Louie (John Tormey), a local mobster, who saved Ghost Dog's life years ago. While living as a hired hitman for the Italian Mafia, he adheres to the code of the. Fan made trailer for Ghost Dog. Starring Forrest Whitaker. Soundtrack by the RZA. Directed by Jim Jarmusch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
October 2016
Categories |