The Beat November 2002

Ghost Dog
The Way Of The Samurai
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Rating: 5 Ojingas (out of 5)

They used to make toys that could shoot bullets and missiles. Then some short-bus rider decided to fire his Battlestar Galactica Viper missile down his throat and we all had to turn in our pointy edges for safety scissors & round paper. I hated that kid then as I do now.

The same thing inevitably happens to most directors when they move from student/indie productions to studio pieces. They are required to check their balls at the studio gate. No more risks. No dangerous or unconventional plotlines. Whiskey with lots of ice & seltzer.

Enter Jim Jarmusch, the kid who never handed in his dangerous toys. Jim doesn‘t want big budgets & big paydays. He is a film auteur without the beanie & pretension. He makes films that rely on words, not morphing, tit shots, or test marketing.

Each of his films does the following:
1) Details a subculture.
2) Then, he brings in a foreigner.
3) Then he examines the conflicts that arise, and
4) He makes you love his characters.

The reason Ghost Dog rocks is the subculture (a timeless amalgam of mafiosos & high-rise tenants in an east coast inner city), the foreigner (a samurai hitman played by Forrest Whittaker), the conflicts (death, dislocation, betrayal) and the characters (wonderfully stereotyped Italiano gangers, a Haitian ice cream man, a black Ronin that can only be reached by messenger pigeon) are all exceptionally inventive.

Great dialogue and theme music are two of the things that separate everyday life from the movies, but they also two of the divisions between good & bad films. Ghost Dog is all satire and dark humor, acted and spoken in 4 different languages and played out with the stirring backbeats of RZA carrying us smoothly from image to image. Almost every character has memorable lines, and like all great movies the more you watch the better the dialogue gets.

Additionally, the pacing is totally non-western (he lists Jean-Pierre Melville and Akira Kurosawa in his acknowledgments so go figure) so what you get is a story that seems to move at exactly the meter of the soundtrack. This is not a traditional action film, but it doesn‘t seek to defy classification as such.

The resultant mixture draws from a new source of inspiration for Jarmusch; it is video-flashpoint at times but usually offers wide, grainy shots when things are happening. You get to see the people as much as the action. Slow and smoldering, even the gun battles seem to happen at the speed of life.

And for the Alpha Male viewers there are countless scenes of graphic violence, with a kill list including several pigeon enthusiasts, a dozen middle-aged goombas, bear poachers, and a highway patrolwoman. It is, however, sorely lacking in both female frontal nudity & monkeys, which may prevent many Beat readers from giving this film the full 90 minutes it deserves.

In the end, Ghost Dog isn‘t trying to be cool so much as it simply is cool. Rent it and enjoy.

Note 1: The fade-in quotes he reads are from Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. They are priceless; they make you want to be a fuckin' samurai, too.
Note 2: This can be rented in Korea.
Note 3: If it does not sound like your kind of flick, try Yentl or Red Sonja.