Comments on: Dead Right

By: Luigi

Luigi — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:50:05 +0000

It’s always fun when a film-maker screws with the conventions. It’s been done for the crime thriller, for example by killing off the hero(ine) way too early, as in Psycho and To Live and Die in LA. It’s been done for science fiction. Blade Runner’s vision of a “used” future was deeply disconcerting and subversive. It’s been done with the noir, big time. Look at Altman’s The Long Goodbye, or even The Usual Suspects. Or even, in a way, the self-same Blade Runner. Or, indeed, Minority Report, where actually the mind-fuck is a bit more subtle than usual, because what’s being flouted is the conventional wisdom on Spielberg’s maudlin endings. It doesn’t work if you don’t know that Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg picture. And it’s been done for the western. Most insidiously perhaps by The Unforgiven. And, in a meta-way by the spaghetti western. And it occurs to me that Jarmusch, a very European America, may be aiming to undermine the conventions of the sub-genre that undermined the conventions of the western.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 04:00:01 +0000

I did notice the jurneys at either end, and the time given over to them, but not the symmetry of the walk through the villages. I wonder whether the whole thing is symmetrical.

It is a long time since I saw OUATITW, and now that you mention it, one of the similarities might be the heightened noise.

By: Luigi

Luigi — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:14:04 +0000

BTW, I think the opening scene of ennui is an homage to Leone’s magisterial take on the subject in One Upon a Time in the West (http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/infocus/onceuponatime.htm)

By: Luigi

Luigi — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:06:15 +0000

Yeah, good movie. I loved the way Depp plays the transition from city slicker to natural born frontier killer. Lots of cool cameos too. And did you notice the structure? Begins and ends with a journey, the first followed and the second preceded by walks through very similar villages.