No pressing need to anticipate "Broken Flowers"

That's a pity. The Jarmusch/Murray combo has such great potential.

I think Ghost Dog is his best film.

Ghost Dog is his second worst, after Permanent Vacation.

Granted, I haven't seen them all. I didn't think much of Night On Earth, though.

I've actually seen them all, except for Coffee & Cigarettes. This is how I'd rate them:

1. Down by Law
2. Mystery Train
3. Night on Earth
4. Dead Man
5. Stranger Than Paradise
6. Ghost Dog
7. Permanent Vacation

Yeah, Down By Law's fantastic.

This is what I wrote of Ghost Dog in 1999. I was 20 then, so the text is a bit crude, but I still stand by it:

"As a huge Jim Jarmusch fan I'm quite sad to say that Ghost Dog is his worst film since his debut, Permanent Vacation (which, out of all his movies, Ghost Dog pays most resemblance to). Stylistically there's nothing wrong with the film; the cinematography is beautiful and the RZA's score fits the movie perfectly. The usual Jarmusch themes of alienation and chance encounters are explored, although in somewhat flat and uninspired way. But all this does not fully explain why I have such mixed feelings about the film.

Although the characters portrayed in Jarmusch's films are usually more than a little eccentric, there still is certain universality to them, making the viewer able to relate with these strange people. This is not the case with Ghost Dog. Ghost Dog, the main character, is so far off this plane that his actions and words left me cold, and I didn't care what happened to him (as I cared about the main characters of Down By Law and Dead Man, for example). This is by no means Forest Whitaker's fault; he carries out his role perfectly, but this role was written so that there's no way to relate to his character (the only exception to this being his scenes with the French-speaking ice-cream salesman). One can argue that this is a deliberate choice made by Jarmusch, but that doesn't make the film any better. Jarmusch's seems to have wanted to make a stylish crossbreed of a samurai film and a gangster film, and in this he succeeds perfectly. But, by making the protagonist a stone-cold hitman who follows the samurai ethos, he makes it impossible to understand him or to have any sympathy for him (unless the viewer himself happens to be a samurai hitman). So, at the end of the film I was left feeling just as uncaring as Ghost Dog himself felt.

Perhaps one of the reasons for my disappointment is that I'm beginning to grow tired of these lonely outsiders Jarmusch constantly displays (even though he's great at doing it). I think his next project should be less like Ghost Dog and Permanent Vacation, and more like Down by Law and Night on Earth. In those two films he explored the full scale of emotions, from alienation and loneliness to friendship and love. In Ghost Dog we have only the former two."

here's how i'd rate the ones i've seen:

1. Stranger Than Paradise
2. Ghost Dog
3. Down by Law
4. Dead Man
5. Mystery Train
6. Night on Earth

Ghost Dog and Dead Man are my two favorites. You guys are out of your minds.

Seconded. Ghost Dog is a hugely sympathetic character, not that that's important. I don't like the idea of Universal characters, I think they're bad Art.

from your review above: If you’re a Jarmusch fan, I s’pose you have to see it. If you’re not, you won’t anyway, so I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about you.

this is horseshit, this film obviously has market potential beyond the core of Jarmusch fans. I haven't seen it yet but I'm sure it'll make more money for Jarmusch than any of his films so far based on the name recognition of the cast alone.

Perhaps. But if so, it will be simply based on the name recognition of the cast alone. But I still have to disagree.

I haven't seen it yet
I have.

And you're so wrong about available light photography. Get one Festen.

Seconded. Ghost Dog is a hugely sympathetic character, not that that's important. I don't like the idea of Universal characters, I think they're bad Art.

-- Anti-Pope Consortium (noodle_vagu...), August 7th, 2005.

OTM -- I prefer Jarmusch when he's at his strangest and least universal.

i thought this movie was excellent.