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I'm home alone on a Friday night; a four-day weekend is ahead of me, with no plans until Tuesday. And I am totally content. I love having no obligations, no expectations, I can just do whatever I feel like doing. I was seriously contemplating just parking on the couch and watching all the movies I have saved up on my Tivo (I think I haven't mentioned that here yet: I bought a Series 3 Tivo, dual-tuner HD, 30 hours. More details in another post, maybe) but after I watched Broken Flowers this evening I didn't want to watch another movie just yet. It was great, and the kind of movie that makes me just want to sit and savor it for a while before something else intrudes on the mood.
For some reason I hadn't realized beforehand that it was a Jim Jarmusch movie. Maybe I did know it at some point, but I had forgotten and thought it was some up-and-comer like Alex Payne (who did About Schmidt, which is a similar kind of movie). I don't think of myself as a Jarmusch fan; I still kind of think of him as that guy who does quirky, low-profile, somewhat half-assed stuff like Stranger than Paradise and Coffee and Cigarettes, who shows up playing quirky bit parts in other indie films like Blue in the Face, In the Soup, and Sling Blade. But I really loved Ghost Dog and Dead Man, and in fact I've seen (and enjoyed) all his feature films except for two, Down By Law and Permanent Vacation. (But I've heard that Aerosmith album, and I thought I had a CD by the punk band Down By Law, but now I think I may have sold it long ago.) Anyway, I guess I should pay more attention when his next movie comes out.
The movie stars Bill Murray as an aging bachelor. Girlfriends come and go, and in between women he sits alone in his living room watching TV or just listening to music. He gets sent on a quest of sorts, but a lot of the movie is just him going through life alone, driving or flying or picking flowers by the side of the road. These depictions make it a pretty slow-moving film, but I love this sort of introspective slowness. The last time I made a list of favorite movies, I think the top 3 were Slacker, Barton Fink, and Until the End of the World (yes, I am that cliche of thinking all the best stuff came out when I was in college; many of my favorite albums are from 1991 as well), and my favorite movie I watched this year was Last Days, which along with Gus van Sant's previous two films Elephant and the insanely minimalist Gerry are exercises in different forms of observational meditative film-making.
I have some ideas about how to resolve some of the apparent ambiguities in the story, and about what the movie is ultimately about, but I think I'd have to watch it again to fully formulate my theories. Plus, I wouldn't want to spoil anyone. But I will talk about some of the little things I liked in Broken Flowers.
He travels from airport to airport along his quest, but every place he lands looks sort of the same (I think it was all filmed in New Jersey and New York state). From time to time he looks at some maps, but you can never tell what part of the country the maps are depicting. Even all the license plates are unidentifiable—the only one I could partially make out said "Commerce and Industry" on the bottom, and I'm pretty sure that was never any state's slogan.
At one point he encounters a girl named Sun Green. This is also the name of a character in Neil Young's rock-opera Greendale; Jarmusch's Year of the Horse was a documentary about one of Young's tours, and Young did the soundtrack to Dead Man (which is awesome, by the way). The soundtrack for Broken Flowers is excellent too; it's an eclectic mix of stuff, kind of jazzy, kind of funky, kind of psychedelic. There's also a couple songs by garage-rock veteran Holly Golightly of Thee Headcoatees (and from the last track on The White Stripes' Elephant). At one point some guys drive by in a van with their radio playing Sleep's Dopesmoker, which is one of my absolute favorite albums, a massive monument of slow, heavy guitar riffage.
There is a brief hint that the characters played by Chloe Sevigny and Jessica Lange are lovers, which made me think of the episode of "Will & Grace" where Sevigny plays Edie Falco's submissive partner. Probably not an intentional reference, but I thought it was funny.
It was great to see Frances Conroy as someone other than the cringeworthily neurotic mother in "Six Feet Under". At one point there is a picture of her as a '60s hippy chick with a peace sign necklace, but it's supposed to be from 20 years ago. I guess Jarmusch is stuck in the '80s too. There's also a running joke where Murray's character, who's named Don Johnston (an allusion to Don Juan), is mistaken for Don Johnson by young girls he meets, but what young girl today even knows who Don Johnson is?
Bill Murray's son Homer makes a well-placed cameo. Another bit part is played by Ryan Donowho, who, according to IMDb, "is famous in the streets and subways of Manhattan as a bucket/drum player". And I just figured out that the two guys in the van, Brain McPeck and Matt McAuley, are in the great NYC band A.R.E. Weapons along with Paul Sevigny (Chloe's brother).
For some reason I hadn't realized beforehand that it was a Jim Jarmusch movie. Maybe I did know it at some point, but I had forgotten and thought it was some up-and-comer like Alex Payne (who did About Schmidt, which is a similar kind of movie). I don't think of myself as a Jarmusch fan; I still kind of think of him as that guy who does quirky, low-profile, somewhat half-assed stuff like Stranger than Paradise and Coffee and Cigarettes, who shows up playing quirky bit parts in other indie films like Blue in the Face, In the Soup, and Sling Blade. But I really loved Ghost Dog and Dead Man, and in fact I've seen (and enjoyed) all his feature films except for two, Down By Law and Permanent Vacation. (But I've heard that Aerosmith album, and I thought I had a CD by the punk band Down By Law, but now I think I may have sold it long ago.) Anyway, I guess I should pay more attention when his next movie comes out.
The movie stars Bill Murray as an aging bachelor. Girlfriends come and go, and in between women he sits alone in his living room watching TV or just listening to music. He gets sent on a quest of sorts, but a lot of the movie is just him going through life alone, driving or flying or picking flowers by the side of the road. These depictions make it a pretty slow-moving film, but I love this sort of introspective slowness. The last time I made a list of favorite movies, I think the top 3 were Slacker, Barton Fink, and Until the End of the World (yes, I am that cliche of thinking all the best stuff came out when I was in college; many of my favorite albums are from 1991 as well), and my favorite movie I watched this year was Last Days, which along with Gus van Sant's previous two films Elephant and the insanely minimalist Gerry are exercises in different forms of observational meditative film-making.
I have some ideas about how to resolve some of the apparent ambiguities in the story, and about what the movie is ultimately about, but I think I'd have to watch it again to fully formulate my theories. Plus, I wouldn't want to spoil anyone. But I will talk about some of the little things I liked in Broken Flowers.
He travels from airport to airport along his quest, but every place he lands looks sort of the same (I think it was all filmed in New Jersey and New York state). From time to time he looks at some maps, but you can never tell what part of the country the maps are depicting. Even all the license plates are unidentifiable—the only one I could partially make out said "Commerce and Industry" on the bottom, and I'm pretty sure that was never any state's slogan.
At one point he encounters a girl named Sun Green. This is also the name of a character in Neil Young's rock-opera Greendale; Jarmusch's Year of the Horse was a documentary about one of Young's tours, and Young did the soundtrack to Dead Man (which is awesome, by the way). The soundtrack for Broken Flowers is excellent too; it's an eclectic mix of stuff, kind of jazzy, kind of funky, kind of psychedelic. There's also a couple songs by garage-rock veteran Holly Golightly of Thee Headcoatees (and from the last track on The White Stripes' Elephant). At one point some guys drive by in a van with their radio playing Sleep's Dopesmoker, which is one of my absolute favorite albums, a massive monument of slow, heavy guitar riffage.
There is a brief hint that the characters played by Chloe Sevigny and Jessica Lange are lovers, which made me think of the episode of "Will & Grace" where Sevigny plays Edie Falco's submissive partner. Probably not an intentional reference, but I thought it was funny.
It was great to see Frances Conroy as someone other than the cringeworthily neurotic mother in "Six Feet Under". At one point there is a picture of her as a '60s hippy chick with a peace sign necklace, but it's supposed to be from 20 years ago. I guess Jarmusch is stuck in the '80s too. There's also a running joke where Murray's character, who's named Don Johnston (an allusion to Don Juan), is mistaken for Don Johnson by young girls he meets, but what young girl today even knows who Don Johnson is?
Bill Murray's son Homer makes a well-placed cameo. Another bit part is played by Ryan Donowho, who, according to IMDb, "is famous in the streets and subways of Manhattan as a bucket/drum player". And I just figured out that the two guys in the van, Brain McPeck and Matt McAuley, are in the great NYC band A.R.E. Weapons along with Paul Sevigny (Chloe's brother).
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As for the article, I've seen this exact thing happen too many times. I knew one friend who was writing a script similar to Galaxy Quest, even down to the bad guys being Reptile aliens. When he saw the preview for it he thought "oh shit." But he had only passed the script around his friends, so he knew it wasn't stolen. I also saw someone else with a script far too similar to Blast from the Past.
These things just happen. It's kind of uncanny that some scenes were similar, but, really, if you were going to rip off a script, would you keep little details exact like that? In the random crap shoot, sometimes you'll get a lot of things similar, the kind of 1 out of 300 odds the lawyers were talking about.
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