Rating: 
Summary: Got any tobacco?
Review: Jim Jarmusch's DEAD MAN starts on a westbound train sometime in the late 19th century. Johnny Depp is a young man going west, and in the long opening sequence we don't stray off the train or far from Depp. Through a string of fade-outs we note the landscape and the passengers slowly change. We are moving away from civilization, and en route the number of women decreases to nothing. Men grow shaggier and more wild looking. The first eight minutes of DEAD MAN set the hook deep in me, and allowed me to overlook its excesses and enjoy it.
Depp arrives in the town of Machine to discover the job he was traveling to was filled my another applicant. The owner of Dickinson's Metal Works (Robert Mitchum) orders him out at the point of a gun. Depp hits a saloon, meets a woman selling paper roses, trysts, gets discovered by ex-lover Gabriel Byrne, shares a bullet with his tryst-mate, shoots Byrne, and flees into the movie proper.
Depp wakes the next morning with a 300-pound Indian sitting on him, digging a knife into his chest. The bullet is lodged near his heart. After some palaver the two introduce themselves. William Blake, meet Nobody. Nobody, played by Gary Farmer, was kidnapped by the English and attended school in London, where he fell under the spell of William Blake, poet. Nobody believes the Depp William Blake is THAT William Blake. And he believes that he is a dead man. Nobody takes it upon himself to take Blake to the point of departure to the spirit world.
It stretches credibility a little... okay, a lot... but I found the scenes between Depp and Farmer extremely enjoyable. If you accept the logic of the situation the dialogue between the two is sometimes absurdly funny:
Nobody: Did you kill the white man who killed you?
William Blake: I'm not dead
Later... Nobody: But I understand you, William Blake. You were a poet and a painter. But now you are a killer of white men.
And I may be in a minority, but I even thought Neil Young's score - mostly playing a solo guitar under the scenes - worked well. If was by turns driving and pulsating, if not necessarily tuneful.
Jarmusch took the wrong approach with the other characters, though. The white bounty hunters and town's people and travelers are too grotesquely portrayed. A movie can only handle so many sociopaths, and DEAD MAN is chock full of them. If they aren't demented, they're cannibals, or cross-dressers (Hi Iggy Pop.) If I watch this one again, I'll use the dvd's scene selection option and skip over about half the movie. The symbolism is laid on a little thick, as well. At one point William Blake comes across a dead fawn. He dips his finger into the fawn's blood, mixes it with blood from his own open wound, and smears the mixture onto his forehead and chin before lying down next to the dead animal. He's on a Vision Quest, you see, and apparently the quest has led to identity himself with the slain fawn. This scene occurs AFTER he's killed three or four men, so his embrace of innocence is open to question.
DEAD MAN looks good, capturing the feel and appearance of the late-19th century Pacific Northwest in glorious black and white. I'm giving it a weak endorsement. I liked quite a bit of it, but I had to ignore a lot as well.
Rating: 
Summary: hypnotic
Review: Slow film at first, but then, I became hypnotized. I even bought the Neil Young soundtrack, and play it on sleepy, lazy mossy Sunday mornings when I'm outside, drinking coffee, maybe at 7am and enjoying nature. The plot has been described, but the atmosphere, like Stranger than Paradise, was (and is) what attracted me to this movie. It may not be for all, but it moved me.
Mark
Rating: 
Summary: I'll make it simple for you...
Review: Do you like Johnny Depp? Do you love Johnny Depp's weird off-beat roles? If so you're going to enjoy this movie. Do you like David Lynch? Do you love David Lynch's disturbing semi psychotic plots, mind benders, and twisted endings? If You said Yes to both of these questions. You will love this movie. Nearly a "western" (which the only reason you can call it a western is because its...in..the west during...the western times but GET OVER IT) that you would imagine David Lynch creating, then mixing a bunch of depressants in his morning coffee. If you wanna see a Pop- Teen Culture Johnny Depp, Go elsewhere. If you want to see the Dark Inner sides of Depp. Which are rediculously amazing. Buy this. Now. Oh and Iggy Pop, Billy Bob, Crispin Glover, and other familiar faces are hilariously perfect. Im sure my wording and all that is crap cause its 2am, but im not trying even slightly to sound inteligent. So just read it, and get the point.
Rating:
Summary: Filmmaking at its best.
Review: This is definitely one of the most ambitious and original works that I have seen from the nineties, a time when film (especially horror) was slipping into a trend of over-hyped sensationalism. Out of the mass of special effects ridden blockbusters came a gritty, odd film in black and white. This is a western in the style of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time In the West." Slow-moving and with surprisingly little dialogue, with chartacters that are so utterly believable and flawed, it captivates the viewer from the very beginning. The film moves like a dream, with slow fades that separate each scene, and a musical score from Neil Young that is driving and apocalyptic. The acting is extremely good from even the most menial roles to those of Depp and Farmer. The plot seems intentionally thin, leaving time and room for the viewer to think about what he or she is seeing (I'm going to spare you my thoughts on the symbolism and meanings and let you draw your own conclusions). The camera work is also stunning, probably more effective in stark black-and white. What results is a very effective, thought-provoking and excellent film.
Rating:
Summary: ~Hypnotic~
Review: There is something about this film that grabs your senses and won't let you go. The storyline of an unjaded accountant who has traveled from Cleveland into the gutwrenching reality of the cold west and is quickly absorbed into it's darkness. The performances by all in the cast deserve much merit, Gary Farmer is excellent, Johnny Depp is brilliant. Had another actor other then Depp played William Blake the soul of this movie would have been lost. The filmakers choice to make this work in black and white magnify the hypnotic, mesmerizing effect of the story. A perfect backdrop for the mood is Neil Young's music, the music is a vital part of this film.
Rating:
Summary: Some things that die, someday come back
Review: For the novice fan of Johnny Depp (i.e., "Edward Scissorhands" and "Pirates of the Carribean"), this movie will prove to be a pleasant surpise, into the world that Mr. Depp truly dwells. His portrayal of a man, William Blake, already broken, yet unknowing of his future, is exuberantly interesting and beautifully unsettling. Jim Jarmusch is known for his keen sense of cinematography and laughs, but this picture shoots straight from the hip of seriousness and straight-forward conciousness: Silent, subtle, and poignant, this film is brilliant.
Driven by a powerful subtext, this movie finds Johnny Depp as William Blake (hint: Not the dead poet) who is steering a seemingly promising life, straight into a dimming light, toward a city of burgeoning industry, somewhere in the old west. Complete with an encounter with a an Native American Indian named Nowhere, whom soon becomes his guide, he sets out to find, unknowingly, what it is that his life has in store for him. Throughout his travels, deep into woodlands, he makes his way toward, to meet what it is he does not yet completely understand.
The underratted facet of this movie, is the fact that it is shot completely in black and white (or, as my friends refer to it, Blake and White); an aspect of film that has not been efficiently accomplished since "Young Frankenstein". A perfectly foreshadowing cameo from Crispin Glover rounds out a cast that includes Robert Mitchum and Iggy Pop. Watch this and please be impressed by the purely natural feel to this movie, for it is an art that has been lost with the passing of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa.
Rating:
Summary: A surreal western adventure with an excellent cast.
Review: This one was recommended to me by a co-worker for its dark humor and strange storyline.But in this case strange is a good thing.Johnny Depp plays William Blake an accountant from Cleveland on the run from 3 crazed bounty hunter-killers after getting mixed up within a crazy turn of events in a town called machine. He teams up with a wacky indian names 'Nobody'and goes on an adventure of self-discovery and killing (or as Nobody calls it 'poetry writing'). The title describes Depp's character and you really need to watch this one a few times to even begin to comprehend its meaning. It's alot like a Salvador Dali painting, everytime you look at it you see something new within it. Lots of great acting and an excellent cast. Johnny Depp once again proves he's one of the greatest actors of all-time.
Rating:
Summary: in good company
Review: One way of appreciating this excellent, complex film is to put it in the company of films that have similar resonances, and I would like to recommend four.
First, if we assume that Blake was killed early in the film, and that Nobody's reference to him as a dead man is literal (in the context of the film), then we can think about the film as Blake's initiation into the mysteries of being dead-- a theme wonderfully handled by the twisty, shifting film, Waking Life. In this film,the protagonist is killed early in the film and the balance of the film shows his twirling education in the kaleidoscope of life's mysteries, an education that is, like Blake's, dreamlike and severed from rationality, and finally resolved in a lyrically accepted floating way.
The second film with odd affinities to Dead Man is Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala. In this film the guide,Dersu,is a pure spirit of the wilderness--a fitting foil to the experienced and wisely jaded Nobody; in fact, comparing the two is like comparing the tiger and the lamb. Dersu's contact with the "alien" in this film is benign and enhancing, and gives wonderful idea of how the European might have better engaged the Native American.
Third, Dead Man has for me a weird echo effect to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev--for one thing, the gritty starkness of the images in black and white seem to enhance in many scenes the naked brutality found in both movies. Rublev wanders through the appalling ugliness and violence of human life in Medieval Russia in much the same way as Blake does in the American West--passively, silently, but slowly accumulating a new way of understanding the human condition. Curiously, the scene in which Blake finds a dead fawn, paints himself with the blood, and curls up next to it(or the vision of the dead bounty hunter's head with firewood radiating out like an icon)is so "Tarkovsky" that I expected Blake to speak Russian. This scene is such a twin to the one in Andrei Rublev in which Foma finds and examines the carcass of a swan-- such implied awestruck mystery is in the faces of both characters! The cinematography in both films doesn't just enhance the ugliness, but brings out an incredible aura of beauty in nature.
The fourth companion that I recommend for this film is Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. Simply put, this film is a rendering of the town of Machine as it metastisizes to devour a whole country.
In conclusion, I would like to add that, similar to many viewers, I was stunned by Dead Man. Many who lead the lives of pale accountants from Cleveland can see this film as holding out a quirky,imaginative possibility of transcendence out and away from the flat, pinched, bleached-out lives that the English Blake simultaneosly described and predicted. This movie, in short, is NOT about Schmidt.
Rating:
Summary: The "2001" of the Western genre
Review: Dead Man is the best film by Jim Jarmusch. If you have no tollerance for artsy drawn out metaphors then stay clear of this indie masterpiece. The first time I rented this film, I watched it twice in a row. It is one of the most utterly captivating films I have ever seen. Photographed brilliantly in black and white across the western US, this film takes you on a journey through a surrealistc landscape filled with bizzare characters. Its complete vision is more of a tone poem - a meditation on superficially anomalous diversions of thought. If you can have a little patience and an open mind, you will find incredible beauty here. A special nod to Lance Henricksen, who has given one of his finest performances; and to Neil Young for his incredible score that juxtaposes electric grunge with a simple western theme, affectively merging image and music into the totemic and iconic realm of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Rating:
Summary: Really great film
Review: To each his own, but I caught Dead Man on Independent Film Channel one day. Most movies make me bored and jumpy after awhile but this one fascinated all the way through. I don't like to see violence generally but for movies that interest me, I will put up with it. I loved the literary tie-in to William Blake who was a radical in his own time. The Neil Young music was good and different. Nobody made me laugh the way he drew out his own conclusion that William Blake was the long dead William Blake the artist.
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