Dead Man

Rating:
Summary: sTrAnGe MaSterPeiCe about death. For the open minded.
Review: This anti-western has become my favorite western of all time. The only other movie that comes close to were this movie stands in my mind about the old west is "The Unforgiven".
However if your expecting something like the guy gose after the bad guy. Kills him, and takes the girl off into the sunset. You will not find it here. Jim Jarmucsh has proved you can make a creative western that means so much more then your avarage reused ideas. Sadly some people hated this movie for being so different. A blend of perfound sadness mixed with truly funny and creative hummor is the best I can think to put this.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT MOVIE so-so DVD release
Review: I agree with all the other gushings about this movie listed here. I saw it several times in the theater when it was first released, and was simply mesmerized. Like few other movies, I was involved in the story, felt as if I was floating above it like some waiting spirit. Jim Jarmusch has some fairly good movies to his credit - this is my favorite. When will they release "Down By Law" on DVD? Anyway, "Dead Man" has the standard fair of extras - a couple of deleted scenes, a music video, but no trailer? On chapter eight of this DVD, the movie seems to get staggered, apparently a bad transfer into the digital format. It looks as if frames were removed, making the scene (one of the best in the movie) seem like a silent movie. I returned it several times, and all copies had this problem. I haven't seen anything out there about this, but I wish they would correct it. Oh well, I imagine this movie will go out of print in a year or two anyway. The paying audience should be satisfied it was released on DVD at all...

Rating:
Summary: Blake's Poetry of Blood
Review: Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
--William Blake

Blake knew (as who does not?) that the Poet has a murderer's heart and is condemned to live apart--marked and wounded--in the black margins of the everyday, envious and uncomprehending of ordinary happiness. "Dead Man" is engraved in the blacks and whites of this primal struggle. Individuality vs society. The soul vs mechanized civilization. The Poet's quest vs the appetites of life. Blake, the author of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," knew that all creativity flows from the clash of opposites--from discord, rebellion, ambivalence.

In the first scene, Depp is a Lost Spirit, shuttling in a blackened fugue state, on a symbolic train. A solitary, still body--a Northern Star--aloof from the many landscapes and passengers (the passing generations) which flicker by. But the train has a destination: the blood-soaked bed where William Blake is destined to re-enter life. Though he cannot know it, he is a "rough beast...slouching toward Bethlehem to be born."

The perfect, pristine landscapes give way to a venereal scar on the earth: the factory town of Machine. In its feculent streets of blood, dung and tears, Depp gawks slack-jawed at the seeds of evil in this mercenary pus-hole: a prostitute wolfing on a drunk in broad daylight, the first of several cannibal motifs. (This may also allude to the so-called Primal Scene: the Child's shocked discovery of the sexual hunger of the adults who nurtured him).

Soon the Freudian gaze sharpens to the point of conflagration--when a flower girl (a Flower in the Machine!) takes Depp home to deflower him. They are surprised by her lover (Gabriel Byrne), and a Freudian bloodbath ensues. The Father has caught his Oedipal son in the forbidden bed. His phallic retribution (a bullet) pierces the Mother, and William Blake re-enters the world with the Poet's seed of death next to his heart. The bullet is both the sperm of creation and Depp's deadly legacy. The Mother's breast spurts--not milk but blood, and her blood-fed son finds a gun in his hand.

This is important. The first William Blake (1757-1827) was in open rebellion against the industrialization of his country. His violent, messianic verse condemned England's "dark Satanic mills," which laid waste to the "green and pleasant land" and drowned the pastoral music of life in the grinding of machines. The spirits of the earth, to whom poets traditionally listened, were growing silent.

Now the rot has found the wildness of the New World--the West--and the situation is desperate. Blake Reborn is no less cursed to darkness, but now words alone will not do. An inhuman, ravenous, psychotic society must be answered with blood. Depp kills the Father (son of the Factory), as all poets must. This Oedipal overthrow brings the Furies of society against him. Factory magnate Mitchum (who kills and stuffs Nature) marshals a band of killers, a microcosm of unnatural, self-devouring civilization. (This oxymoronic "society of outlaws" implodes spectacularly).

So the Poet is born an outlaw and wounded animal. His mentor and guide is Nobody, a loner from a dying race, who knows where the spirits of the earth reside. With his help, Blake communes with them and perfects his poetry of blood. His metaphorical passage to the Land of Spirits, ending with the great scene adrift on the gray waters of death, is brutal, beautiful, indelible.

Rating:
Summary: live movie
Review: Literally, they won't make movies like this anymore. With the advent of the world market, movies have been so thoroughly dumbed down that it is rare to see a movie such as this--one that doesn't think for you. As in the tradition of Native American story telling; "Dead Man" offers up related imagery and allegory that provide a sense of wonder. It is odd how a movie with such minimal dialog can say so much more than every other movie out there.
Even the violence is intriguing, no zip 'em up gun battles, just an awkward discharge, as the shooter himself seems surprised by his absurd deed.

Rating:
Summary: WOW
Review: Stumpled into the last ten minutes of this film by accident, as I was zapping late in the evening. Had no idea what it was, but was helplessly hooked. I was dragged through the entrance to the indian village, slowly died with Blake, as he was dragged half unconcious through the dirty street, almost got sick to my stomack, breathlessly waiting for what was going to happen when Nobody dissappeared into a strange building with a birds beak as a door, and finally breathed a sigh of relief in some form of understanding, as I saw the last glimpse of the sky. I knew I had to see the rest of this film. Since then I have spent quite some time trying to find out what it was, I had accidentily seen, and how to get hold of this beautiful and painful movie, as it has never been released in my country. Today I got it, and the rest of the film is as mesmerizing as the last ten minutes. This is food for the soul!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best American films of the 90s, damnit!
Review: I'd like to sic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who wrote a book-length essay on the film) and the good critics from the Village Voice Best of the 90s poll on Tom Keough, Roger Ebert & anyone who doesn't recognize this film is the brilliant revisionist Western masterpiece this is.

From the brilliant opening (we're on a train with Depp, who keeps falling asleep, and we fade out with him, being as disoriented as he is) to the great Robert Mitchum in one of his last performances, to Robert Muller's cinematography (there's one unforgettable scene when Nobody runs through birch trees) to Neil Young's score to the pitch-perfect casting, this movie is a perfect surreal Western.

If you like Hollywood pablum, don't bother, but if you like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, black-and-white films, or anything the slightest bit off the beaten path, this is a must-see film.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: This movie(and the music) will take you on a unpredictable trip into many situations that chalenge your sensitivity. Please see it. Warning; you will encounter many strange moments.

Rating:
Summary: A movie you have to WATCH
Review: I agree... that this is a masterpiece of a film... This is a film you really have to sit down and WATCH, not just play in the background while the kids are running around and screaming or you're trying to entertain guests. In this film Johnny Depp is not making a journey through life...he IS the "Dead Man," and the film is his journey between death and whatever comes after...a journey through limbo including the other characters he encounters as imps, and angels and other wandering souls. Yes, i know this sounds strange, but watch carefully...you'll see. (that last coin, for example...a toll to the ferryman on the river Styx?)

Rating:
Summary: A Slow Wander Thru Bardos of the Old West
Review: More meditation than movie, this hypnotic piece deserves time and attention. Mesmerizing has been said over and over, but it is the best word for it.

Read Blake, read the Book of the Dead, see this movie again. It will resonant in your consciousness for days.

Rating:
Summary: Very Thought Provoking Movie
Review: This is the kind of movie you sit mesmerised watching. It takes you out of yourself into a world that only poets and dreamers know. I thought about life and death, and how strangely different I felt about it all after watching this movie. Is this life so damn important? After all, there has to be more than this. I love this movie and recommend it to fellow thinkers.