Books, Arts & Manners: Misdirections

IT is hard to say which is more perverse: our filmmaking or our film reviewing. One of the hits of the fall and winter was Stranger than Paradise, a film that won an award at Cannes for its young director, Jim Jarmusch, who also wrote this piece of foolishness. It scored, too, at the New York Film Festival, got numerous raves upon its commercial release, and was voted best movie of 1984 by the National Society of Film Critics. Nothing about this aimless piece of home-movie-making makes the slightest bit of sense, and it was ground out on a budget so low and with so little technical skill as to set the film clock back by some 75 years. The director could not manage tracking shots, and just barely a few primitive pans; the camera is mostly stationary in the missionary position. There are only a handful of camera setups, mostly indoors and repetitive, and the only way Jarmusch could go from shot to shot was via blackouts, which were promptly saluted as innovative. In fact, this film, about three young drifters who merely hang out, around, and in, was hailed as representative of a new genre, the hanging-out film. I consider it more of a hanging matter.

Another hit of the New York Film Festival was Blood Simple, hosannaed as a revivification of the film noir. Actually, it does not so much pump new blood into an old genre as provide new catsup in old bottles. This is the kind of film where blood on a car seat is still so fresh the following day that, when a concealing towel is tossed over it, it manages to seep through. Here it is the brain that congeals. Thus a cheating married woman, who has reason to believe her husband is out to get her, moves into an apartment with huge windows but no blinds or curtains, to facilitate a sniper’s work. When her lover comes at night to warn her, and tells her to turn off the light, she refuses. And he, too dumb even to duck, argues with her in the brightly lit room with his back to the window. If for no other reason than stupidity, he deserves to die.

JS

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John Simon

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IT is hard to say which is more perverse: our filmmaking or our film reviewing. One of the hits of the fall and winter was Stranger than Paradise, a film that won an award at Cannes for its young director, Jim Jarmusch, who also wrote this piece of foolishness. It scored, too, at the New York Film Festival, got numerous raves upon its commercial release, and was voted best movie of 1984 by the National Society of Film Critics. Nothing about this aimless piece of home-movie-making makes the slightest bit of sense, and it was ground out on a budget so low and with so little technical skill as to set the film clock back by some 75 years. The director could not manage tracking shots, and just barely a few primitive pans; the camera is mostly stationary in the missionary position. There are only a handful of camera setups, mostly indoors and repetitive, and the only way Jarmusch could go from shot to shot was via blackouts, which were promptly saluted as innovative. In fact, this film, about three young drifters who merely hang out, around, and in, was hailed as representative of a new genre, the hanging-out film. I consider it more of a hanging matter.

Another hit of the New York Film Festival was Blood Simple, hosannaed as a revivification of the film noir. Actually, it does not so much pump new blood into an old genre as provide new catsup in old bottles. This is the kind of film where blood on a car seat is still so fresh the following day that, when a concealing towel is tossed over it, it manages to seep through. Here it is the brain that congeals. Thus a cheating married woman, who has reason to believe her husband is out to get her, moves into an apartment with huge windows but no blinds or curtains, to facilitate a sniper’s work. When her lover comes at night to warn her, and tells her to turn off the light, she refuses. And he, too dumb even to duck, argues with her in the brightly lit room with his back to the window. If for no other reason than stupidity, he deserves to die.