Hacker Cinema
Dead Man
1995 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
On the run after committing murder, an accountant encounters a strange Native American man who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.
9 positive3 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
There is Jim Jarmusch cinema called "Dead Man."
The protagonist is William Blake - boards a train to the town of Machine.
The Milton prints, Songs of Innocence, plus the illustrations of the Book of Revelations were pre-Romantic steel engravings.
I regard Blake to be this anti-positivist character in the 19th century.
Anti-Kant, anti-Newton.
I’ve seen the movie Dead Man. No way am I paying my own flight and lodging costs for a potential employer that has no accountability to me.
I was in the second group that went through only digital film program in my whole country in, I was about to give you shit for saying "soon after" till I realized it was less than 10 years between Dead Man and me graduating.. getting old is weird.
Dead Man 1995
I dont know, but probably the last great American "film". Shot on monochrome and depicting American history in raw and surreal way. The industry soon moved on to mainly digital video. Although many contemporary directors still shoot on film. Nolan for one.
Sure, the below stick with me, Im not sure if they class as lesser known, they were to my uncultured self..
- Black Cat, White Cat (1998), serbian comedy
- Brother (1997), russian revenge flick
- Kontroll (2003), hungarian sci-fi/fantasy
- The Return (2003), russian drama
- Dead Man (1997), US western/art
- Three colours Blue (1993), french drama
- Paris, je t'aime (2006), short film compilation
As a bonus if you like smoking with friends Darby o Gill and The little People (1959) is an (inadvertent?) slapstick-comedy/horror from disney.
Great, thanks for your response! That sounds good. I have put it to the top of the list to be watched next. I'm not a massive Western fan but there's something about them that makes them easy to watch.
I'd mention Dead Man (1995) as a Western or Western themed movie to watch. I would give it a very similar description to yours.
Please watch the movie Dead Man with Jonny Depp.
It's easy to forget but acting and filming are actually art forms and Hollywood once excelled at them.
You won't see any evidence of that in the modern blockbuster, though. I remember a scene in one of the Iron Man movies (or perhaps the Avengers?) where Iron Man is fighting the Hulk. Scenes of the fight are interrupted by scenes where we see Tony Stark's face against a dark background- encased in his helmet, with the armour's HUD superimposed. It's a clever trick. The point though is not to create a dramatic effect. It's to maximise Robert Downey Jr's face time.
When I was younger I was always on the lookout for "videoclip-like" directing. For instance, I was crazy about a French movie called Dobermann [1] that goes like a cheetah on speed and doesn't stop to take names. I was obsessed with portrayals of action and violence, the faster the better.
But there is power in standing still. There is power in silence, in saying nothing, in showing nothing. I was shown that in the movies of masters [2] [3]. Perhaps I've grown up in the process.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobermann_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man
> I'd say you want an interesting but expect incredible production values
Smoke was an interesting movie, and cost $7M. (It didn't make much more but it wasn't a failure.)
Moon was a fantastic movie, and cost $5M. The little CGI it had was pretty obvious but didn't affect the viewing experience. (It also made near-zero returns.)
Requiem for a Dream was - and remains - an outstanding film. It flopped in box office but must have made pretty penny on home sales.
Dead Man is an interesting movie, and still one of my favourites. It works on the audience for the same reason Apocalypse Now does: episodic films in general are considered "artsy" and hard to chew, but turn them into thoughtful road movies and the audience enjoys the experience.
Pan's Labyrinth is just damn good. It cost €13.5 to make, and grossed $37M. Home sales must have added even more since then.
All the films above are both interesting and, in terms of bloated Hollywood budgets, were cheap to make. I would take any one of them over the perfumed sewage that floods the film theaters. And for reference, I did see Doctor Strange in a cinema so I do have a metric for calibration. My opinion stands.
If you like Blake, I'd recommend: Dead Man. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112817/
This reminds me of the movie "Dead Man", which is a good thing I'd say.
I used to write in my diary from a very early age so blogging came very naturally to me. When I write I like to present the topic to a reader as I saw it. So if I do a movie or a game review (I do those a lot :) I would write it as if I was describing the movie or a game to a friend. I would talk about the experience of it.
For instance I reviewed Dead man(http://www.staticshin.com/dead-man/) last year and I opened the review with the following lines
>William Blake( Johnny Depp) has nothing to look forward to in his home town. He is unemployed. His parents are dead. His lover has left him. He has only enough savings to pay for his fare to the machine town where he has been promised a job as an accountant. But when he arrives there he finds that the position has already been filled by some one else.
It immediately told the reader what I thought of William Blake which is exactly how I would have described the movie to a friend.
A constant that I have noticed in my writing is that I write well on topics that I want to write about. How do I know what I want to write? By writing. It is funny but it works every time. I have tonnes of half finished blog posts/ideas that I initially thought would be interesting but turned out commonplace.
Two things that I feel are very important for writing (digitally) are
1. A good text editor.
2. A quiet place.
I think it would be a good investment for any blogger to learn markdown and yet I see a lot of writers fiddling around with wsywig editors that constantly break their chain of thought.
Point 2 is self explanatory, I think, since a large part of writing is thinking and if you can think clearly you will write clearly.
One adivce that I absolutely hate is
> write on a niche topic
I don't like blogs that talk about a single topic. When I read a blog I want to know more about the writer as much as I want to know more on the topic. And I know that every individual has many different tastes so why limit yourself?