Ray Pride

Snap judgments -- for a good critic -- should be as easy as responding to a stranger's face on the street: Years of experience, contemplation and composition should make intuition move at the speed of slight. Yet the demands of most contemporary movie reviewing gigs often require ever-more glib dismissals of the ambitious, the ambiguous, or the cryptic. It's great and rare for a critic to find the room to dig in and examine, worry and glory in a piece of singular work.

Jonathan Rosenbaum first wrote about Jim Jarmusch's dark, complex and contrarian "acid Western," "Dead Man," for the Chicago Reader and Cineaste magazine, and by my count, then reworked his ideas in Canada's Cinema Scope magazine, another Reader essay, in his new critic-critique "Movie Wars," and in compact, gem-like form for the ninety-six-page monograph, "Dead Man." Rosenbaum combines interviews, script extracts, copious stills and a knowing career overview, as well as his own reflections on the pilgrimage of Johnny Depp's William Blake and Gary Farmer's Nobody toward Blake's slow death.

There is an awesome range of themes in Jarmusch's movie, and this slim book is packed with reflections on its many byways, with an emphasis on friendship, and on purity and innocence and its spoiling. Yet there is room as well for thoughts on road movies; Jarmusch's haunting, hypnotic rhythm; Neil Young's meditative guitar noise score; a knowing analysis of the estimable literary qualities of Jarmusch's serene masterpiece; and for good measure, even more of Rosenbaum's Miramax fixation, rightly deriding that distributor for its disrespectful and jejune release of a picture that Jarmusch, as holder of all his copyrights, would not cut to their specifications. Compact and masterful, "Dead Man" reveals its years of contemplation, like pebbles worn smooth at the bottom of a cool stream. This is clear-headed stuff of an order too few cultural commentators have the leisure or inclination to pursue.

"Dead Man"
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI Modern Classics, 94 pages, $10.95 (2000-11-30)

Also by Ray Pride

GIMME PROVIDENCE
This is rock; this is dread; this is sex and longing; and "Gimme Shelter" is an exquisite microcosm of ambiguity in an observer's art. I dare you to put half a dozen people in a room and get them to agree on any aspect of "Gimme Shelter" but its essential excellence.
(2000-11-23)

THE MYSTERIES OF HISTORY
For a couple months, I've struggled to come to quips with the 5-CD, complete soundtrack to Jean-Luc Godard's monumental eight-part video critique of a century of cinema, "Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinema." Godard's hoarse rumble confides all.
(2000-11-16)

SUSHIOLOGY 101
I had to be plastered and it had to be right after this year's Oscars to wind up drinking gold-flecked sake for last call at Mirai.
(2000-11-09)

ID STUFF
Clowes' worlds are stylized and precise, but he also walks down the same streets we do. Keep walking or get indoors? Clowes does both.
(2000-11-09)

INTIMATE LIGHTNING
(2000-11-02)

AMERICAN POP
(2000-11-02)

TICKLE ME DEADLY
(2000-10-19)

WEST IS EAST
(2000-10-12)

THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
(2000-10-05)

HOW THE FEST WAS WON
(2000-10-05)

DIRTY LOOKS & SMILES
(2000-10-05)

RAGING HORMONES
(2000-09-28)

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