THE STORY OF A KILLER NOT QUITE LIKE THE REST : "GHOST DOG - THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI"

GHOST DOG For the longest time, this film had the title of “only Jim Jarmush film I haven’t watched”. Then my flat mate – who also works in / with films – watched it. It instantly rocketed to his list of favorite films ever – and it was somewhere near the top as well. Ironically enough this happened when I told him that he should watch something by Jim Jarmush – because he is pretty much my favorite director ever – and he went to the library only to find this was the only one on the shelf at that time. It took him months of recommending it – and me being very disorganized – but I finally got round to the blessed thing last night. Please note that I was nursing the remains of a rather brutal hangover at the time, and yet, I loved it. I mean, I feel that, just because of the hangover, I should watch it again, just to make sure I don’t miss something, but I doubt it. Minimal and beautiful as ever, this is Jim Jarmusch at his best, yet again. Ghost Dog (Forrest Whitaker) is a professional killer. He is not, however, like any professional killer you will have seen before. For starters he is pretty much the best at his job. He can dissolve into the night like a real ghost, getting “the job” done quickly and quietly. He is just a bit eccentric however. First of all, he only communicates by carrier pigeon. He lives, in fact, on a roof with a flock of pigeons. He lives by the code of the samurai. Guided by an ancient samurai text, he is the last unlikely member of a very ancient clan. Hired killers have, as you can imagine, rather unsavory bosses sometimes. Ghost Dog is no exception. One of these bosses is a mafia family. A mafia family that doesn’t quite realize what a sensitive balance Ghost Dog’s world is in. And when, one fateful night the balance is broken, everyone even vaguely connected knows the full wrath of the code of the samurai. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is, in fact, a samurai film set in modern (relatively) day USA. And the particular genius of this film is largely the fact that it takes many very unlikely looking couplings that actually go together so well that you don’t even stop to think how unlikely they are until later sometimes. I mean, Forrest Whitaker makes a very unlikely samurai if you stop to think about it. Yet the story goes so smoothly and Whitaker carries off the role so well that it you actually don’t stop to think about it. Or even if you do a bit at the beginning of the film you are carried away by the beauty of the film. And the film is beautiful. I call this film pure Jarmusch because someone else could take the same story and make a very gangsterish “bad boy” revenge movie of it. No. this movie, although there is one heck of a lot of bloodshed in it, is calm, beautiful in places and sprinkled liberally with Jarmush’s rather unique sense of humor, eerie parallels and wonderful cinematography. I mean, if you don’t like Jarmusch’s style you’ll probably hate it, don’t get me wrong… If you like it however… Oh you are in for a treat…