jim jarmusch

Bonus Features: Baby Cakes (1989)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s Baby Cakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker.  It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch.  In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye.  It’s a much darker film than Baby Cakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym.  Baby Cakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one.  Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.

One essential romcom element of Baby Cakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions.  Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup.  The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation.  Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one.  It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc.  That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake.  Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat.  Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion.  You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality.  It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.

While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though.  In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety.  Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée.  It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable.  Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare.  Cute!

On the Line (2002)

If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative.  In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable.  *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard.  While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L.  It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection.  When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents.  I am not kidding.

Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer.  In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops.  Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.”  Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame).  Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard.  And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic.  The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women.  Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands.  If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers. 

Paterson (2016)

If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver.  Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic.  Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies.  His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets.  You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer.  He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife.  It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.

I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case.  If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do.  It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery.  Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd.  For its part, Paterson just has the most.  There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.

-Brandon Ledet

Down By Law (1986)

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Big changes are afoot at Wildwood, the weekly series that has recently brought classics as varied as John Waters’s Desperate Living and Barbara Loden’s Wanda to local cinemas for packed-room repertory screenings.  Firstly, the series doesn’t officially appear to be called Wildwood anymore; all social media presence has been temporarily rebranded to “WWCinema” while the programmers soul-search for a new name.  More importantly, it has switched times & locations to Wednesday nights at The Broad, which is much more easily accessible to me by bus than their previous slot on Thursdays at Canal Place.  So, it was my solemn duty to attend WWCinema’s “debut” at The Broad this month, despite the fact that I don’t particularly care for the films of notorious No Wave slacker Jim Jarmusch.  Programming Jarmusch’s 1986 prison escape comedy Down By Law in any local screening series is kind of a no-brainer, since it’s the exact kind of high-style, low-ambition filmmaking that convinces college-age hipsters from around the world to move to New Orleans and inspires lifelong New Orleanians to pick up cameras to capture the local mise-en-scène.  It’s often cited by cineastes as the best movie ever set here (an honor that actually belongs to Paul Schrader’s Cat People, also a former Wildwood selection), which always sets my teeth on edge even though it is, from what I can recall, the only Jarmusch movie I’ve ever fully enjoyed.  Thankfully, rewatching it with an enthusiastic crowd did remind me exactly why I have vaguely fond feelings for Down By Law despite all of its minimal-effort hipster posturing & N’awlins Y’all cultural cachet, which already makes me grateful that Wildwood is moving closer to home.

My knee-jerk resistance to Down By Law comes from two separate places of distrust.  The major issue is my longstanding bias against Jarmusch as a filmmaker with an incredible wealth of resources who often deliberately chooses to do nothing with them, because doing nothing is the Gen-X ideal of cool.  Speaking more personally, this is the project that brought that performative Gen-X slackerdom to my home turf, making hip-cred outsider musicians Tom Waits & John Lurie the poster boys for laidback New Orleans cool.  When I hear someone declare Down By Law their favorite film set in New Orleans, I automatically assume they idolize the kind of dirtbag alpha male behavior exemplified by those two leads, who are both role models for a specific kind of French Quarter hipster that’s been around as long as I can remember (likely because this movie was released the year I was born).  Waits stars as a WWOZ radio DJ with a dumb little porkpie hat & goatee combo to match his dumb Cool Guy™ personality.  Lurie co-leads as a suave street hustler out of a classic shot-on-location noir starring a Sal Mineo or a James Dean (or, in the case of King Creole, Elvis doing his best impersonation of Dean).  They’re both framed for crimes they didn’t commit and are locked up in a small cell at OPP, spending the rest of the picture trying to out-alpha each other as top dog of their block.  For the first twenty minutes or so, Down By Law is the exact ambitionless, inert slacker drama Jarmusch always delivers, more concerned with cool cred than artistic ambition.  Then, the film’s third lead arrives in the form of Roberto Benigni as an Italian tourist who was arrested for manslaughter – the only one of the cellmates who wasn’t framed for his crime, and the movie’s saving grace.

I have whatever rare brain disorder causes people to find Robert Benigni funny; in my worst moments, I’m convinced he’s the funniest man who ever lived.  If nothing else, he’s the only comedic performer who’s ever dared to ask the question “What if Harpo Marx was obnoxiously loud?”, a true visionary.  Setting his chaotic cornball energy loose on an otherwise typically laidback Jarmusch set is the genius of Down By Law, a magic trick the director only ever came close to repeating with Mia Wasikowska’s vampire-brat in Only Lovers Left Alive.  Jarmusch clearly understands the value of what he has in Benigni, and he allows that vaudevillian presence to reshape the entire movie to great effect.  While Lurie & Waits are participating in an imaginary Cool Guy™ contest, pretending to heroically care the least about what’s going on around them, Benigni strives with every atom in his body to be classically entertaining.  He wills the movie into becoming more exciting, citing The Great Escape as an example of great American cinema because it has “lots of action.”  His cellmates put on stoic Tough Guy personae, but he’s the only character in the movie who hunts, who kills, who fucks.  By the final scenes the difference between him and the other boys verges on the philosophical; Lurie & Waits split into arbitrary, opposing directions just to spite each other while Benigni finds happiness staying in place, a fully content man.  In short, the problem with New Orleans these days is that too many young, impressionable dudes watch Down By Law and move here with ambitions to become suave street hustlers and hipster radio DJs, when what we really need is more classical Italian clowns.

The funny thing about Down By Law‘s reputation as New Orleans’s finest moment onscreen is that very little of the film’s runtime actually showcases the city.  Sure, it opens with sideways pans of shotgun homes & cemetery tombs set to one of Tom Waits’s greatest hits, but just as much of the third act features forward-facing boat trips into mysterious channels of the swamps outside the city.  The story opens with Waits & Lurie committing petty crimes as French Quarter gutter rats, but after they’re pinched by the NOPD we never return to the city streets.  Shot on cheap black & white film stock and deliberately ignoring the basic facts of New Orleans geography, the film often recalls the Poverty Row noir aesthetics of schlock like the 1956 Roger Corman cheapie Swamp Women.  The OPP cell block looks like it could’ve been filmed in a hastily decorated warehouse or apartment.  The prisoners’ escape from OPP directly leads into swamp water instead of the intersection of Tulane & Broad.  The cops-and-hounds hunt for the escaped prisoners is represented entirely as distant sounds to keep the costs of casting down.  This is scrappy, D.I.Y. filmmaking from the height of the Indie Boom that made festival darlings like Jarmusch moderately famous instead of desperately auditioning them for career-crushing deals with Marvel or Netflix.  WWCinema is pitched to its audience as a series programmed by and for legitimate working filmmakers, so it’s not surprising Jarmusch’s current go-to editor Affonso Gonçalves selected Down Bay Law for the series, given its local connections and its inspirational model for high-style, low-budget filmmaking.  Let’s just hope most of the impressionable young men in the audience latched onto the right role model at that screening; the city already has more than enough Tom Waits wannabes hanging around, doing nothing especially worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Broken Flowers (2005)

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In my Silver City review, I mentioned my recent writing retreat, in which I went internet-free in a cabin for a week to get some fiction writing done, and the collection of “Blockbuster’s Twilight Years”-era DVDs that had been purchased during that organization’s decline and which found there way to the cabin. One of these films was Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 Bill Murray vehicle Broken Flowers. I have a complete and utter Jarmusch blind spot, never having seen any of his films. In fact, I only know him from his appearance on Fishing with John for, as you well know by now dear reader, I am a weirdo. After the abysmal experience of watching In Secret and once again trying and failing to get through Titus, I really wanted to clear my Jessica Lange palate, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Don Johnston (Bill Murray) is a serial womanizer, now retired after having done quite well in the field of “computers,” and living rather disaffectedly. When his latest ladyfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy) leaves him, citing that she feels like his mistress even though he isn’t married, he receives a second blow: an untraceable letter from a woman claiming that Don fathered a now nineteen-year-old son with her and she kept it from him. The letter’s author warns that the boy is now on a road trip, and she has her suspicions that he’s looking for his father, and doesn’t want Don to be taken completely unaware. At the urging of his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don travels to see the five women who might have sent the letter.

First up is Laura (Sharon Stone), who married a now-dead stock car racer. Now a professional closet organizer, she does have a teenaged child—a daughter inexplicably named Lolita, who even more inexplicably expresses a sexual interest in 55-year-old Don. Next up is Dora (Frances Conroy), formerly a flower child but now leading a boring existence as the wife and business partner of real estate agent Ron (Christopher McDonald). Then it’s on to Dr. Carmen Markowski (Jessica Lange), who Don remembers as being very passionate about becoming a lawyer, but who is now some kind of animal whisperer, and from there Don locates Penny (Tilda Swinton), living in a bleak, crumbling clapboard farmhouse somewhere that definitely has a meth problem. Finally, Don visits the grave of Michelle, the fifth and final potential author of the letter. Returning home, he notices a young man (Mark Webber) whom he seems to remember having run into before, and buys him a sandwich and a coffee. Assuming that the boy is the long-lost son whose arrival was foretold, Don starts talking about being the kid’s father, freaking him out and causing him to run off. Alone in the street, Don watches as a car drives by slowly as a teenaged boy (Homer Murray, Bill’s real life son) makes eye contact with Don from the passenger seat, and then is gone.

While definitely a product of a certain time and of a certain generation of masculinity, which detracted from the end product for me, this was a good watch overall. The idea of Don Johnston as a Don Juan-esque lothario is a bit of a stretch (no offense to Murray, but let’s get real) and the fact that the film hinges on not just his one-time sexual voracity in his peak, but also his virility and that he’s never changed his behavior, is the weakest element. Murray’s also doing none of the heavy lifting here, as the editing is doing nearly all of the work while Murray sits back and lets his motionless silence be captured by Jarmusch’s directorial eye. There’s a great performance in here from the male lead, but it’s all in the Kuleshov of it all, while Murray does that thing that he always does (hey—if it’s not broke).

Looking at Jarmusch’s larger filmography, it seems his earlier films that predate Broken Flowers were largely anthological works, while his more recent ones seem to be more standard in their narrative structure, and this film is a kind of bridge between those two forms, conceptually, as it follows Don through a series of vignettes that consist of reunions with the women he once loved, each one shorter than the last, beginning with an overnight with Laura, a dinner with Dora and her husband, a constantly-interrupted period between appointments with Carmen, a four or five sentence exchange with Penny, and finally no time at all with Michelle. This adherence to structure is something that I love in any work of art; I think that the attention to detail is something that soothes my hyperactive brain. There’s also a lot of fun with the minor details of each interaction: Laura’s daughter’s detachment from the death of her father (“It was on the TV”), the utter sterility and banality of Dora’s bland dinner (a big slab of meat, unseasoned white rice, and crinkle cut carrots, possibly boiled), and the dilapidation of Penny’s home. There’s also something fascinating about the high number of basketball hoops everywhere he goes, which Don always instantly assumes means that there’s a teenage boy about and that he’s come to the right place, and yet their omnipresence renders them completely irrelevant as a clue.

Before Don goes on his adventure, Winston primes him to be on the lookout for pink items and objects to match the pink paper on which the letter was typed, and to try and obtain writing samples to compare to the written address on the envelope, which is the only handwriting on the letter. Although he isn’t successful in the latter endeavor, he (and by extension the viewer) is drawn to pink items everywhere in his adventure: Penny’s boots and motorcycle, Dora’s business card (to match her husband’s blue one), Carmen’s pants, etc. It’s a nice touch that, like the basketball hoops that appear so frequently, all of these clues are meaningless as well. The film sets itself up as a mystery: who sent the letter? And in the end, that mystery isn’t important, and remains unsolved. Each woman with whom he reunites is utterly noncommittal in their responses to Don’s roundabout questions, and in the end, it’s not as if he could have expected something different: if any one of them had taken the time to send Don a letter without divulging their identity, then they wouldn’t really allow themselves to be taken by surprise as he intends and suddenly confess when confronted in person. The possibility is even floated that Sherry wrote the letter as an attempt to shake Don out of his comfort zone, and that’s a possibility, but that resolution doesn’t really matter in the end.

As a showcase for the women who round out this cast, including Chloë Sevigny as Carmen’s assistant and Pell James as Sun Green, a compassionate florist who tends to the wounds that Don received from Penny’s friends, this is a pretty nice vehicle. It’s a film with a lot of breathing room but no real fat to be trimmed, playing out in shots that are long enough to convey meaning and last not one moment more. The blipvert/fever dreams that Don has in his quiet moments were initially distracting, especially as they simply once more reminded viewers that Don is still a perfectly virile man capable of sexual thought, which errs a little too close to the “New Yorker story in which an aging professional lusts after his student/protege” genre for my personal tastes, but not enough to derail the whole shebang.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

That’s So Ava!: Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)’s Potential Second Life as a Multi-Cam Sitcom

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There’s a certain crop of 90s art house films that I can never quite fully give into despite their consistently positive reputations. Titles like Clerks, Slacker, and Living in Oblivion are supposedly essential to the voice of a disaffected, laid back generation of arty farty types, but I often have a difficult time connecting with what they’re selling (possibly because they pretend not to be selling anything at all). Gen-X cinema often purported to be the laid back slacker counterpoint to the over-enthusiastic, grandiose generations that came before, but in actuality felt more try-hard & fresh out of art school than ever. The king of this I Don’t Care At All (But I Secretly Care Too Much) aesthetic is, in my mind, one Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch’s intentional art house pretension leads to some interesting moments that all too often get drowned out by the suffocating self-indulgence that surrounds them. There are some amazing small moments & images in Jarmsuch titles like Mystery Train, Broken Flowers, and Coffee & Cigarettes, but all three of those examples leave me so frustrated because they ultimately feel like wasted potential when considered in their fatally affected totality.

As much as I can be frustrated with Jarmusch’s overall product, I genuinely enjoy his sillier flourishes. Besides poking fun at his own self-serious mystique on the show Bored to Death & appearing as the “French fried potater” salesman in Sling Blade, the director always includes a flight of fancy or two in his works that catch my attention & delight me. Bill Murray serving diner food to the Wu Tang Clan, Steve Buscemi getting hung up on Lost in Space trivia, and (in my only pet favorite from the director’s catalog) Roberto Benigni annoying the piss out of Tom Waits are the kinds of breath-of-fresh-air moments of sublime humor that nearly save his work for me. Nearly. If Jarmusch dealt exclusively in broad, yuck-it-up comedy instead of using it to punctuate his more intellectual tendencies toward existential self-reflection I might even be willing to call myself a fan.

I waited as long as possible to catch up with Jarmusch’s most recent work, the vampiric existential crisis piece Only Lovers Left Alive, despite my burning fan worship of bonafide changeling Tilda Swinton (who was on fire that year, considering her work in Snowpiercer & Grand Budapest Hotel). Something about the film’s promo material struck me as a lowkey remake of The Hunger (I still don’t think I was entirely off-base there), which is one of those delicately immaculate cult films that probably should not be touched or even cautiously approached. Buried somewhere deep in the film’s ennui & self-pity, however, was one of those typical Jarmusch saving graces I’m prattling on about here. Mia Wasikowska, who has dazzled me before in titles like Crimson Peak & Maps to the Stars, absolutely steals the show in Only Lovers Left Alive. There’s some kind of self-important rock star cool at the heart of Tom Hiddleston & Tilda Swinton’s titular vampiric lovers that honestly bores me to no end in the film, but Wasikowska’s wonderfully disruptive, chaotic presence brings the film, well, back from the dead with the minuscule screentime she’s allowed. Swinton’s matriarch vampire Eve (her vampy hubby’s name is Adam btw *puke*) is struggling with the tedium of centuries-long survival, but her younger, still-stoked sister Ava is a frivolous hoot. She consistently fucks up, wreaks havoc, and over-indulges like a spoiled brat, a behavioral pattern Adam indicates is habitual . . . which finally brings me to my pitch.

Imagine for a minute an alternate, preferable universe in which Only Lovers Left Alive isn’t a stuffy art house film about addiction or romantic ennui or whatever, but instead a multi-cam sitcom with a laugh track in which Wasikowska’s vampire brat Ava crashed the gloomy party every week in spectacular fashion. I want to go to there. Adam & Ava have an exquisitely balanced Odd Couple dynamic. His gloom & her glitz clash beautifully & hilariously, but aren’t given nearly enough screen time to fully play out. Fairly soon after Ava arrives from Los Angeles & burns Adam’s entire life to ground, he’s stuffing her into a cab so that he can pout & whither with Eve in Europe somewhere. Boring. It’s not fair to me as a trash-loving citizen of the movie-going audience. I demand more goofy, disastrous Ava antics, preferably delivered to my television set on a weekly basis with a laugh track prompting me on when to chuckle & slap my knee. Wasikowska delivers a stellar performance here as a bubbly (unintentional) antagonist brat & I could watch her do that shtick for at least 100 syndicated episodes of a formulaic sitcom.

Unfortunately, Wasikowska feels like she’s performing in an entirely different movie form everyone else (Amy Heckerling’s underrated gem Vamps, maybe?) and, although I understand the sentiment is far from universal, it’s a movie I’d much rather be watching. This film’s Gen-X aesthetic hangover just doesn’t do it for me the way an Ava vs. Adam sitcom would. I’m totally okay with how vapid that makes me sound; I just also wish that I had the funding to make the ultimate reality where we had a That’s So Ava! sitcom meld with our own. The world would be a much better place for it.

-Brandon Ledet