Friday, July 30, 2010

That Mean Old Evil Train Took My One and Only Friend

Upon reading Roger Ebert's Great Movies essay for Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, I realized that the notion that all three of the stories - the Japanese couple obsessed with Elvis, the three hoods (with at least Joe Strummer clearly obsessed with Elvi), the weird Italian lady-con man tale with at least one of them obsessed with Elvis - occurring at exactly the same time never came up in my mind while watching it. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I recall thinking it was one of the better Jarmusch films.

See, as much as everyone seems to love Stranger Than Paradise, I can live without it. I do love Broken Flowers, though, and wasn't too crazy about Coffee and Cigarettes. Although I did love Dead Man and am fond of Down By Law.

So the point of this is: I'm soon going to watch Mystery Train again and try to rip off some of Jarmusch's story-telling techniques and apply them to a sci-fi spec script I need to re-write. It's called PATHS and the first couple of drafts shifted dramatically back and forth in the timeline, which left every reader who's tried it completely lost.

Good?

Good.

1 comment:

OsoSoul said...

1) Dead Man
2) Down By Law
3) Coffee and Cigarettes
4) Stranger Than Paradise
5) Broken Flowers

I haven't seen Mystery Train.