Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

HalBanksy Entertaining film, but badly miscast in my opinion. I couldn't take the nearly 40 year old Forest Whitaker seriously in either the hit-man or samurai context. Isaach De Bankole was great though, lost in translation with his ice cream. I think the film would have worked better if these actors had swapped roles... The mafia guys were either ridiculously cliched or bizarrely comical. The greatest scenes were heavily inspired by better films. The emotional moments fell a bit flat for me, the ending especially didn't hold the weight if should have.

samuel_ronalds "Ghost Dog" feels incomplete. In fact, it feels as though it were hardly started - the film contains an interesting premise in a hit-man who upholds the honoured samurai code in a world of dishonour and cruelty, as well as a unique blend of various subcultures - Italian Mafia, Hip Hop, and ancient Japan. Yet this is all the film is: a premise. The characters are skeletal outlines, composed only of duties and interests - there's no psychology or actual character present. The plot is where the film's stunted composure is most noticeable - the themes set to be explored are merely included. The Hip Hop culture is present, to its fullest extents, through thinly scattered moments involving gang members and freestylers. It is most present, however, through the soundtrack - although this soundtrack is well made, it is merely played over long transitional scenes, and hence feels like a shallow and cheap attempt at including the Hip Hop culture within the narrative. The Italian Mafia are explored through the main opposition to the film's eponymous character - yet they are clichéd, dull, and wholly non-threatening. At no point within the film do the Mafia feel as though they possess any sort of presence to be reckoned with, and the various figureheads within the organisation serve only as targets for Ghost Dog, and little more. This notion is accentuated by the regard in which Ghost Dog wipes out the entirety of his opponents in one fell swoop, with little to no resistance. Finally, the Samurai code - Bushido - is explored. This is one of the most lackluster aspects of the film - rather than create a story, within which our main character is cast and navigates through in accordance with the Samurai sense of honour, we find a plot constructed purely for the sake of enacting certain Samurai codes. The plot is initiated by an entirely arbitrary event - Ghost Dog is sent to kill a member of the mafia for sleeping with the boss's partner, who is meant to have left town by this point. Yet, for some reason - never revealed - she hasn't, and Ghost Dog must be taken out, as he has executed a member of the Mafia, and this is the way they operate. This event occurs at the very beginning of the film, and is what sets the narratives path in motion. From here, various excerpts from the book, Hagakure, are read out by Ghost Dog, and almost immediately after a scene plays out that is set to present Ghost Dog specifically practicing the mindset taught within that particular excerpt. This is how the entire film plays out, and it feels as though the writer selected specific excerpts from Hagakure, and adapted these excerpts into bare-bone scenes. In fact, with this particular book mentioned, Hagakure serves as the manifestation of the film's attempts at exploring the Samurai way - rather than infuse the narrative with the theme to be explored, it is contained within and read aloud from a single book. The film also attempts to deepen its narrative with several references, often through other books owned by the characters, yet these are only references, and not symbols or points of interest in any regard. In regards to the visual aspects of the film - they are amateur at best. The cinematography is unremarkable, and the editing often indulges in lazy attempts at stylisation. Also, the direction of fight scenes within the film is awful, with the annihilation of the mafia serving as the only actual scene of this criteria. Mafioso appear from behind walls, point their guns towards Ghost Dog, and are promptly killed. There is no tension whatsoever, and the feeling is of the main antagonists of the film merely being deflated. Over all, "Ghost Dog" serves as an interesting premise, yet the lazy writing and shallow attempts at stylisation leave the film as a blueprint, and shoddily presented one at that too.

lasttimeisaw Conflating the samurai tenet within a tailing-off gangster underworld in an unnamed USA city, Jim Jarmusch's version of LE SAMOURAI is profoundly branded with his idiosyncrasies: a nocturnal cityscape tinged with retro-flair (mostly seen behind the wheels), a vibrating, mind-bending, killer soundtrack (courtesy to RZA), a perversity and absurdity presiding over the turn of events (cartoon hooked mobsters, a lethal shot fired from a drain pipe, the cameo of Gary Farmer's Nobody from DEAD MAN 1995, etc.), a tangy timbre of acedia inhabits in some of his dramatis personae (the boss's daughter portrayed with crashing nonchalance by a sylph-like Tricia Vessey) and a total abandon of anhedonia (twice, the dog's gaze is the self-reflexive bellwether of a preordained corollary).Ghost Dog (Whitaker), a self-claimed retainer of the world-weary mobster Louie (Tormey), who has saved his life eight years ago, is a proficient hit-man abiding by the codes of HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMAURAI, written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo in the early 18th century, living alone in the top of a building with a bevy of messenger pigeons, his disciplined life and allegiance is challenged when the local mafia boss Ray Vargo (a deadpan Silva) and his right-hand man Sonny Valerio (Gorman), both superiors of Louie, decide to do away with Ghost Dog as a scapegoat for a mission he has adroitly accomplished, a fatuous move because they have no inking of Ghost Dog's credentials, who will become their imminent nemesis, save the wobbling Louie, who is inadvertently submitted to the receiving end of Ghost Dog's undivided loyalty, chiming in with the RASHOMON (a book which undergoes a ritualistic full circle in the end) motif, even their recollections of their first encounter are different (with clear visual aid here), which shrewdly explains the discrepancy of their attitudes, for Louie it may be merely a self-defense, yet for Ghost Dog, he roundly leaves his own life to the mercy of Louie. An artistically knowing discord looms large between Ghost Dog's zippy choreography and efficiency to rub out his over-confident but ponderous, long-in-the-tooth rivals and a languid but cordial narrative arc encompassing Ghost Dog, his best friend Raymond (De Bankolé), a francophone-only Haitian ice-cream vandor, and a prepubescent bookworm Pearline (Winbush), to whom Ghost Dog eventually lends HAGAKURE, a deed of passing on his mantle. Forest Whitaker superbly channels a less laconic Alain Delon in the titular role, but is far more superior in transmitting a loner's variegated inscape, hewing to his codes of honor and living by liquidation of mortals, but it doesn't necessarily negate that he can have a warm soul underneath, and truly, the warmth quotient increases whenever there is a scene between him and Isaach De Bankolé's motormouth Raymond, the latter is the bees knee for a sore eye, amusingly and edifyingly, Jarmusch points up that human beings can build a communicative bond in spite of a seemingly insurmountable language barrier, and it is this humanistic perspective gives the film an edge over its built-in romanticism of indiscriminately adhering to something exotic and gnomic, so at large, GHOST DOG is worth cherry-picking by both Jarmusch newbies and diehards.

Red_Identity In terms of the actual content, I had never seen Jarmusch make a crime/action film. But once you extend from that, you realize that yes, this is very much a Jarmusch film. The acing, the look, the tone of the whole thing, very reminiscent of an art foreign film in terms of what it actually does. Don't get me wrong, the film does have enough action, but yeah, it won't be for anyone. I didn't love it and if I hadn't seen other Jarmusch films before I would probably grade it lower, but I already know how his films tend to fare with me over time, so I'm taking that into account. Definitely something to linger in the mind, see how it actually does a few months from now.