Very Cool!!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Good idea lost in the noise

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This movie is split into several independent scenes, like separate paintings in a gallery. What connects them is Allie, the main character, and the shabby streets and abandoned buildings of some neighborhoods of New York. Every scene focuses, besides Allie, on one more or less disturbed character, almost like a human zoo. After a few words are exchanged, Allie leaves them, and no deeper connection is made. That's it. In the end, he departs on a ship headed for Europe. Our limited insight into why he does what he does comes mainly from two voice overs in the beginning and the closing of the film.I wasn't bored for a single second, something that seems to be a huge issue for other people when they watch this film. The slowness, the surreal dialog, the eccentric characters and the morbid backdrops combined with a very strange music had some sort of hallucinatory effect on me. It was not only a look at a past era, with some shots reminding me of Edward Hopper paintings, but also into the condition of the drifters and lunatics who populated those streets. It is arguably a pretty superficial look without an attempt to develop any of the characters. I'm not really sure why this should speak against this particular film, since it not only defies character development, but also any conventional structure, plot or storytelling. To consciously create a debut movie that a lot of people will find „boring", without trying to go for some obvious effect, is a pretty bold move in my eyes. It would be easy for a more biased person to think that the scenes drag on only for the film to reach it's feature length.It is obviously a low budget production of someone trying out different approaches, but it also clearly has everything that would later make a typical Jarmusch film. The long silent pauses, the odd people, the run down locations, the still frames and, lastly, the music. I almost feel as if Jarmusch's more recent Only Lovers Left Alive is a variation of this film.The film is an experiment with technical flaws that I am not really qualified enough to completely point out, but at it's core it has a strange and haunting quality. It had me thinking about it a few days after watching, something most other films don't accomplish.

Coming to NYU? Going to live in the village? Perplexed by old timers talking about 'how the village/lower east side has gentrified? Watch this in the background as you sip your mocha with soy care of gentrification. The background shots are for real. See how parts of NY looked back in the day. Serves as brilliant photo-journal as that time but with motion.I moved to to village in 1980 away from Europe and this brought back so many memories not just of the urban landscape but the characters. It was the perfect antidote to the stale suburbs and perfect environment to write, act, dance, play music, make love and generally 'Express Yo'Self!'

A young slacker (Chris Parker) wanders New York City searching for some meaning in life and encounters many idiosyncratic characters.From the plot, this sounds much like Richard Linklater's film "Slacker". And while I have no doubt that Jarmusch was an influence on Linklater, there is clearly no direct connection here... this is not the quirky film of Linklater, but a dreary and more depressing vision.Aside from the incredible dance sequence, there is not a large amount of action. Of course, that is not the point -- there are a series of mad characters, which could be seen as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" transported to New York City, with a jazz spin.

This film which is, as far as I know, the first one by Jarmusch, when he still studied to become a film director, is original in its way to reinstall 'realism' – somebody would say 'surrealism' – into film art. He tries to make us understand a special psychological type of our time, a 'tourist in life' on 'permanent vacation'. People having decided to follow that life strategy don't engage themselves in anything or anyone. They just do what they 'feel like', not caring about what that means to others. Others are not really human. They are looked upon as a tourist might look upon an exotic and alien tribe.However, they themselves also feel alienated and estranged, indeed. Why engage in anything? The home where I was born was bombed out 'by the Chinese', my mother is crazy, my father is dead, and there is no hope for the future.Jarmusch is convincing in his description of this psychological type which might be typical of our time. It might be a descripton of himself. But that is not what makes the film original. It is rather the way he succeeds in making that description.Already in this film he uses stationary cameras with horizontal, and sometimes vertical, views, and depicts the world, as exemplified by New York City, as ugly as it is to all of us, if we do not embellish it.What Jarmusch has to tell might be banal to some but it is certainly something that exists and is quite difficult to make understandable to us. Exactly like the opinion of the main character. But I think he has been successful in mediating such an understanding to us who have chosen a different life strategy.