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Dead Man

Dead Man

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $11.24
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Rented It When It Came Out, And Never Returned It! ! !
Review: Thats right folks, I stole this movie on VHS. I had to have it. It was my precious. MINE. My Precious. Beautiful Precious. And ALL MINE...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A stirring vision of the old west
Review: This my freinds is a true western (possibly the last true western) it is a mesmerizing story of a man named william blake (who is mistaken for the 18th century poet by the same name) who starts to become one with nature, this movie got me interested in my ow native american roots. this movie portays the native americans as they were hated and, persecuted by the settlers. Nobody(blake's native guide) is portrayed as an innocent soul the way most native americans were, very understanding but unaware of things like citys and guns. also DO NOT watch this movie under any sort of influence or with a lack of sleep IT WILL FREAK YOU OUT. I highly recomend this film it is a true classic, and the music is used wonderfuly it stirs the soul. in closing BUY IT NOW you won't regret it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A MUST HAVE!
Review: I stumbled across this movie in a video store a few years ago and decided to try it out for lack of anything better. What a pleasant surprise. Folks seem to either like it or hate it, but most love it. My wife and I both consider it a true classic -- one of the best either of us has ever seen.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Death as an Adventure
Review: This film, from director Jim Jarmusch, is a benchmark. It sets the tone for all bizarre westerns. It plays out fitfully; jagged like a nightmare. The black & white cinematography by Robby Muller is crisp and innovative; creating a Noir acid-dream atmosphere. The musical score, by Neil Young, initially thrills us; just the right chords and throbs. Then it becomes tediously repetitive. Is this intentional ? Is Jarmusch using this repetition as a motif ? Possibly.

I felt that from the opening credits the whole film was done in flashbacks. As the frontier train rumbled toward its dark destination, there were a series of fade-outs; with passengers changing into others, and terrain metamorphosing into a bleak arrid wasteland. The fades were like blinks, making the new scenes more illusionary and dreamlike.

Johnny Depp, with his performance of William Blake, added to his personal pantheon of eccentric roles. Part Buster Keaton, part William Bonney, Depp wandered the streets of a decaying town knee-deep in mud and depravity. We wanted to laugh, but were afraid to. In that desolate town, nothing appeared normal. The townsfolk were zombie-like, or possessed by unseen demons. Madness coarsed through the streets like a hot wind. Towering over the edge of town, like the feudal castle of Vlad, the Dickinson Metal Works belched black smoke into a cloudless sky.

Lied to and betrayed, Depp barged into the office of the owner, John Dickinson; played by Robert Mitchum. The character is obviously insane, paranoic, and dangerous. Rushing from the cavernous darkness of the factory, Depp found himself desolate, lost, and desperate. Wandering aimlessly, he met and bedded a flower girl (Mili Avital). She happened to be the former girlfriend of Dickinson's son Charlie. In the midst of their passion, Gabriel Byrne, as Charlie, burst into her room and in a fit of rage, shot her and Depp. In self-defense, Blake killed the intruder. Mortally wounded Depp began his flight, his quest, his Death Adventure.

The entire cast is first-rate. Gary Farmer, as the European-educated Indian "Nobody", dominates the film. Was he a spirit guide, an angel of death, or just a native American vagabond ?
We can decide for ourselves. Lance Henriksen and Michael Wincott are killers hired to hunt down Blake. Their portrayals are vivid and off-beat; especially Henriksen as Cole Wilson; evil incarnate. Along the way, as his strength ebbed, Depp met many colorful characters; an odyssey of sorts. One night he chanced onto a meeting with Billy Bob Thornton ( Big George ), and Iggy Pop as Sabatore "Sally" Jenko, attired in a dress and bonnet. They, too, had to be dispatched by Blake; in self-defense. As the death toll rose, it seemed odd that Blake never picked up a discarded weapon, or more ammunition. This was another inconsistency that pointed to the possibility that the film represented the last gasps, the sordid dreams of a wounded dying man. John Hurt, Crispin Glover, Alfred Molina, and Steve Buscemi spice up the narrative with sparkling off-center characters.

The film is unsettling, illogical, mildly maddening and wildly creative; both frightening and fascinating, like petting a pit viper. The end appears to be the beginning, dipping us into the cyle of a life; hinting that Death is not an end, rather it is a transition; that each life is but a smudge on a larger canvas.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: bloody brilliant
Review: I think this movie is brilliant, who cares. Depp did an amazing job as Blake and I liked that. with great violent scenes and a good assemble cast makes this good. story with plot made this not a bore but a fascinating journey in the world of Blake. for Depp fans.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Bleak
Review: An accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) goes West in the late 19th century looking for a job and instead winds up with a bullet near his heart and on the run from the law. Luckily, an Indian man named Nobody (Gary Farmer) takes pity on him and thinking he's the great English poet, he takes Blake on a slow journey to the ocean and his own death. Even though there's clearly supposed to be a connection to the poet William Blake's works (they quote his poetry a lot, there's a character named Thel), I just didn't get it. Nobody tells Blake that his gun will now create his poetry, but didn't the real Blake write that "Every Thing that Lives is Holy"? Also, the depiction of the West and the people in it is so unrelentingly bleak and hellish that it seems to examine only Blake's dissatifaction with the modern world and none of his hope that somehow man can escape his real and imagined fetters and someday truly live.

That being said, the film is worth your time for a couple of really beautiful scenes, all of them involving either paper flowers or Johnny Depp. Depp is so good, SO good, that he can say a simple line like, "You're a very strange man," and infuse it with such love that it sounds like the sweetest compliment ever given. At the end of the film he has just a few lines, the word, "Hello," being one of them and he even makes "Hello" sound like something special. He makes you realize that if the directer, Jim Jarmusch, had kept all the interaction between Blake and Nobody and taken out a large quantity of the quirky and violent gun fodder characters, this might have been a very good movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Zen Western
Review: I never would have believed that a two-hour black and white movie with relatively little dialog could hold me spellbound, but it did. I'll admit I find Johnny Depp fascinating in all his varied roles, but this movie was fascinating all around. It was like Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and "Fistful of Dollars" all wound together.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Deadman A Classic
Review: This one is a must I've seen it at least a 30 some odd times, and it still packs details to be discovered in the story line.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worst junk since
Review: ...and even though Legends of the fall had the same idiotic "O' Great Eagle spirit" mumbo jumbo mysticism at least it wasn't so obnoxiously artsy.If this movie had come out,say 1968 or so, It would have been looked upon as "Revisionist history" or a "brilliant re-use of a traditional American art form to present a bold counter-cultural statement" a "Re-definition of the genre" As it is,this bloatedly pretentious garbage is about 30 years too late."Nobody" was about as convincing as a Native American as Alan Hale would have been in a Cher wig.The violence was gratuitous as well as the humor (which wasn't nearly as funny as I suspect the director thought it was).Don't waste your time with this self indulgent junk...The only way this bomb is "Heavily symbolic" if the director was attempting to symbolize equal parts vanity,pretense and stupidity.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: good art
Review: Johnny Depp is a stranger in a strange land, a world he didn't create, a shifting dream world of vague threats and overt violence. To say this film is surreal is both true and misleading. Just watch it. You'll either love it or hate it. To me, it was a deeply spiritual experience in the truest sense of that word.


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