LoginDown by Law Reviews
Down by Law review
Posted : 1 year ago on 23 April 2023 12:54
(MU) The same characters you could see in a urban minimalist Jarmush film; here they are in prison and outdoors scape action, with tender coda, wise elipsis...
0 comments, Reply to this entry
A good movie
Posted : 7 years, 10 months ago on 20 June 2016 12:48
To be honest, it has been a while since I have seen this movie and maybe I should re-watch it at some point. First of all, even though I did love some movies directed by Jim Jarmusch such as ‘Dead Man’, ‘Ghost Dog’ or ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’, I must admit that I actually had a hard time to care about his other movies, especially his early work from the 80’s. I mean, they were all interesting but it wasn’t just really my cup of tea. In this case, the fact that I always thought that Roberto Benigni was actually more obnoxious than really funny didn’t help either. Fortunately, John Lurie and Tom Waits were fine here and this trio was not bad after all. On top of that, Jarmusch definitely knows how to create a nice unique mood and the black and white cinematography (like his 2 previous directing efforts) was really neat. This time, Jarmusch did use a plot but he obviously didn’t care much about the rules of the jailbreak genre which was pretty nice. To conclude, even though I wasn’t exactly blown away by the whole thing, it was still a decent watch and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Jim Jarmusch’s work.
0 comments, Reply to this entry
Down by Law review
Posted : 12 years, 1 month ago on 15 March 2012 10:17
Jim Jarmusch directs this indie gem in gorgeous black and white, and we feel his passion for his work: this is one of those wonderful films where the characters are tailor-made for the actors portraying them. And what fine actors they are—Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni pour their essence into these three unfortunate men, and it is a treat to watch their personalities clash. But there is more beneath the surface. Each has their own story, their own reasons for innocence while in prison. It’s not their fault, they all say. And we can relate to them because, while flawed, they each have a spirit, a plan for the future if the world would get out of their way. We see them clash, but are they clashing? Or are they seeing their own flaws in each other and feel forced to grow? As they escape, we root for them not because we believe they will go back to their old lives of pimping, drinking, or cheating. We root for them because we want to leave our own flaws behind.
0 comments, Reply to this entry
Down by Law review
Posted : 14 years, 5 months ago on 15 November 2009 11:29
Movie Review
Down By Law (1986)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
September 19, 1986
FILM: JARMUSCH'S 'DOWN BY LAW'
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: September 19, 1986
JIM JARMUSCH is an American original. He's as singular as ''Bob'' Frost, Sam Shepard and Nicholas Ray, each of whom is evoked - in one way and another - by Mr. Jarmusch's darkly comic, lighter-than-air ''Down by Law,'' which provides the 24th New York Film Festival with a truly festive opening tonight at Lincoln Center.
Like ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' which introduced Mr. Jarmusch to the American public in 1984, ''Down by Law'' wears a furrowed brow on its long face, which doesn't initially identify it as a comedy. However, Mr. Jarmusch's comedies, which might be described as existential shaggy-dog stories, look and sound like those of nobody else making movies in America today.
The act of watching one may even be therapeutic: it cleans the mind of all the detritus acquired while responding in the preconditioned ways demanded by most other films. ''Down by Law'' is an upper, though you probably won't realize this at first.
It's been photographed by Robby Muller in the rich, almost liquid, black-and-white tones that recall films like ''The Big Heat'' and ''The Asphalt Jungle.'' It's about three seemingly expendable misfits - a small-time pimp, an out-of-work disk jockey and an indomitably cheerful Italian tourist, who seems to have disembarked in the wrong country without knowing it.
The setting is contemporary New Orleans, though the city looks as if it had recently been ransacked by Union armies, and the Louisiana bayou country, where chance encounters are as life-enhancing as they are life-threatening in the city.
When first met, in separate sequences, both the pimp, Jack (John Lurie), and the disk jockey, Zack (Tom Waits), are on their way to the slammer, though neither has any reason to know this yet.
Late at night, lying in bed in a sleazy room in the French Quarter, Jack listens without interest as his companion (Billie Neal) quotes her mother's analysis of America. ''She used to say it's a big melting pot, because when you bring it to a boil, all the scum rises to the top.''
More than a little bored, Jack is fair game when a man, whom he has no right to trust, arrives and offers to introduce him to a teen-age ''Cajun goddess'' who'd like to join his stable. The not-so-streetwise Jack trots off to the rendezvous, which turns out to have been set up by the vice squad.
In another bed, in another part of this same forest, the bewildered, out-of-work Zack is being harangued by his girlfriend (Ellen Barkin), at the end of which he says, tentatively, ''I guess it's all over between us, Laurette?'' Out in the street, retrieving his shoes from the gutter (where Laurette has tossed them), Zack is offered an easy $1,000. All he has to do is drive a Mercedes from one side of New Orleans to the other. The hitch is that the car, which turns out to be stolen, also contains a dead man in the trunk.
Jack and Zack are turning into sullen near-vegetables in the cell they share at the Orleans Parish prison when Roberto (Roberto Benigni) joins them. Unlike Jack and Zack, who proclaim their innocence, Roberto freely admits that he did kill the man he's accused of murdering, though it was in self-defense during a card game.
To Jack and Zack, Roberto is not only from another country, but another planet. His English is, at best, random. He's read all of the great American writers (''in Italian translation, of course''), including ''Bob'' Frost. He regards his murder charge only as something of a temporary delay, like bad weather at the airport.
Roberto is part-clown, part-genius. There's something of Papageno about him, especially as played by the irrepressible Mr. Benigni. He's simultaneously pragmatic and sophisticated. It's Roberto who plans the odd trio's successful escape from prison.
No more about the story should be revealed or, for that matter, can be revealed. There's even less ''story'' to ''Down by Law'' than ''Stranger Than Paradise.''
''Down by Law'' is a fable of poetic density. It's so much of a piece that it's not easy to separate and identify the components that make the movie what it is. The performances by Mr. Lurie, Mr. Waits and Mr. Benigni are extraordinary. However, they wouldn't exist had they not been photographed by Mr. Jarmusch and Mr. Muller in the kind of deep-focus that permits the three to be on the screen at the same time, in the same frame. In this way they are able to act and react to one another - in a way that just isn't possible when the camera keeps intercutting between the actors.
Early on, Mr. Jarmusch's characters, and the world they inhabit, remind one of the plays of Sam Shepard, but the similarity is superficial. Unlike Mr. Shepard's characters, who have their roots in the theater of Ibsen, Mr. Jarmusch's travel light. They carry very little in the way of historical baggage. Their pasts are unimportant. They take their shapes from their present circumstances, and from the way they are seen by the camera in their environment -mostly at a comparatively cool distance.
Mr. Shepard's Americans have cut themselves loose from the safety of middle-class life, and must come to terms with their sense of dislocation. In ''Down by Law,'' Jack, Zack and Roberto seem to have been classless forever, floating always (as they are seen in the film) off the shore of a foreign land they've never known or understood, where a logical system of rewards and punishments still exists. They give us not the actuality of life but a dream impression.
The excitement of ''Down by Law'' comes not from what it's ''about.'' Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.
''Down by Law'' works on the mind and senses in a completely different fashion. It's an unqualified delight, from its elegiacal opening shots to to its unexpected last scene, which is funny in itself as well as a wicked pun on ''Bob'' Frost's now somewhat tired ''Road Not Taken.''
''Down by Law,'' which will be shown tonight at 7:45 at Alice Tully Hall and at 9 at Avery Fisher Hall, opens tomorrow at the Cinema Studio and Cinema 2. UP THE RIVER - DOWN BY LAW, written and directed by Jim
Jarmusch; director of photography, Robby Muller; edited by Melody London; music by John Lurie; produced by Alan Kleinberg; released by Island Pictures. At Alice Tully Hall, 7:45 P.M.; Avery Fisher Hall, 9 P.M., as part of the 24th New York Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.
This film is rated R. Zack...Tom Waits; Jack...John Lurie; Roberto...Roberto Benigni; Nicoletta...Nicoletta Braschi; Laurette...Ellen Barkin; Bobbie...Billie Neal; Gig...Rockets Redglare; Preston...Vernel Bagneris; Julie...Timothea; L. C....L. C. Drane; Detective Mandino...Joy Houck Jr.
movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0DE5D9163BF93AA2575AC0A960948260
Down By Law (1986)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
September 19, 1986
FILM: JARMUSCH'S 'DOWN BY LAW'
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: September 19, 1986
JIM JARMUSCH is an American original. He's as singular as ''Bob'' Frost, Sam Shepard and Nicholas Ray, each of whom is evoked - in one way and another - by Mr. Jarmusch's darkly comic, lighter-than-air ''Down by Law,'' which provides the 24th New York Film Festival with a truly festive opening tonight at Lincoln Center.
Like ''Stranger Than Paradise,'' which introduced Mr. Jarmusch to the American public in 1984, ''Down by Law'' wears a furrowed brow on its long face, which doesn't initially identify it as a comedy. However, Mr. Jarmusch's comedies, which might be described as existential shaggy-dog stories, look and sound like those of nobody else making movies in America today.
The act of watching one may even be therapeutic: it cleans the mind of all the detritus acquired while responding in the preconditioned ways demanded by most other films. ''Down by Law'' is an upper, though you probably won't realize this at first.
It's been photographed by Robby Muller in the rich, almost liquid, black-and-white tones that recall films like ''The Big Heat'' and ''The Asphalt Jungle.'' It's about three seemingly expendable misfits - a small-time pimp, an out-of-work disk jockey and an indomitably cheerful Italian tourist, who seems to have disembarked in the wrong country without knowing it.
The setting is contemporary New Orleans, though the city looks as if it had recently been ransacked by Union armies, and the Louisiana bayou country, where chance encounters are as life-enhancing as they are life-threatening in the city.
When first met, in separate sequences, both the pimp, Jack (John Lurie), and the disk jockey, Zack (Tom Waits), are on their way to the slammer, though neither has any reason to know this yet.
Late at night, lying in bed in a sleazy room in the French Quarter, Jack listens without interest as his companion (Billie Neal) quotes her mother's analysis of America. ''She used to say it's a big melting pot, because when you bring it to a boil, all the scum rises to the top.''
More than a little bored, Jack is fair game when a man, whom he has no right to trust, arrives and offers to introduce him to a teen-age ''Cajun goddess'' who'd like to join his stable. The not-so-streetwise Jack trots off to the rendezvous, which turns out to have been set up by the vice squad.
In another bed, in another part of this same forest, the bewildered, out-of-work Zack is being harangued by his girlfriend (Ellen Barkin), at the end of which he says, tentatively, ''I guess it's all over between us, Laurette?'' Out in the street, retrieving his shoes from the gutter (where Laurette has tossed them), Zack is offered an easy $1,000. All he has to do is drive a Mercedes from one side of New Orleans to the other. The hitch is that the car, which turns out to be stolen, also contains a dead man in the trunk.
Jack and Zack are turning into sullen near-vegetables in the cell they share at the Orleans Parish prison when Roberto (Roberto Benigni) joins them. Unlike Jack and Zack, who proclaim their innocence, Roberto freely admits that he did kill the man he's accused of murdering, though it was in self-defense during a card game.
To Jack and Zack, Roberto is not only from another country, but another planet. His English is, at best, random. He's read all of the great American writers (''in Italian translation, of course''), including ''Bob'' Frost. He regards his murder charge only as something of a temporary delay, like bad weather at the airport.
Roberto is part-clown, part-genius. There's something of Papageno about him, especially as played by the irrepressible Mr. Benigni. He's simultaneously pragmatic and sophisticated. It's Roberto who plans the odd trio's successful escape from prison.
No more about the story should be revealed or, for that matter, can be revealed. There's even less ''story'' to ''Down by Law'' than ''Stranger Than Paradise.''
''Down by Law'' is a fable of poetic density. It's so much of a piece that it's not easy to separate and identify the components that make the movie what it is. The performances by Mr. Lurie, Mr. Waits and Mr. Benigni are extraordinary. However, they wouldn't exist had they not been photographed by Mr. Jarmusch and Mr. Muller in the kind of deep-focus that permits the three to be on the screen at the same time, in the same frame. In this way they are able to act and react to one another - in a way that just isn't possible when the camera keeps intercutting between the actors.
Early on, Mr. Jarmusch's characters, and the world they inhabit, remind one of the plays of Sam Shepard, but the similarity is superficial. Unlike Mr. Shepard's characters, who have their roots in the theater of Ibsen, Mr. Jarmusch's travel light. They carry very little in the way of historical baggage. Their pasts are unimportant. They take their shapes from their present circumstances, and from the way they are seen by the camera in their environment -mostly at a comparatively cool distance.
Mr. Shepard's Americans have cut themselves loose from the safety of middle-class life, and must come to terms with their sense of dislocation. In ''Down by Law,'' Jack, Zack and Roberto seem to have been classless forever, floating always (as they are seen in the film) off the shore of a foreign land they've never known or understood, where a logical system of rewards and punishments still exists. They give us not the actuality of life but a dream impression.
The excitement of ''Down by Law'' comes not from what it's ''about.'' Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.
''Down by Law'' works on the mind and senses in a completely different fashion. It's an unqualified delight, from its elegiacal opening shots to to its unexpected last scene, which is funny in itself as well as a wicked pun on ''Bob'' Frost's now somewhat tired ''Road Not Taken.''
''Down by Law,'' which will be shown tonight at 7:45 at Alice Tully Hall and at 9 at Avery Fisher Hall, opens tomorrow at the Cinema Studio and Cinema 2. UP THE RIVER - DOWN BY LAW, written and directed by Jim
Jarmusch; director of photography, Robby Muller; edited by Melody London; music by John Lurie; produced by Alan Kleinberg; released by Island Pictures. At Alice Tully Hall, 7:45 P.M.; Avery Fisher Hall, 9 P.M., as part of the 24th New York Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.
This film is rated R. Zack...Tom Waits; Jack...John Lurie; Roberto...Roberto Benigni; Nicoletta...Nicoletta Braschi; Laurette...Ellen Barkin; Bobbie...Billie Neal; Gig...Rockets Redglare; Preston...Vernel Bagneris; Julie...Timothea; L. C....L. C. Drane; Detective Mandino...Joy Houck Jr.
movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0DE5D9163BF93AA2575AC0A960948260
0 comments, Reply to this entry