Jim Jarmusch's PATERSON starring Adam Driver as a bus driver/poet

I've never been a huge JJ fan, but this is the best he's managed in awhile. And should put to death the idea that Driver can only do weird hipsters.

Best/most New Jersey movie in years too, with shoutouts to W C Williams, Lou Costello, Uncle Floyd, Larry Doby et al.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnWKiF19gIc

Cop Land actually the best movie about marriage in New Jersey.

psyched for this. bummed it doesn't come out here for another month or so. did anyone see his Stooges doc?

Saw this a couple months ago, pretty stunning. Morbs otm re: Driver.

Looks great, wish it was playing in lil' ol' Wisconsin.

Driver won year's best actor from the LA critics, but I strongly doubt he will crack the bigger-budgeted Oscar lineup.

im so pumped for this - what's the deal with the soundtrack? jj usually has a soundtrack schtick going on. i think the vampire movie could have been a major classic if he cut out the corny jack white is god shit.

the trailer for this looks good, it seems like this particular type of independent cinema has been replaced these days by more splashy things.

Every time I go to the cinema I see the trailer for this. I do not like that.

... this and the new Scorsese film, coincidentally.

Driver won year's best actor from the LA critics, but I strongly doubt he will crack the bigger-budgeted Oscar lineup.

jeez doc why you gotta make every film thread about Osc*r prognostication

i think the vampire movie could have been a major classic if he cut out the corny jack white is god shit.

^totally the worst part of a very enjoyable movie

I did not register any Jack White involvement in the vampire movie, guess I missed something

Film about my hometown so will watch but it looks like fantasy.

Watched "Copland" for first time last night. Outstanding in how it managed to capture "Jersey" and not a fascimile thereof. Only thing I can think of that came closest - at least in its first couple of seasons - was "The Sopranos". Also my favorite Stallone role.

Yeah, good movie. Jarmusch is expert these days at filming repetition.

but it looks like fantasy.

It's not harshly realistic, no, and what of it? It deals in part with working people and routine, not in a galaxy far far away, so exotic for this era.

Paterson's poems are by this guy --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Padgett

-- which Sotosyn didn't care for. I don't think it's important to the film whether the poetry is good or not, so I didn't care so much that I couldn't tell.

why do you keep referencing Star Wars

Settle down, Morbs. I'm looking forward to watching a film about a young white guy driving a '70s era bus in my city while musing and then going home to his wife and bulldog when in reality this sort of thing * does not exist in Paterson, NJ nowadays*. I'm fine with the fantasy and fuck yeah I can dig both Star Wars and Sirk It's all cinéma to me, yo. Free your mind and your snarkiness will mellow.

Xpost Morbs still livid that Star Wars "killed" cinema.

oh yeah, apparently there is a vein of White Man Protagonist criticism of the film i have mercifully only heard about, so no need for me to invoke the Order of the Permanently Offended.

I've been in NJ recently and seen buses like his.

My bad. Seems the bus is contemporary.

Go to Paterson sometime.

The supporting characters are panracial and, as some critic whose name i can't recall wrote, are "in no way marginalized."

The averageness of the poems doesn’t matter, agreed

what's the deal with the soundtrack? jj usually has a soundtrack schtick going on.

Some of it is by Jarmusch's group SQÜRL; it's all pretty ambient (I think Paterson is in many ways an attempt at ambient cinema)

jeez doc why you gotta make every film thread about Osc*r prognostication

v funny Simon, but i just meant a nomination would have a big effect on the scope of theatrical distribution.

The film wouldn't work if the poems were better. The stakes would be too high.

I didn't see much last year but this was my favourite thing that I did see. I think it's really beautiful.

Well, don't tell Jarmusch! xp

This was an extremely boring film. I had to fight against falling asleep after 5 minutes. The only thing that saved it for me was the dog and its humour. The repetitiveness of the days was quite annoying, I found. The last good Jarmush film I have seen was Broken Flowers.

Then you'll love my pal's comparison of the everyday grind in this film and The Turin Horse!

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy

Lol I loathe that movie but I am still stoked for this

i will try to read the essay but before i have to add that i absolutely loathed the "poems" which were just awful and did not work. i love william carlos williams intense simple poems which condense life settings in very few simple words - a little like haikus - but these scribblings had nothing to do with it. they were so mundane and loveless, i couldn't bear them, they were crap.

That the poetry was good or not (and it wasn't all that necessarily) was not the point. Liked how the film went through the creative routine of someone that holds down a job. Its what many struggle with.

What I didn't like was what the wife was up to - not so much the r/ship (the affection, mutual support was well-played). She was annoying at times, a kind of a cliche but I am willing to say she was a mirror in some ways to the bus driver husband, adding colour to a kind of grey existence that the film does need. Overdone somewhat.

I have read complaints re Laura; I generally was fine with her, semi-cartoony ambitions or not, largely due to Golshifteh Farahani's charming performance.

having spent plenty of time in Paterson over the last few years i really want to see this.

did you ever take a bus?

yes i sure did

was just trying find the picture i took of the bus i was on that got stuck in the snow in Paterson.

Did everyone have to get off the bus?

lol yes it was a packed bus and we all stood around for a bit watching the driver try and get it out. I ended up walking .

lol you should definitely see the film ;)

Charles Taylor:

The last lines of Padgett’s poem “The Future of Your Name” are “the future won’t have any meaning / left for it. It will be all used up.” Jarmusch isn’t waiting for the future. Faced with a mindlessly voracious present, in which all images, ideas, stories, and music are not so much built on as cannibalized, Jarmusch is taking a stand, perhaps a quixotic one, against the idea of culture being used up. He can still do deadpan, as he shows in almost everything having to do with Marvin, Paterson and Laura’s comically grumpy bulldog (played with a trouper’s panache by a female named Nellie, who died shortly after the film was made). But on the whole, he has traded deadpan for subtlety. His films are quiet now — not because he is affecting cool but as a means of unshowy resistance against the incoherent noise and bash that constitutes so much of contemporary movies. I’m not ready to compare Paterson to Ozu’s great Tokyo Story. But I do think that, just as Ozu did, Jarmusch wants us to believe in the past as a real place whose inhabitants weren’t fools or buffoons. And I believe he wants us to treasure what has lasted, to see that, whether it’s the William Carlos Williams poems Paterson reveres or the soul and blues playing softly in the background of his local watering hole, art from the past can be as devastatingly present to us as anything contemporary.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/man-city-jim-jarmuschs-paterson/

I liked this film a lot but it's kinda blowing my mind that those are real poems by a real poet tbh, they're like parody NYS

I've gotten over it, as I point out in my review.

^even tho the 'climax' is telegraphed thunderously, SPOILER

what Williams verse are you quoting

do we know whether the little girl's poem was written by this padgett fellow too

blowing my mind that those are real poems by a real poet tbh

In Anthony Burgess's satiric novel about a poet (Enderby) the main character, was portrayed as a slothful, piggish, and priggish man, whose poetry would be idolized by future generations. Burgess then appended a series of poems he attributed to his 'great' poet. He was both amused and somewhat disappointed that none of the critics reviewing the book addressed the question of whether the poems were good, bad or indifferent and called it 'a failure of nerve'.

Jarmusch wrote the little girl's poem.

I didn't have a prob w/ the poetry, I thought it worked well, read by Driver, as another piece of ambient sound.

the trailers make this look sooooooooooooooo bad, and i hated Only Lovers Left Alive, but w/e Broken Flowers is one of my favorite movies so i'm excited to see this soon.

better hurry!

it just opened today here... along with Almodovar's Julieta, way more psyched on that...

Don't be.

I thought this was a beautiful film. The first poem about the matches was a deft display of Jarmusch's talent; he is able to take what seems like an observational and rote poem about matches and then transform it emotionally when Paterson links the matches to lighting his girlfriend's first cigarette. I love the empathy in his films.

i liked this a lot. didn't really have strong opinions about the actual poetry one way or another--and i dont know if the movie does either since its destruction is treated less as a catastrophe than an example of ultimate transience. poetry recaptures and re-organizes the entropy of life but this too shall pass, etc.

the dog is the principle of chaos, clearly, with the mailbox and paterson always having to put it back in place--every day holding back trends toward disorder. and it's significant that Paterson lets him back in the house even after destroying the notebook.

maybe it's just me, but perhaps there's some deeply buried political subtext going on too? not sure that i could connect those dots myself, though it seems to me that the wife is possibly responding to some kind of trauma as well. if that reading has any merit it's an unusual film since i'd argue that both characters have a healthy response to past trauma. but maybe that reading is over-dramatic, and ordinary life is traumatic enough.

i missed any implied past trauma, what are you referring to?

Seemed like Paterson may have been in the military based on how easily he took down the gunman? But I could be wrong. Everyone seems surprised by his reaction but he seemed quietly stunned.

oh right, there was a picture of him in uniform on their bedside table!

Hey I loved this. Instantly read as an idealized vision of the city to me so I was ok with going along with it and was happy I did. Really lovely little film.

Such a fine line sometimes between desolate mood piece and deadly dull...I liked this, but for me it did walk right up to that line.

One of the best things about it is that it even got made, with some measure of distribution. I saw it in a pretty big multiplex theatre tonight that was at least half full. Discount Tuesday, but still--that's pretty amazing.

Also--don't mean to be pretentious, or to just make up stuff--I can see where this might be one kind of valid response to Trump for the next few years: situate yourself a million miles away, in a world where people aren't yelling at each other all day long.

The surprise towards the end, and what that says about art and life and their relationship to each other (even if you have doubts about the artistic worth of Adam Driver's poems--my friend pointed out they were written by an actual poet of some repute): will have to give that some thought.

A little skeptical about their idyllic--unnaturally idyllic--marriage. Driver and his wife didn't so much as look at each other cross-eyed even once.

Driver's wife reminded me of both Salma Hayek and Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Rain Man. And I want to go look up the bartender, who I strongly associate with one particular film.

Barry Shabaka Henley. It's Collateral I associate him with. He tells the story about meeting (playing with?) Miles Davis.

I associate him with looking oddly at the duck voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in the old Aflac ads.

I laughed extremely loud at the point where the bartender's other half storms into the bar to as where her money is - "chess tournament? Chess tournament? I'll give you a chess tourniquet if I don't get my money back"

having spent plenty of time in Paterson over the last few years i really want to see this.

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Wednesday, January 18, 2017 4:46 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I want to check this out, too. I did a criminal law internship in Paterson a few years ago, and it was like Night Court set in the True Detective universe. I'm assuming this movie's a little more lighthearted than that.

The unreal marriage started to make sense when I considered the possibility that Paterson wants tranquility -- perhaps passivity -- in life and art.

The wife just seemed like a really lovely person to me.

Have known plenty of couples who celebrate and encourage each other's creativity in much the same way as the couple in Paterson - coupledom is partly about building a united front against the indifference of the wider world, and love definitely deepens when seldom is heard a discouraging word.

So I didn't think it was 'unnaturally idyllic' at all - and besides, Paterson at the very least looks less than enraptured at the thought of having to find funds for a new guitar.

A little cruel, but I did laugh at David Edelstein on the wife: "...Laura is a bit like Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres: dizzily beautiful and completely untethered." In which case I guess Marvin = Arnold the pig. (Just read that Marvin died after the film's completion: http://www.indiewire.com/2016/05/the-2016-palm-dog-posthumously-awarded-to-nellie-the-dog-from-jim-jarmuschs-paterson-289094/)

I don't know--there just seemed something a little unreal about the marriage to me (which didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the film all that much).

I agree, seemed like there was a gulf between them. Opposites attract, I guess.

Loved this film. Want to watch it again. I haven't wanted to re-watch a film in a very long time.

damn still haven't got around to seeing this. perhaps since it is Amazon Studios it will be streaming soon.

I loved this too... esp after the shitty Iggy doc and the cringy vampire movie.

It's not the most naturalistic of films.

I forget who commented that a 'mixed' couple goes to see the inter-species horror oldie Island of Lost Souls...

I loved this too... esp after the shitty Iggy doc and the cringy vampire movie.

― kurt schwitterz, Wednesday, February 22, 2017

you're a cringy vampire movie.

It's not the most naturalistic of films.

Au contraire: it's naturalistic, not realistic.

Love JJ, not a fan of AD. watch?

definitely

My favourite film of last year I think. It's not flawless but I like it's flaws too.

One thing I liked that I've been mulling over was the Japanese man's exit line: "A-ha!" I know it echoes something that was said earlier in their conversation, but it's also a cliché of teaching workshops: the "a-ha! moment." Paterson gives the cliché some life.

Loved this and pretty much wanted to rewatch immediately too. Felt similarly about the "cringy vampire movie". People caught up on the Jack White things in that feel like people caught up on the quality of dude's poetry in this. Ultimately seems inconsequential.

This is going to be very high on my film poll ballot.

My fave Driver performance to date. Not ruling it out as my fave Jarmusch film, either.

Same