Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (1999) ****

More than twenty years on, Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (1999), Jim Jarmusch's genre/culture mashup, holds up incredibly well and is perhaps even better than I remembered it.

Jarmusch's film presents a lone hit man (Forest Whitaker) living by a code, embracing both ancient practices and modern technology. Whitaker perfectly portrays the titular character—emoting through his sad and stoic eyes, deliberate movements, and sparse dialogue. Many, seemingly disparate, elements comprise this unique minimalist poetic slice of cinema—the mafia movie, chanbara, blaxploitation, books (including Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short stories such as Rashōmon (1915) and In A Grove (1922)), and hip hop (the RZA's jittering, pulsing score), to name a few. Jarmusch borrows from two 1967 films in particular—Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (my review here) and Seijun Suzuki's Branded To Kill.

Ghost Dog's languid pace and slow dissolves meld satisfactorily when interspersed with on-screen (and voice-overed) quotes from Tsunetomo's spiritual guidebook. The exchanges between the Italian American gangsters in the film are hilarious stereotypes yet still dignified portrayals, augmented by cartoons viewed by these characters, which parallel what happens on-screen. It all just seems to work, in a way that only Jarmusch could pull off.

You can find my Jim Jarmusch Feature Films Ranked list here.