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Jim Jarmusch, USA, 1999
"Continue to spur a running horse." That's but one of the bits of wisdom to be gleaned from Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, the volume of 18th century samurai philosophy that ethereal urban hitman Forest Whitaker keeps as his constant companion throughout Jim Jarmusch's like-minded, like-titled new film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. But it is not, surprisingly, one of the many passages from that volume which Jarmusch, fixing the philosophical mindset of Whitaker's contemporary snuff agent within the context of Japan's "strange" and "ancient" culture of death, painstakingly and recurrently quotes onscreen.
Or is it?
Recurrent quotes are the very substance of Ghost Dog, of both the film and its titular hero, Whitaker's curtly cornrowed assassinfor-hire. Photographed in the fecal-industrial environs of Jersey City, N.J., the film lifts a metal gate to reveal an ill-bent, sunblanched noirville where the empathic birdman of Melville's Le Samourai meets the butterfly-addled button-pusher of Suzuki's Branded to Kill for a battle of the book reports over Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and WE.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk. And within this crucible of hit-mania, Whitaker's titular hero - wistfully sympathizing with doomed Promethean seekers everywhere, longing to be "home away," like Shelley's creature, "into the darkness and distance" - exists as much in positive/negative relation to Jarmusch's last floating ghost, Johnny Depp's already-dead William Blake, as to his own unnerving career as the cuddlemaster behind Hope Floats.
"Every day when one's...