Tilda Swinton doesn’t have a co-writing credit on Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (which triumphed over dismissive reviews to top the speciality box office over the weekend), but maybe she should. According to an interview with the actress in Movieline, Jarmusch cribbed one of the film’s most memorable (and self-reflexive) monologues, in which Swinton muses that “Movies are like dreams you’re never really sure you’ve had; sometimes my favorite films are the ones where people sit there and don’t say anything,” from a State of Cinema speech Swinton gave at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2006. That speech, which was structured as a letter to Swinton’s young son, after he wondered “what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented”, is online at SF360.
It’s hard to know how to go about using words to do justice to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film seemingly designed to reveal the folly of associating language with meaning, so concerned it is with the rhythm and atmosphere of code over courting traditional satisfaction by suggesting conceivable systems for breaking it. In talking about a picture in which everything is surface (or else nothing is), and the relationship between all signs and their meanings are scrambled (or none are), is everything a spoiler? (Or, perhaps nothing is?)
It’s possible that you’re frustrated already, and you wouldn’t be the only one; Jarmusch’s film is the first to be released this calendar year to truly polarize critics to the point where some of my colleagues have suggested that it’s one of the filmmaker’s worst efforts, while others champion it as one of his best. As such, it seems necessary to be more transparently subjective than usual: I like it. The Limits of Control seems to work best for those who can roll with the fact that Jarmusch is trafficking in vague genre promises that he only barely cashes in on, and that the story’s perceived mystery is a MacGuffin to pave the way for a rumination on creative idealism as a code that crosses transnational lines, bridging gaps of language and ethnic difference to unite dreamers/travelers (signified here as one and the same) in a common fight against those who seek to destroy their philosophy in the name of global capitalist homogeneity.
…Read more
All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”
That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below.
…Read more
