the art of nothing

stranger than paradise 1984 directed by Jim Jarmusch

permanent vacation 1980 directed by Jim Jarmusch

The funny thing about jim jarmusch is that none of his films are really my favorite or movies i consistently watch, but his work is the most inspiring to me. I watched permanent vacation a year and a half/ two years ago and it seems like the longer i haven't seen it the more in my head it is. It's one of those things that you see and you dig it and you understand why it exists but moving in front of you it's a little slow, a little boring, you move onto more kinetic things but it's the slowness that sticks with you for so much longer than anything else could.

 So much that over the past year i've realized i'm a hardcore realist. I enjoy beginnings of movies very much and i usually only prefer to watch the beginning, just a peek of someones life before the conflict arises and it turns into an epic. My two favorite movie beginnings are Taxi Driver, before he shaves his head is where i usually stop watching it and i love it because it actually does remind me of a darker jarmusch movie if it stopped before he started shooting people it could pass as a jarmusch movie but because there's a huge blowout scene it's a Scorsese movie, and The Matrix. the matrix is so funny because i seriously only like the first 20 minutes. I just love the idea of an office man by day and elite hacker by night drifting in out of sleep at 4 in the morning so on the verge of discovering something that is so much bigger than himself. That to me is 100 times more interesting than the actual things he discovers. the matrix is just too big, too in my face it actually bores me which is why Kid's Story from the animatrix is my favorite of all the videos because it's mostly just him in the matrix (and the cool ass animation helps).

Another thing that reminded me of the whole no plot notion was minoru furuya's ciguerta and himizu which i guess you could just call pretty typical coming of age stories, but to see such a straight forward coming of age story without gimmicky romance or a mecha side plot told in manga is pretty atypical. and a story about "growing up" is still not really a plot, i mean the ultimate coming of age story Catcher in the rye you can tell me what holden's like and what he's doing but there still is no plot. All you really need for a good story is characters and a setting.