FuzzyTagz
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
fred freeze
A good number of rotten tomatoes for this one but it's so bad it's redeemable and watchable for a second time. The cost of making this film must have been rock bottom. At the end I wish this depressing soap opera continued following the lives of these depressing individuals and their bleak existence. I can see the classic cult appeal to this sad excuse for a motion picture. But I liked it.No sex and almost no bad language. A glimpse into a life of poverty and boredom. A week long trip seeking adventure in dreary Cleveland and traveling to a cheap motel in Florida. I got a good laugh when cousin Eva showed the two dead beats the view of Lake Erie.Suicide Alert - If you're depressed this movie could push you over the edge. :)
Lachlan J McDougall
Long lingering conversations, shots held for much longer than is necessary, and a plot that really goes nowhere: Stranger Than Paradise has all of the hallmarks to make it an art-house auteur classic, but don't mistake Jarmusch's flair for pretension. In fact the lingering shots and stunted conversations found in this film are anything but pretentious, rather they are the core of realism in cinema.We film lovers have long been trained in what to expect from a movie: dialogue has a natural sounding progression that moves us from plot point A to plot point B, characters have motivations that make sense, and stories go forward with an easy momentum. Stranger Than Paradise, contrary to these established modes of film making, just lets events, characters, and dialogue unfold in a manner much more similar to the real world than most other films. Conversations are not directed and shots are not carefully constructed and edited, rather the viewer feels like a fly on the wall as this collection of bored characters try to find something (anything) to talk about.The plot revolves (like many of Jarmusch's movies) around a cast of outsiders drifting aimlessly through life. Willie (John Lurie) is a bored New Yorker with a gambling habit, Eva (Ezter Balint) is his Hungarian immigrant cousin, and Eddie (Richard Edson) is their hopelessly optimistic tag-along friend, and our story follows these three as they travel through their dull lives making an issue out of everything.The actual plot, however, takes a backseat the real goings on in this film. The boredom and pointlessness is not meant to entertain in any usual way, but rather to force the viewer into a mode of existential thinking. These characters are not searching for entertainment or action (although they think they are), they are simply searching for themselves all over America. "What does it mean to be an American?" Jarmusch is asking of us, and furthermore, "what does it mean to simply 'be'?"Stranger Than Paradise provides no answers to these questions, but it does give a deep insight into the issues at hand. Like every single shot the characters fade in, exist for a time, and then fade out. Nothing is achieved, nothing is accomplished, thing just are. And that is where the beauty of the movie lies; in its simple act of existing.I suppose that some might find the whole thing pointless, and I would agree to an extent, but those who dismiss this film for its pointlessness are in for a very heated argument indeed. It's true that this is not the movie you want to throw in the player when you are looking forward to an evening of mindless entertainment with friends, but that doesn't lessen the movie's impact at all. It is a commitment to lock yourself into the film and really work your way through the melange of useless conversation and dead-pan editing, but I would say that it is well worth the effort. There is just so much to be gained from watching this film with an open mind and taking in the sheer beauty of its bared souls.
dougdoepke
Viewers appear to either love the film or hate it. Like any good work of art, STP tries to get us to see the familiar in an unfamiliar way, such that our understanding of the every-day is deepened. So I'm tempted to say that anyone willing to look through Jarmusch's novel spectacles will be rewarded, while those insisting on a more conventional approach will turn away in disgust. But perhaps the results are not as simple as that. After all, who would want to sit through a double feature that extends the listlessness and minimalism to 3 hour duration. STP may have moments of real insight such as the dead-end diner, nevertheless as cinematic style, the limitations are obvious. (Andy Warhol's eight hours of fixed focus on a Manhattan skyscraper may be a profound idea, but as repeatable cinema the limitations are even more obvious.) Still and all, this one-of-a kind is salvaged by its droll humor. By any measure, it's an exquisite example of existential comedy. The zombified characters simply cannot communicate with one another and as a result are reduced to co-existing in darkly humorous fashion, carrying their mute fumblings from one seedy locale to another, (the ridiculous pork-pie hats are a brilliant comedic touch). And not even that most American of solutions, a big wad of money, helps; in fact the sudden windfall produces a final physical separation, both amusingly ironic and unexpectedly poignant. Apparently, Jarmusch intends this on-going isolation as a musing on the so-called human condition, since a number of scenes are filmed against featureless horizons. But whatever the over-all intention, this 'Buster Keaton meets Ingmar Bergman' oddity remains a classic of deadpan understatement. And though most of us are a lot more talkative than the three principals, I wonder--when you get right down to it which Jarmusch does--if we communicate any more effectively.
wandereramor
I first encountered Stranger than Paradise in a Intro to Film tutorial - - I think it was for the week on cinematography. It was only the opening scene, but the visual style grabbed me right away. The grainy black and white, looking not like a 1980s feature film but rather newsreel of some mid-century atrocity, the long opening shot of Eszter Balint's Eva walking away from the airport like an angel of death, the almost-surreal scene of her walking through the streets blaring "I Put A Spell On You"... it stuck with me. A few years later, I finally got around to watching the film in its entirety. The visual style fades after a while and becomes invisible in the way cinematography tends to. But what emerges in its place is a slow but devastating character drama.Stranger than Paradise is really about the immigrant experience in America. In this way it is a strange, low-key response to The Godfather. Whereas Coppola saw the story of the immigrant as one of struggle, seduction, and eventual corruption -- a Hollywood tragedy, in other words -- Jarmusch argues that it is a grind, an endless procession of ungrateful relatives, incomprehensible television, dead-end jobs, and the slow realization that no matter where you go, the banality of real life is always there ahead of you.Jarmusch was a pioneer in independent American cinema. The style of Stranger than Paradise is echoed in any of the countless "mumblecore" films that deal with the mundanity of contemporary existence (and perhaps existence in general). It is frequently a boring film, mainly because it is about boredom and its omnipresence. Certainly it could be aesthetically improved, so that the dialogue and the characters have the same artistic grace as the cinematography. But somehow I like Stranger than Paradise just as it is. Instead of the catharsis of Hollywood, it leaves the viewer with an emptiness, a strange hole in their gut that they can't quite figure out what to do with. But maybe that hole was always there, and the film only cast a revelatory light on it.
