Amazon.com Customer Reviews
 Rated 5 out of 5!
Brilliant piece of work
Jarmusch does it again with excellence!!!!
Great character piece.... Rated 4 out of 5
This plum is from Japan
This simple movie is great! It really brings you in and tells a great story of three parties crossing paths in downtrodden Memphis.
The story of the Japanese couple was an excellent way to show America through the eyes of a foreigner. I almost felt like a stranger in my own country. The scenes with the local lowlifes were the movie’’s weaker points, but they were still good. "Son, I’’m the man who’’s gonna make you use that gun."
Definitely worth purchasing for repeat viewings if you’’re a film afficianado. If you are into more mainstream films, rent it first.
-- JJ Timmins
- Rated 4 out of 5
Elvis Dark Elvis Light.
I think this film is quite good, but I disagree with the basic slant on it taken by the editor and the other customer reviews. I think this film is at least as much dark satire as it is celebration of the Elvis ’’legacy’’.
Jarmusch understands that comedy, the comic, is always rooted in irony and extreme contrast. But because it is rooted in irony, in contradiction, it is also never far away from nightmare. From beginning to end this beautiful little film overflows with ironies, harsh contrasts, comedy, and looming nightmare. People who don’’t grasp Jarmusch’’s deep feel for the proximity of comedy and nightmare call his style ’’quirky’’. But for Jarmusch this quirkiness is a dominant characteristic of the human condition, not merely an idiosyncrasy of his own.
To begin with consider the major inclusive contradiction that the entire film is set in, namely, that between the glory and wealth normally associated with Elvis and Graceland and the run down, trashed, Memphis that the film places us in. Jarmusch sets up the viewer by beginning with the very upbeat feel of the moving train and young Elvis singing the title song. From the first frames of the young Japanese couple on the train we know that they are going to Graceland and everything associated with that place immediately comes emotionally to mind. But Jarmusch deliberately drives against this mental/emotional current by leading us into a Memphis that feels more like a ghetto than the dream-home of our hero. From there the ironies just become continually more dense and subtle. By the time we reach the segment involving the gun-toting Britisher nicknamed ’’Elvis’’, we are very close to a hell-world with only comedy to protect us from feeling its full impact. Clearly the legendary, fantasy Elvis that haunts every corner of this dark, shabby, sad, little world of Memphis is as oppressive and exploitative as it is liberating. When these two contradicting aspects collide it creates comedy in the film, but it creates comedy only because we don’’t want to deal directly with the darker aspects of the whole Elvis phenomenon involving racism, economic exploitation, consumer manipulation, etc. To see this film as a merely quirky, though skillful, tribute to the Elvis legacy is to miss its rich deeper layers. But then to see this one must be willing to acknowledge that Jarmusch might have something negative to say about the Elvis phenomenon and certain other aspects of americana. But whatever one’’s take on the film may be, I think that it must at least be admitted that Jarmusch probably had a good reason for mixing these extremes of dark and light, I mean a better reason than mere quirkiness. But the film stimulates a great deal of thought and felling and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in genuinely creative American cinema.
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