(video: Jarmusch discussing past collaborations w/ Neil Young and RZA)
I haven't had a chance to see Jarmusch's neo-noir The Limits of Control yet, but it's already ranking as one of the most interesting soundtracks this year, what with its "power ambient" sensibility. This time around Jarmusch is taking more of a licensed/various artists approach (click here for the full soundtrack listing on the Playlist blog), and his sense of adventure is still very much in tact.
Jarmusch has said that when when he starts writing scripts he'll listen to music that "kick start" his imagination, and if that was true with Control, then it was tickled to life by some truly unlikely muses. How Japanese sludge rock trio Boris, a for instance, could have given rise to a film Betsy Sharkey described as a series of "sun-saturated French impressionist paintings" is of an un-small amount of interest. How could tracks by drone doom pioneers Earth have any business in a film with a globe trotting, cappuccino swilling protagonist who is, according to Roger Ebert, "handsome, exotic, cool, impenetrable, hip, mysterious, quiet, coiled, enigmatic, passive, stoic and hungry?" Maybe the music will just loom in dark irony or slide sideways into post-modern Bond-ness of it all.
In any case, I really like the idea of this guy ordering his foamy coffee beverages to the tune of "Omens and Portents." I mean, most directors would have chosen some generic Buddha Bar dross or unobtrusive Spanish guitar for this subject matter. I love that Jarmusch is gloriously unwilling to pad his images in such car commercial fare, and instead lights out for the territories. It may or may not all hang together, but in a year dominated by the schlocky backwash of the 2007 writers' strike, I would take even a failed experiment over a seamless rehash. And I'm not worried. With fellow seekers Christopher Doyle, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton involved, I am, in fact, not even going to bother to read the reviews before seeing it.
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