Cult of Jim

I clutched the small crate of tea candles in my left hand as I swung my arms in time with my quick-paced stride. I cruised down the middle avenue, passing red-bull's eye-logo-marked aisles. I hummed the theme song to Saturday Night Fever in my head as I strutted, at least in my mind's eye, like a young John Travolta.

I was on course and within sight of the auto parts sector where I intended to acquire a compact tool kit for my car, when an image caught the corner of my eye. I stopped cold in my tracks. I did a double take, and whispered a little too-loudly, "Holy Shit!" The passing-mother of two small children gave me a very dirty look. I didn't care, the older of the two probably heard worse coming from mommy's bedroom on Friday night...

I was dumbfounded, I was astonished, I was annoyed. There, before me, on display with a none-too-small price tag, sitting on the shelf as if anyone in their right mind would buy it, was the DVD of the single worst movie ever made. SITTING RIGHT THERE!!! I mean, somebody could have actually purchased it and taken it home!! Even I was fooled, a few years back, into actually paying money to see that crapass bucket of swine-vomit in a movie theater, and I’m not an easy person to fool! (Well, Cheney’s minions did fool me into voting for W in 2000, but hey, they were able to fool a near majority of voters as well.)

So, anyway, the movie... Way back in 1995, the missus and I were in law school, and had just started dating. Now, I think it’s fair to say that my wife is not shy when it comes to making rules, mostly for herself. Sometimes, the rules even make sense. One of her best rules, and one that we have come to renew our faith in was, “Johnny Depp can be trusted to choose only worthwhile roles, and it is a safe bet to see any movie that he is in.” Being lawyers, we have devised a number of corollaries and amendments to that rule, but the gist basically holds true.

True, that is, with one glaring exception: Dead Man. No, NOT Dead Man Walking, that was Sean Penn. They came out at the same time, and are often confused. No, Dead Man. DEAD MAN. Remember it. Avoid it.

Dead Man, there it was, on DVD. Somebody wasted calories and breath to put the effort into transferring the image to digital format and assembling a cover sleeve. Dead Man. There’s $8.00 and two hours that I’ll never get back.

Spoiler Alert!! Here’s the movie: Johnny is in the old west. He gets off a train, has a scuffle and gets shot. That’s all in the first five minutes. The entire rest of the never-ending Bataan-death-march-like movie is about Johnny wandering into the woods dying, until at last, he gets in a boat. The End.

Not only did I want to gnaw my arm off sitting there, I wanted to gnaw off the arm of the lady sitting in front of me. I didn’t want to appear to be uncultured to my date, so I sat there biding my time. Unfortunately, my date was thinking and doing the exact same thing. I suppose that’s why we got married.

So, why has this cinematic turd been released on DVD? Because there is a group of people who will buy it, and they are The Cult of Jim. Jim Jarmusch. He’s the real perpetrator, and he has followers. Now, I’ve enjoyed some of his other films. Ghost Dog, the story of a modern samurai, was brilliant, and Night on Earth was quirky fun. To his cult, though, everything Jim does is a masterpiece. Jim is infallible.

You can find these people on IMDB or Amazon.com, slathering this hateful piece of garbage with praise, rating it 5 out of 5 stars, and then apologizing to the proletariat for the seemingly plotless storyline. If they are not apologizing, however, then they are condemning the witless critics for not being “NewYork enough.”

Well, poor little me. With seven years of higher education, a staggeringly impressive DVD collection, and a brain the size of a goddamn pumpkin; I guess I just ain’t smart enough about these here moving pictures to have a legitimate opinion…

Once bitten, twice shy. You can keep your stinking DVD. I hope whichever studio executive that decided to release it dies horribly, with pus-filled boils.