Sitting in New York, watching the days go by. Sitting in Cleveland, watching the days go by. Not much happening. Maybe we should do something. How about we go to Florida?

A poem of boredom, stasis, and banality. A very beautiful movie without a single pretty image, and a very funny movie without a single joke. The kind of miserable world you can wrap yourself in like a warm blanket. In its way, a perfect film.

I would imagine that circa 1984, if you were old enough to remember how exciting Antonioni was when he appeared, and conscious enough to mourn the absence of anything like him or what he represented in mainstream film culture for years, this movie would have been a very exciting development. And if you were too young to remember? Imagine seeing something like this in a movie theatre in 1984.

Jim Jarmusch's "wherever you go, it's all the same" movie may feel a little cynical about the joys of the world — here, the joys are mostly a stolen pack of cigarettes, an old cartoon on TV, and a win at the racetrack — but it's a terrific moody character study and it feels like the Rosetta Stone to understanding Jim Jarmusch's film rhythms, the way he lingers on shots and lets his characters sit around so viewers can study and understand them. This is a film about people fighting to define themselves in spite of other people's expectations, but the fights are so subtle that they get summed up in the way the characters stand, and sit, and look at each other, and listen to music.

We'll get into a lot more detail about this film on the next edition of the Next Picture Show podcast, where we've paired it with Jarmusch's newest film, Paterson.

I didn't quite get this when I first saw it years ago as a young lad, and today I finally understood why. It's because I hadn't been through my twenties yet.

At age 26, I can spectacularly declare that this is the most viciously accurate cinematic portrayal of post-teenage life I've ever seen. The whimsy is gone, and it's replaced with worry. Dear love between family and friends turns into dull connection out of necessity. The sense of adventure goes, because every place you visit starts to look and feel exactly the same. So what do you do? You sit around your cheap, shitty digs, you smoke and you watch TV, waiting for something to happen.

It's amazing that almost forty years after this film's release, it seems like almost nothing has changed. Just put phones in their hands and you've got a monochromatic 2023.

ideal friend group

The land of the free puts a spell on you: ennui, alienation and cultural dislocation; after all, it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

No matter where you go, or how many places you leave, you just can’t escape this empty, desolate, late-modernist, greyscale world in which you’re trapped.

The loadstar that would ultimately guide the 90’s indie boom, making so much of an impact on American Cinema that a decade later independent movies, almost monolithically, were still trying to be some variation of this, either in form or in spirit.

john lurie following me on twitter is and forever will be the coolest shit that’s ever happened to me

Brilliant in that it gets you on board with the movie going nowhere, convinces you that the substantial joy to be had is in the minimalist notes, and then ends in a fit of irony that actually utilizes details you just accept as borderline-extraneous at the beginning to be cathartic and conclusive. Again, it makes a strong enough case that the story doesn’t need to go anywhere to be good, but it certainly helps punctuate things.

I love how Willy (John Lurie) is so eager to disavow his Hungarian roots and be a fully-assimilated American, and he lives in an apartment that's indistinguishable from the western stereotype of Soviet-style housing, and the thing he likes about America are certain consumer brands ("It's the same Chesterfields. All over America.") and TV dinners ("This is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don't even have to wash the dishes."). It takes some vision and courage to make a movie in 1984 that - in its style, pace, and politics - grates this much against the dominant culture of the Reagan era.