Delirious (Tom DiCillo, 2006)

Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt in Delirious

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, Alison Lohman, Gina Gershon, Kevin Corrigan, Richard Short, Elvis Costello. Screenplay: Tom DiCillo. Cinematography: Frank G. DeMarco. Production design: Teresa Mastropierro. Film editing: Paul Zucker. Music: Anton Sanko. 

Celebrity is a broad target for satire, but writer-director Tom DiCillo finds the right weapon for hitting it: He makes his protagonist a paparazzo named Les Galantine, played by Steve Buscemi with his usual high-strung, terrier-like intensity and vulnerability. Trying one day to shove aside the other paparazzi and get the right picture of the latest pop music phenomenon, K'Harma (Alison Lohman), Les encounters a homeless kid named Toby (Michael Pitt), hanging around the fringes of the shoot. With his usual impulsive bark-is-worse-than-his-bite manner, Les at first abuses the kid, and then lets him crash in his apartment. Toby is sweet but a little dim: When Les explains that every paparazzo is in search of "the shot heard around the world," the photo that will make his reputation, Toby clearly doesn't know the origin of the phrase. Still, when he proves useful in capturing a shot of a celebrity who has just had surgery on his penis, Les empties a closet for Toby to use as a bedroom and makes him his unpaid assistant. But gradually the dynamic between the two shifts: K'Harma had noticed the good-looking Toby, who wants to be an actor, and so does a casting director (Gina Gershon) when he tags along with Les at a celebrity event. Before long, it's Toby whom the paparazzi are pursuing, much to Les's fury. DiCillo keeps the satire well within the confines of his story, and his actors never let it overwhelm the characterization of Les and Toby and K'Harma.   

Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

Like a botanist discovering rare plants pushing through cracked pavement and a littered vacant lot, writer-director Jim Jarmusch finds curiously indomitable life forms in the back streets of ungentrified New York, the frozen outskirts of Cleveland, and the parts of coastal Florida that tourists speed through on their way to Orlando or Miami. And he presents them to us in a film with a beautifully eccentric rhythm to it. Stranger Than Paradise is composed of 67 single takes grouped into three sections: "The New World," in which Eva (Eszter Balint) arrives from Budapest to stay with her cousin Willie (John Lurie) in his ratty one-room New York apartment; "One Year Later," in which Willie and his friend Eddie (Richard Edson) drive to wintry Cleveland, where Eva has gone to live with her Aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark); and "Paradise," in which Willie, Eddie, and Eva go to Florida. To say that nothing happens in the film isn't entirely incorrect, especially in the New York and Cleveland sections, in which Willie and Eddie spend most of their time playing cards, smoking, and generally getting on each other's nerves, as well as Eva's. In Florida, they lose money gambling, win it back, and Eva accidentally strikes it rich when she's mistaken for a drug runner's bagman. Yet it's the blackout structure of the film that gives it the illusion of a plot, or at least forward motion. Once you catch its rhythm, you may find yourself, as I did, eagerly anticipating the way in which Jarmusch will end each scene. He rarely does it with a gag or a punchline, but somehow in ways that make each scene feel like a kind of epiphany. In one of the longest sequences, we do nothing but watch the three major characters, plus Eva's boyfriend Billy (Danny Rosen), as they sit in a Cleveland theater watching a movie that, because it has no dialogue but is punctuated with various grunts, seems to be a kung fu film. Billy, who we learn has bought the tickets for everyone, is walled off from Eva by Eddie and Willie, who sit on either side of her, and when he passes the popcorn to Eva, Eddie takes a big handful. We learn more about these characters from this wordless sequence than we do from some of the film's expository dialogue. Tom DiCillo's black-and-white cinematography makes the most of the locations that were chosen for their blandness, bleakness, drabness, or, in the case of the frozen, snow-covered Lake Erie, emptiness. The soundtrack, composed for string quartet by Lurie, is supplemented by Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You," a foreshadowing of Hawkins's appearance in Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989).