In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Jim Jarmusch tries to do to the samurai epic and the gangster movie what he did to the western in Dead Man (1997), his dreamy, elegiac deconstruction of cowboys-and-Indians mythology. Like a postmodern magpie, Mr. Jarmusch likes to scavenge shiny bits of pop-culture flotsam — mobsters in their sharkskin suits, gaudy cartoon animals, sleek imported luxury cars, iridescent CD’s — and weave them into quirky, ramshackle habitations. [Read more…]