Boys Don't Cry vs. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Boys Don't Cry
Major Flaws: It didn't need to be a film. It could have just as easily been a play, a novel, a tv movie, a frontline report, anything that conveyed the story. The little visual flourishes that Pierce put in were unimpressive and didn't add to my emotional, thematic or atmospheric understanding of the film and I otherwise fail to see their point. Most of the framing was boring and lacked ingenuity while there were noteworthy inserts that inspired cringing, if not (academic) anger. At no point in the film did I feel than any of the anxiety, fear, or pain that were so important to the story was communicated by the film to the audience in any cinematic way. Also, this one is no one's fault, but I couldn't help but think of Candace as "Becky".
Major Attributes: Very fine acting. Peter Sarsgaard and Brendon Sexton are known for these kinds of sleazy roles. Swank was totally convincing and Sevigny was passable to good depending on the scene. I'm not even going to deal with "Becky", I just can't. The pacing was spot on and kept a clean beat throughout. The narrative was expressed with admirable skill and success.
Ghost Dog
Major Flaws: Some of the acting was stiff. I could've done without the VOs on the book excerpts. A number of times it was too clever for its own good and a few times it was too philosophical for its own good.
Major Attributes: I understand a lot of the complaints about Whitaker here, but he totally worked for me. The perspective driven camera work was some of the best, most effortless, I've seen in film of this period. The comedy was very much of Jarmusch's later period and was really on target here. The melange of genres and the spoofing within them was really well done and should be considered before watching Kill Bill if you are a fan of the latter film. The set design, relationships and spatial framing really evoked the tenor of the scene and kept the audience in step with the narrative. Again, surprisingly funny.
The main difference here for me is the use of the medium. While I feel that Pierce's film does nothing with cinema itself and simply uses it to communicate the story, Jarmusch is constantly aware of his artifice and uses it often. Even some of the problems I had with it (the VO on the text) had a purpose that revealed itself and maintained the importance of the device. There was nothing in Pierce's film that I considered indispensable (maybe the shots from the film that she was forced to cut to drop the rating would've changed my perspective on this). While this is nowhere near Jarmusch's best film of the decade (Dead Man being unfairly dispatched earlier), it is more than strong enough to let Boys Don't Cry go.
Ghost Dog over Boys Don't Cry.