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" The news that today filmmaker Jim Jarmusch turns sixty is not surprising because he&amp;#039;s been making movies for so little time (he&amp;#039;s done it since 1980&amp;#039;s Permanent Vacation). It&amp;#039;s surprising because of the kinds of movies he&amp;#039;s made for thirty-three years. Jarmusch defined for us before we knew it the Generation X rebel director who makes intensely private movies for people just like him \u2014 the Richard Linklater, the Andersons Wes and PT, the Spike Jonze, the Sofia Coppola.  I snuck into Coffee and Cigarettes (the feature-length movie from 2003) midway through a showing at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, a restored movie house from the &amp;#039;20s. I desperately wanted to see the movie and the theater, but it was my first time in Chicago, and I had no idea how to get there. It didn&amp;#039;t really matter. It&amp;#039;s the kind of movie you can watch from any point in the middle. When it was over, I waited for the next showing and watched again from the beginning. It made sense. It&amp;#039;s about people hanging out. Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi. You could drop in at any point in the conversation. All of Jarmusch&amp;#039;s films, in one way or another, follow that same circular logic, most memorably in Dead Man, about a man whose life seems to be one wandering circle. You can point to good or bad Jarmusch movies from different points in his career, but he&amp;#039;s always been steadfast in his refusal to make tidy A-to-B stories that pass on some important life wisdom. He&amp;#039;s always sought out new collaborators (Rza!) and stories about journeys that don&amp;#039;t necessarily arrive anywhere, or where you&amp;#039;d expect them to. Which has made him something of a hero for a certain kind of young moviemaker and moviegoer \u2014 the kind that might go on to make Slacker, say. Like the people in his movies, Jarmusch is more content to drift. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a18308/jim-jarmusch-birthday-15008504/>