THE DEAD DON'T DIE

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is an unashamedly indulgent movie who's success relies on the audience wanting to be in on the joke.  I went along for the ride and found it to be uproariously funny, silly, shaggy and joyful - and hands down one of my favourite films of 2019.  This isn't a film for those over-obsessed with tight-plotting, consistent pace or an aversion to jump the shark moments. But as I said, if you go with the silliness, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The film opens in small town USA, reminiscent of original Twin Peaks. There are some slow-witted nice cops, played by Bull Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny. And there's policing a dispute between Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) and MAGA-supporter Farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi).  There's pace is lackadaisical and their hearts decent.  It soon becomes apparent that polar fracking has caused the earth to move off its axis resulting in whacky daylight hours and a zombie apocalypse. The rest of the film sees how our heroes cope with the impending doom ("kill the head") - not to mention the newly arrived Scottish mortician with hardcore Samurai skills (Tilda Swinton). 

We get lots of references to George Romero, including an update on his consumerist satire, as zombies wonder round in desperate search of wifi.  We also get a hopeful message about how "the children are our future". But mostly this is a film of supreme visual comedy - a shot of Adam Driver pulling into a diner parkway in a tiny red convertible Smart car - a shot of Tilda Swinton applying 1980s New Romantic makeup to a corpse - or a re-animated Iggy Pop hunting for coffee.  

Any film is worth watching that gives us even one of those things. So yes, I get all the critics and I see the film's weaknesses but I just dont' care, because when it delivers it's absolutely hilarious!

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Cannes 2019 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK on Friday.

PATERSON - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day 7

Move over LA LA LAND. Lovers of romance have a new movie to watch - the quietly beautiful and unassuming love-letter, PATERSON.  Directed by Jim Jarmusch, the film stars Adam Driver (THE FORCE AWAKENS) as a mild-mannered bus driver called Paterson, who also happens to live in Paterson, New Jersey.  As he drives the morning shift, he smiles wistfully to himself as he listens to the funny conversations of his passengers.  Some of things he notices and sees find their way into his poetry (written by real-life poet Ron Padgett), much of which is addressed to his girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani).  She is a creative soul too - decorating their house, her clothes and cupcakes in abstract black and white patterns.  She utterly supports her boyfriend in his poetry and he her wide-eyed dreams of success.   At first they seem somewhat naive, but this is a loving relationship played without irony.  I suddenly realised how rare this is to see on screen - a couple quite simply in love - accommodating of each other's foibles - supportive.  

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - LFF 2013 - Day Eleven - Super late review!

So here's a super-late review of the gloriously weirdly wonderful romantic-comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT LIVE from art house director Jim Jarmusch (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL).  I originally saw this flick at the London Film Festival, and then watched it again on Valentine's Day at the BFI.  I resisted reviewing it because sometimes the movies you truly love are the hardest to write about. Somehow it's easier to pinpoint exactly why you hate hate hate hate hate a movie and far harder to articulate that nebulous feeling of unashamed joy when you luxuriate in a movie that's uniquely wondrous. But, as this flick is still on a few arthouse screens in the UK, here goes....

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE tells the story of two ancient vampires called, in biblical simplicity, Adam and Eve.  When we meet them, they're living apart. She's in the richly decorated decadent Tangier, hanging out with her friend Marlowe (wry jokes about ghosting Shakespeare), and generally looking effortlessly punk-rock-chic.  He's hanging out in decaying Detroit, writing awesome moody music on self-consciously old-school tech, procured by his cluelessly half-baked muggle friend Ian.  

Adam's in a funk, and Eve comes to rescue him. What's funny and sweet about their relationship is that after all those centuries it has matured into a kind of docile middle-aged marriage and yet we still feel they're passionately in love with each other, and utterly good people who make each other better, which is ultimately the aim, right?  He shows her his decrepit post industrial city by night, dodging fan-girls, and all seems wistfully melancholy until Eve's little sister Ava turns up and throws everything into chaos.  There's a lot of fun to be had at Adam's deadpan response to Ava's hell-raising antics, and the key plot point is that it forces our Lovers onto a plane to Tangier, leaving their ethically sourced blood supply behind them.

Throughout all of this, Jim Jarmusch seems to be engaging us in an elegy for high culture.  Adam is weary with superficial modern culture - the source of his depression - and longs for a greater more glorious past.  Eve might try to snap him out of this, mocking Byron as an old bore, but there's a feeling that the times of great dandy fashion and music and writing is over and they are not just the Only Lovers Left Alive as in the only truly passionate people left, but the only Lovers of Art left in a modern world denuded of taste. To that end, Eve's little sister with her insatiable immediate and unfiltered appetites might remind us of modern pop-culture - superficial, insatiable, undiscriminating.  If Eve's reading Marlowe, then Ava's reading TMZ. 

All of which makes this movie sound rather pedagogic but it's only after I watched it, and rewatched it, and pondered it, that I came to this awareness. When you're in the movie, you're enjoying the wonderfully attenuated, chiselled beauty of Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, and utterly buying into their love story.  You're enjoying the wonderfully curated ramshackle houses that they live in.  You're glorying in the very British humour delivered in particular by Hiddleston and his interplay with Anton Yelchin as Ian. Plus, did I say that the music is just insanely wonderful?

Really, there's nothing not to like here.  And if you've found Jim Jarmusch inaccessible and wilfully obscure in the past (as I have) then please don't let that put you off this beautifully shot, deeply affecting film.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language.  

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2013.  It was released in 2013 in Russia, Croatia, Switzerland, Japan and Germany. It was released earlier this year in Greece, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Belgium, France, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Taiwan, Denmark and Finland. It will be released in the USA on April 11th, in Australia on April 17th, in New Zealand on May 1st, and in Spain on June 27th.

London Film Fest Day 7 - THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

I must confess that I found THE LIMITS OF CONTROL such hard work that I simply walked out after an hour of lessening patience and sheer disgust with how ludicrous the whole thing was. What a pretentious pile of wank this movie is.

Isaach de Bankoele is some kind of shady character. He sits in various cafes and for no particular reason orders two espressos in different cups. He exchanges matchboxes with various other shady characters and engages in the same stilted stupid conversations. There's even a random, seriously off-her-trolley naked chick. What is all this for? What is it meant to be? Or is it just a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Are we meant to be laughing with Jarmusch or at Jarmusch? I left because I felt he was laughing, sneering, at us.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Australia, Romania, Finland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Japan, New Zealand, Brazil and Spain. It is currently on release in Russia. It opens on November 26th in Argentina; December 2nd in France, the Netherlands and Mexico; on December 11th in the UK and on February 2rd in Belgium.

BROKEN FLOWERS - beautiful, bitter-sweet comedy

I have to say that I was pretty much guaranteed to love BROKEN FLOWERS. It is directed by one of my favourite film-makers, Jim Jarmusch, and stars one of my favourite actors, "Bill Groundhog-Day, Ghostbustin'-ass Murray!" Throw in some nice support work from Jeffrey Wright (last seen in the flaccid Syriana), Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Chloe Sevigny and Tilda Swinton, and you have a recipe for an engaging, bittersweet comedy.

Bill Murray reprises his role as the professionally successful, world-weary, cynical romantic from the infinitely inferior flick, LOST IN TRANSLATION. His girlfriend leaves him on the grounds that he has commitment and emotional issues. He also receives a letter from an unidentified ex-girlfriend who claims to have fathered his child. Murray barely reacts to these events - his ennui prevents him from doing anything more positive than drifting to his neighbour's house for morning coffee. Indeed, Murray spends much of the film reacting obliquely to increasingly strange things happening to him. Therein lies the comedy. When a butt-naked teenage girl called Lolita walks past him, he wears a bemused smile. The "WTF?!" reaction we have is distilled into a slightly raised eyebrow. Brilliant.

Luckily for Murray, his neighbour Winston, played with great comic dash by Jeffrey Wright, is on hand to play amateur detective*, and sends Murray on a road-trip to visit all his ex-es and find his son. Wright's character, Winston, is the kind of stand-up family guy who reassures his kids that he isn't smoking tobacco but 'cheeba, and who always has a magnifying glass to hand. He genuinely cares that Murray should get ot of his funk. Anyhoo, Murray goes travelling; strange stuff happens. Maybe he meets his son, maybe he learns something about himself, maybe not. This is not the kind of film where you get trite answers. At the end of the movie, all that Murray's character can cobble together from his experience is that: "The past is gone, I know that. The future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That's it."

What does Jim Jarmusch bring to his mix, apart from his genius in writing the part for Murray and the wry dialogue? Every single inch of every frame of this flick is wonderfully cosntructed. The production design, the positioning of the props, the camera angle - everything is just right. For instance, there is one scene where Murray is sitting alone looking mournful on a chi-chi designer couch in his well-appointed house. On the coffee table in front of him is a bottle of Moet and a full glass. Marvin Gaye is playing in the background. You don't get more tragic.

BROKEN FLOWERS may not be all bangs and whistles - and it may not have answers to all the key questions of life - but it does make you smile an awful lot. You can't say fairer than that.

BROKEN FLOWERS won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2005. It went on cinematic release in Autumn 2005 and is now available on DVD.