The Dead Don’t Die. Jim Jarmusch. 2019.
[five minutes pass; i.e., I watched the titles]
Wow; this movie basically has everybody that’s famous. It’s not just Jarmusch’s normal troupe (although many of them are here), but a bunch of random famous people. I’m assuming they called his agent or his agent called them and they said “sure!”
Appearing here for free, I’m assuming.
[wtf; forty minutes pass?!?!]
I thought that was like ten minutes.
I’m so totes engrossed in this movie… I’ve been a Jarmusch fan since forever (I saw him once on the streets of New York! squee!), and this is just such a Jarmusch movie. It’s basically a goof on Night of the Living Dead: Nothing’s very serious; it’s all just done in fun, even the really grisly bits (and the political bits).
It’s like… if you designed a movie to appeal specifically to me (and you weren’t French), this would definitely be the movie to make.
The “name” actors are definitely having fun here (although Chloë Sevigny seems to be participating in a totally different movie than everybody else), and the newcomers are delivering, too. I love the two threesomes — the hipsters, and the peeps in juvie. Just amazeballs.
(I’m typing this because I had to take a pee ‘n cocktail break.)
[the end]
The pacing, the way the actors deliver their lines… It’s just like er Down By Law or any of the early Jarmusch movies. Adam Driver in particular — I’m wondering if he studied those movies like hard and is just going “how would John Lurie do this scene” and then doing that.
But it’s not just a goof, of course. Just like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a movie about racism, this is a movie about Trump, and just as despairing.
It’s a really well-made, funny, knowing movie, so I was expecting everybody to hate it.
And I was right!
*phew*
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.