David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: The
Dead Don’t Die and Non-Fiction)
The Dead Don’t Die
Only a very dead, headless zombie would not enjoy the
frisky charms of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, but only a mental zombie would think that
Jarmusch is saying anything important. The word “deadpan” rules, led by old
maestro of deadpan pauses Bill Murray and young master of deadpan reflection
Adam Driver (their rhythms zipper neatly together). They’re police chief Cliff
and assistant Ronnie, two square but dimly hip guys in Centerville, “a real
nice place” and a joke-yokel variant on the generic but surreal American burgs
in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and The Straight Story. Cinematographer Frederick
Elmes, a great Lynch veteran, achieves wee gems of atmosphere, but the movie
lacks the witty, sexy magic of Jarmusch’s Only
Lovers Left Alive, possibly the most truly stylish vampire vision since
Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.
Earth’s axis is tilting thanks to “polar fracking,”
clocks and nature are going bonkers, animals are fleeing. But Cliff and Ronnie tool
around town in their squad car, sometimes with adorable, easily scared Officer
Mindy (Chloe Sevigny). Slowly they tumble to the fact that dead people,
including gone friends and Mindy’s granny, are coming back as ravenous
flesh-eaters. The true tilt is from global ecological anxiety to the grisly but
campy realm of George Romero, who ignited the film zombie cult with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Jarmusch
satirizes addictive consumerism, which Romero already nailed down in his zombie
mall movie of 1978, Dawn of the Dead.
The pulpy schtick made Romero, who died two years ago, the Grand Old Ghoul of
the genre. Jarmusch, a more diverse, urbane talent, is enjoying his hipster’s
chow-down on Romero gore and the goofy (“kill the head!”) mystique of the
undead. Compared to vampires, the vamps of romantic desire, zombies are only
dumb, ugly cannibals.
Jarmusch’s love of actors provides the party buzz. His
cool cast includes many haunters of the indie zone, each chewing a crafty
morsel: Tom Waits, Carol Kane, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, RZA, Selena Gomez,
Danny Glover, Eszter Balint, Rosie Perez. O blessed Harry Dean Stanton, why
hast thou not returned? As in Only Lovers
Left Alive, the main reward is the immaculate, pale-hawk beauty Tilda
Swinton. As Zelda, a Scottish mortician, she has sword moves worthy of Kill Bill and the floaty aura of a space
alien who dropped in to observe the primitives. Swinton gets the big payoff
scene. And then Jarmusch, as if blood-bound to the genre, adds some final
carnage – a rather dull dessert.
Non-Fiction
What better gourmet stuffing for a fine French goose
than savvy articulations about the crisis of modern publishing and the “end of
literature”? In Non-Fiction veteran
publishing editor Alain (Guillaume Canet) frets suavely about a corporate
threat to his old Parisian firm, and the rising tide of blogs, digital snarkers
and self-pub sites. Meanwhile, actress wife Selena (Juliette Binoche) is bored
with her hit cop show on TV, always defining her role as “not a policewoman but
a crisis management expert” (even though we only see her character firing a
gun). Portly novelist Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) fears he is losing Alain’s
support, and their talk is a dance of needles. Alain, being naturally a man of
affairs, suspects Selena is having one (with tubby-bear Leonard). Leo’s wife
Valerie (funny, straight-talking Nora Hamzawi) seeks relief from work anxieties
in her own liaison. Being glib and Gallic, everyone sauces sex with discussion
(Binoche, always a tonic gift, pulls off at 54 a bed romp with gamine verve).
Despite chatter loaded with timely cultural worries,
avoid being an earnest note-taker or you’ll miss the fun. Non-Fiction, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, is a
fleet-tongued comical carousel. Vincent invokes Bergman’s wintry Lutheran film Winter Light (his young, Internetty
advisor hasn’t a clue), then we hear Selena and Leo talking about past oral sex
during a Star Wars viewing. For all
their angst à la mode, these people
are corks of survival. Tasteful elitist Vincent will cushion literature with a
trendy sideline of “adult coloring books,” while Selena must advance from police
busts to Racine’s immortal drama Phèdre.
Finally the movie escapes from urban rooms to sun-gilded Provence. In this
radiant partie de campagne, sly darts
and wry gossip will continue, soon crowned by some happy news. Jean Renoir
would have been delighted.
SALAD (A List)
A lesson in contrast …
The Six Best Vampire Movies: Nosferatu
(F.W. Murnau 1922), Only Lovers Left
Alive (Jim Jarmusch 2013), Vampyr
(C.T. Dreyer 1932), Nosferatu the Vampyr
(Werner Herzog 1979), Dracula (Tod
Browning 1931) and Cronos (Guillermo
Del Toro 1993). A sextet of artistic value.
The Six Best Zombie Movies: Night of the
Living Dead (George Romero 1968), I Walked
With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur 1943), Re-Animator
(Stuart Gordon 1985), Dawn of the Dead
(George Romero) 1979, Dead Snow
(Tommy Wirkola 2009) and Land of the Dead
(George Romero 2005). A sextet of diverting pulp.
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
One
of the many things Orson Welles learned while making Citizen Kane was that “movie décor was a model for Kane’s life – so
much accumulation, lovely for a moment when looked at, but dross waiting to be
burned. There is a special emotional charge in the final sequence in the great
hall of Xanadu, when we see all the art, rubbish and things Kane has
accumulated as they stand waiting to be burned. The scene is like a city of
skyscrapers, but it resembles nothing so much as the props department of a
movie studio – and that is exactly what was filmed.” (How unlike W.R. Hearst,
who made sure that almost everything in his home castle was preserved. Quote
from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story
of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“The Cruise is a wee-budget documentary.
The star plays himself and is undeniably strange. So, nix it! But I love
Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s urban muse and verbal mustard, and his supple,
generous, form-bending endorsement by neophyte director Bennett Miller, who
went on to bravura dramas (Capote,
Moneyball, Foxfire). So I salute bus and foot cruiser Speed, film’s finest
New York motor-mouth since Andre Gregory of My
Dinner With Andre.” (Intro of The
Cruise chapter in my book Starlight
Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Vampire
queen Eve (Tilda Swinton) reigns in Only
Lovers Left Alive (Sony Pictures Classics 2014; director Jim Jarmusch,
photography by Yorick Le Saux).