film

Dead giveaway

The zombie genre gets Jarmusched with mild levels of success in The Dead Don’t Die, an often funny, sometimes scary and always amusing horror-comedy effort from director Jim Jarmusch.

Jarmusch has done horror before, most notably with his atmospheric vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive and, some could argue, with the disturbing death meditation, Dead Man. His latest effort is as strongly satirical as the director has ever been: The world is falling apart politically, socially and environmentally, and its inhabitants are too slow and dimwitted to really do anything about it.

Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play Sheriff Cliff and his deputies Ronnie and Mindy in a typical American town called Centerville. The pulse of the town is severely laidback and barely beating, with much of one’s day revolving around when to get that good coffee and donuts from their cultural hub, the local diner.

Due to polar fracking, the Earth spins off its access, and the dead begin to rise. The days become longer, the electronic gadgets we rely upon go dead, and people start getting unsolicited neck bites from formerly live neighbors. Characters like those played by Murray and Driver react in a way that is so disorganized and disconnected, they practically deserve to die.

This, perhaps, is a not-so-veiled statement about our current administration’s strange attitude toward global warming. Actually, there’s no doubt, Jarmusch hates Trump—and this is the first anti-Trump zombie movie. Steve Buscemi plays a racist townsperson who dons a red and white MAGA hat, except his actually says “Make America White Again.”

The pacing of this movie is really slow— Jarmusch slow. In fact, the pacing is so slow that the George Romero-like zombies that are lumbering around are almost sprinting compared to what goes on around them. Your ability to like this film depends very much upon your willingness to let the things happening on screen linger and, in some cases, really drag out.

The film does contain a moment of genuine terror when a zombie couple takes out two waitresses at the diner. The zombies feast upon the dying with—I’ll reference the zombie master again—Romero-like goriness, right down to intestine chomping. What distinguishes the moment as ultra-creepy is one of the victims not dying immediately, and letting her agony be well known verbally.

The zombies doing the diner killing are played by Iggy Pop and Sara Driver as rock groupies with caffeine addictions. Live flesh is well and good when it comes to feasting, but what they really need is a good cup of joe, like so many of the multitudes currently crowding Starbucks and indie cafes across our great nation.

Murray and Adam Driver are both very funny, with Murray’s Cliff representing the old-school, I’vehad-enough-of-this-to-the-point-where-I-will-barelyreact part of society, and Driver’s Ronnie providing the semi-hipster outlook. Ronnie calmly declares that they are in the midst of an apocalypse while never losing his deadpan face. He’s a lot younger than the equally deadpan Cliff and will probably catch up to Cliff’s level of disinterest very soon.

Other Jarmusch stalwarts include Tilda Swinton as a samurai-sword-wielding funeral home director, a role only Swinton could play. Tom Waits (Down by Law) plays the mystic homeless guy commentating on Centerville’s demise, of course. Who else would he play?

As a fan of Jarmusch, even I couldn’t get past the pacing at times. A couple of days later, when I reflected upon the picture, it hit me that I liked the movie a lot more after I saw it than while watching it. His films tend to get that sort of delayed reaction out of me. Ω

“Before we go in, does everyone have their standard-issue horn-rimmed glasses?”

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2Aladdin Will Smith’s strange, big, blue Genie turns out to be the surprising highlight of the fair-to-middling Aladdin, the live-action remake of the Disney animated classic that was big for Robin Williams. Smith does just fine in the role Williams voiced in 1992, and the character gets fleshed out in a manner that is genuinely moving at times, even if his blueness is perhaps a bit creepy from some angles. (And it looks like he’s pushing a big poop out of the top of his head thanks to that hairstyle.) In fact, if they decided to make a horror spinoff where the blue genie starts biting people’s heads off, that would be kind of awesome. He’s scary already. Director Guy Ritchie goes the full musical route, and while he has a reasonably talented cast on hand, the whole enterprise feels a bit on the unnecessary side. It’s overlong, and one cast member in particular ultimately pulls the picture into the unfortunate zone. Mena Massoud makes for a halfway decent Aladdin, while Naomi Scott provides a luminous Jasmine. Both do good jobs singing the famous songs, and they most certainly look the parts. Their magic carpet ride while belting “A Whole New World” is charming, and they make for a cute couple. It’s a shame that it’s all in the service of something that, no matter how much money is being thrown at the screen, feels hollow.

4Avengers: Endgame The Marvel universe gets its most grandiose chapter with Avengers: Endgame, a fitting successor to last year’s Infinity Warand a generous gift to those of us who like our movies with superheroes in them. When last we saw Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), he was a survivor of the dreaded Thanos (Josh Brolin) finger snap, a universe altering occurrence that took out half its living creatures and provided for that tear-jerking moment when SpiderMan (Tom Holland) and many others turned to dust. Endgamepicks up where that action left off, with Stark floating in space and keeping a video journal of his inevitable demise having run out of food and water. Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Rocket (Bradley Cooper) are among the other survivors, dealing with the repercussions of so much death on Earth, just like Justin Theroux in The Leftovers. Oh, there are tons of questions this movie needs to answer in its three-hour-plus running time. Where’s Thanos? Where’s Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)? Is Tony permanently marooned in space? What’s been going on with AntMan (Paul Rudd) during all of this Thanos hullabaloo? Is everybody really dead? Does Star Lord (Chris Pratt) still have his Walkman in the Great Beyond? Good news: the movie answers many of your questions and more thanks to another well-balanced screenplay and a crack directorial job from the team of Anthony and Joe Russo. When you leave Endgame, your belly will be happily full of cinematic satisfaction.

2Godzilla: King of the Monsters Somehow, Legendary Pictures found a way to totally muck up the greatest Godzilla premise ever with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a movie that is all things great and terrible at the same time. This movie has some terrific monster battles in it, and the special effects are mind-bogglingly good. Godzilla squares off against such legendary foes as multiheaded Monster Zero and Rodan, while getting some much needed assistance from the great Mothra. All of these monsters, including the title character, are wonders to behold when on screen. As for the internet bitching about the movie’s appearance being dark and murky, I think the darkness was fitting, made things scarier, and didn’t diminish the effects. But, and this is a big but, I cannot endorse this movie overall. The human stuff in between and during the fighting is dreadful. Homo sapiens get too much screen time. The writing and staging for that screen time is so bad that the film derails every time it goes to military types in a war room. The plot has the world in a state of disarray after the 2014 attacks on San Francisco and Las Vegas depicted in the last Godzilla movie. OK, that’s kind of cool. How do we dust ourselves off and find a way to coexist with the likes of Godzilla and big monster moth things after the decimation of the Bay Area? Apparently, according to writer-director Michael Dougherty (Krampus), we deliver inane dialogue real slow-like and inexplicably play with a sonar gadget that supposedly calls out to the monsters in a manner that either chills them out or fires them up. Once the gadget thing sends out a call that basically kicks off the monster apocalypse, the action goes from nicely staged monster battles featuring beautiful close ups and battered landscapes, to a bunch of lost actors sitting around in a situation room observing and commenting. It’s a wasted opportunity for monster fun ruined by stupid humans.

4John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum The gun opera that is the John Wick franchise keeps on rolling and shooting with gory gusto, and some great dogs to boot. When we last saw Keanu Reeves as John Wick, he had himself a little time before getting excommunicated from the assassination club The High Table and all its perks. His killing a fellow assassin within the walls of the Continental Hotel means no more room service or dog sitting. He’s got a multimillion dollar bounty on his head and no place to kick his feet up. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum picks up right where the last one left off, with a battleweary Wick running in the streets, putting distance between himself and the hotel and trying to figure out his next big move. Credit Reeves for playing this part perfectly, on a level where we can believe that this dude who keeps getting stabbed and shot can turn on his power afterburners and keep shooting people in the face. Wick basically runs from one action set piece to another, with returning director and former stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski making each of those set pieces a thing to behold. A gun battle inside a weapons museum counts as a franchise highlight, as does Wick’s gunfight atop a motorcycle. And, yes, dogs play a major role in the shenanigans, which makes this dog person very happy.

3Rocketman Dexter Fletcher, the very same director who helped take a shit on Freddie Mercury’s legacy with the dumpster fire that was last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody— he finished the job after Bryan Singer was fired—fares much better with this celebration of Elton John. The movie tells John’s story through musical numbers and fantasy sequences and, as it turns out, it’s a good approach to the life of Elton John. John is played by Taron Egerton (who starred alongside John in the wonderfully weird Kingsman: The Golden Circle), and there will be no lip-synching here, thank you very much. Egerton confidently sings John’s tunes, including “Tiny Dancer,” the title track and, unfortunately, “I’m Still Standing.” Jamie Bell plays John’s writing partner, Bernie Taupin, and the movie works as a nice testament to their contributions to rock’s legacy. Egerton goes full blown rock star in this movie, which features some nice, artistically exaggerated recreations of key moments in John’s history. The results are a lot of fun, even with some slight miscasting (Bryce Dallas Howard as John’s mom!). It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s a bold and interesting approach to a rock biopic that has more in common with Across the Universe than Bohemian Rhapsody.