Cannes opening night film: Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die
STILL FROM THE DEAD DON'T DIE
Opening Night at Cannes. Some reviews.
Mixed reports, but a sense this will worth seeing for Jarmusch completists but not particularly invigorating. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian: "Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast." "Lethargic," and has "more brains than bite," says David Erlich in IndieWire. The premise is that an excess of polar fracking has warped the planet’s rotation and reanimated the corpses at the local morgue. The theme, Erlich says, is "When Hell is full, the dead will walk the Earth. And when the Earth is fucked, the living will do whatever they can to sleepwalk through the nightmare." Many interesting cast members including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Danny Glover, Chlöe Sevigny, Caleb Landry Jones, Steve Buscemi and Tom Waits, with Tilda Swinton as a Scottish immigrant mortician whose "delightful performance shoots the movie full of fresh embalming fluid every time it starts to rot. Which is often." Owen Gleiberman of Variety typecasts this as a "hipster zombie comedy" and says it "congratulates itself for doing what other movies have done better." Nonetheless there are some original plot twists, as you'll learn if you read Todd McCarthy's Hollywood Reporter review, which tells all about the flick's plot-line. Current Metascore: 64%. Hipness level: surely much higher. Note: A favorite of mine, Dead Man, has a Metascore of 62. Todd McCarthy's concluding words:Typically for Jarmusch, the songs, led by the title tune, and score are outstanding, enlivening nearly every scene. And the sheer diversity of the castmembers, along with their individual senses of humor, sustains one’s attention even when inspiration sometimes lags. It’s a minor, but most edible, bloody bonbon.
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