Zombie Comedy Hipster by Jim Jarmusch – Variety



[ad_1]

What does a Jim Jarmusch zombie movie look like? It sounds like what you expected: a hilarious and silly comedy that examines the apocalypse with a shrug of conscience blasé. (He seems to say, "The dead are rising again, and what's new?")

"The Dead Don's Die", which debuted this year at the Cannes Film Festival, opens on a graveyard, a blink of an eye too obvious to the first sequence of "Night of the Living Dead" ". The film then presents us with two poker cops, Crusty Cliff (Bull Murray) and morose Ronnie (Adam Driver), who wear their nerd glasses as the punk suburb of "Stranger Than Paradise" wore his beatnik hat. (There's a third cop, Mindy, played by Chloë Sevigny, and she's also wearing nerd glasses.) "The Dead Don's Die" takes place in the kind of indie film so normal, a weird little town that has a restaurant, a police station, a gas station and a homeless person (in this case, Tom Waits as a sage of the woods that looks like Moses), and where people have names like Hank and Fern. The name of the city is Centerville, but that could have called Twin Peaks Lite.

At the restaurant, Steve Buscemi presents himself as a farmer with a cap that says "Keep America White Again" (Keep America White again). Jarmusch has the feeling that he's buddy with the guy sitting next to him at the counter, played by Danny Glover. -Good liberal jokes of corkscrew. In the midst of all this irony of the average American mentality, Cliff and Ronnie begin to observe some strange signs. Electronic devices keep on fighting and the day refuses to pass at night. On the car radio, they hear a steel country anthem called "The Dead Do not Die". ("After life, the afterlife continues"), and the news is full of reports on the "polar fracking", environmental aggression sanctioned by the company ("Polar fracking has created great jobs …") that makes the earth ejected from its axis.

And that's why, as if we needed an explanation, the dead begin to rise. The first sign of the zombie apocalypse is a couple of hands coming out of the earth in front of a tombstone. It's supposed to be a burlesque horror moment, but our only thought is, "Well, it looks like the" Thriller "video. Then, the first two zombies, played by Sara Driver and Iggy Pop (a pair of jokes: Driver is Jarmusch's longtime partner and Iggy already looks like the undead), enter the restaurant and continue tearing the bowels of the two people present. Zombies, in what will be a theme, whisper the only word they still have of their past lives. In this case, the word is "coffee". (Both take a whole pan and come out of there.)

The zombies of "The Dead Do not Die" behave, for the most part, in the classic fashion of the zombie movie. It is a horde of carnivores with marbled skin that staggers in the streets, sticking their faces against the windows and placing their arms between wooden slats designed to keep them at bay. None of this is scary, or is supposed to be; all this served as a semi-absurd joke.

The boredom with "The Dead Do not Die" lies in the fact that the idea of ​​treating a zombie uprising as a dark comedy as a temper in an attitude has already been put to death. This goes back to "Shaun of the Dead", to films like "Planet Terror" and "Re-Animator" – and, of course, to "Dawn of the Dead" itself, which combines its dreadful show with a satire culture. consumption. When Jarmusch's zombies resound around words like "Chardonnay", "Snapple" and "Wi-Fi", it's a rehearsal of George A. Romero's original. they go back to what they remember joke. Considering that it was 40 years ago, Jarmusch adds only a few shocking elements to humor or perception.

In "The Dead Do not Die", the only way to kill the zombies is to be beheaded (one of the key phrases in the movie is "Kill the Head", a variation quite different from Romero's, "kill the brain and you kill the ghoul "), and it's a whole set for the most stylish character in the movie: a Scottish extraterrestrial coroner (yes, you read that right), played by Tilda Swinton in long pale blond tresses, wielding her sword with ultimate finesse, I am-woman-show-me-slash. Jarmusch even enters into the effect of all these effects. The cutting of the head emits a puff of smoke which evokes, of all things, the death of the heroes at the end of "Avengers: Infinity War". It's a nice effect.

But aside from that, all that Jarmusch really adds to this well-used genre is a nod to the meta-japery that oscillates between fun and boring. He says, "Look! Jim Jarmusch makes a zombie movie! ". And yes, the movie is this ribs in his self-consciousness; when Ronnie mentions "the scenario", he does not speak of a writing project that he would have hidden in a drawer. Ronnie does not stop saying, "It's going to end badly," a line so pessimistic that you know that it must be acting from a self-fulfilling chorus. "The Dead Do not Die" is a macabre comedy at the cutting edge of technology, but the truth is that it is behind the curve of pop culture. That's why it's a disappointing trifle.

[ad_2]

Source link