In short: The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Centerville, an American small town populated by Jim Jarmusch characters played by Jim Jarmusch’s actor and musician friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Zombie Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Selena Gomez and so on and so forth), suffers under the results of slight changes in the Earth’s axial rotation certainly not at all caused by polar cap fracking, no sir. Namely, some ever so slight troubles with electronic devices, the day night cycle, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song to the film, and the return of the deceased as flesh eating zombies. Needless to say, things are going to end badly.

Even among fans of the great Jim Jarmusch’s late-ish – the kind of late that makes a boy hope the director’s gonna live long enough this will actually turn out to be the mid-period of his career – period, this expedition into the realm of the horror comedy (or really, the realm of what a horror comedy would look like when made by Jarmusch), has a bit of a marmite effect. Also, there’s the “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson. It’s great.

It’s no surprise, really, for here, Jarmusch’s typical love for the laconic and the dead-pan turns even deader (which seems curiously appropriate for a zombie movie), exclusively featuring humour so dry, it’s situated in one of the world’s great deserts. This extra dry approach feels pretty hilarious in itself, like an attempt to really dance on the edge where something can actually still be called humour and not just the in-jokey product of a bunch of friends who somehow got paid for farting around in front of a camera. Me, I found myself amused by this approach more often than not, chuckling quite regularly about some of the running gags, even finding myself snorting about the many, many scenes of Murray and Driver trying to out-dead-pan each other (Murray’s winning, of course, because he’s not been moving his face or his voice much for a few more decades than driver), the throw-away side gags, and of course, Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”.

Plus, how many other films do you know in which Tilda Swinton is playing a perhaps somewhat weird Scottish coroner with an old school samurai thing and turns out to be…something spoilerish? Or whose theme song is Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”?


Seriously, I love the film dearly, but I can’t really blame anyone coming out of this with a puzzled and mildly annoyed expression on their face, because that’s just the kind of horror comedy The Dead Don’t Die is.

In short: Paterson (2016)

It is difficult to talk about Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson without making it sound like a precious, pretentious and condescending piece of pap, seeing as it concerns itself with the poetry of everyday life and everyday people and the beauty hidden in the quotidian; but that’s mostly because this sort of thing is incredibly difficult to pull off and seems to draw the filmmakers least able to actually do it the most, so there are quite a few terrible films – usually made by the sort of arthouse director who never met an everyday person in his life – sitting around as bad precedents.

Jarmusch, however, pulls this thing off without even looking as if he’s trying. Paterson, mind you, isn’t a “realist” movie, so there’s little in it of the kind of thing that makes one want to kick the world and its collective inhabitants in their stupid heads. Instead, this is a film about the quiet joys of overheard conversations, love that is strong and deep and at least partly based on tolerance instead of being a dramatic kind of love, the small sadnesses and defeats that are just as real as the loud and dramatic ones, and an idea of art that’d find the concept of outsider art deeply confusing because it’s really the insiders making art that stand at a distance to the world as people inhabit it.

Because this is Jarmusch, the film is full of little bits of strangeness - strangeness that in Jarmusch’s view clearly is just as everyday as is driving a bus for the film’s main character – and chance encounters.

Of course, things never really cohere into a plot when the film follows bus driver Paterson (Adam Driver), his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and their dog Marvin (Nellie) through a week of their life. It’s not a week in which nothing happens, but it certainly isn’t one dominated by any pressing need to follow a classic dramatic structure. Rather, Jarmusch shows the sort of flow of life that once might have inspired dramatic structures.


The director has by now become highly proficient at this kind of slow exploration of people and places, and where some of his early films had moments where their deliberate slowness felt like the director consciously striking a pose of breaking narrative rules, here (and in quite a few of his other films) the film’s habits and structure are nearly natural expressions of the things it is about. Paterson’s also genuinely funny, but that’s just life if you think about it from a certain angle.

Some Scattered Thoughts About Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

It is somewhat ironic that you have to drag the Star Wars universe out of the hands of its original creator to actually get a watchable film taking place in it again, but then, creating something doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what’s best about it.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of the impact of J.J. Abrams’s film lies in the way it harnesses its audience’s nostalgia and general love for Star Wars and I couldn’t exactly call you wrong. However, you could just as well argue that doing this is actually what this particular film should do, respecting what the audience loved about the original trilogy and using it as the stepping off point for its variation of the original tale, instead of pretending to make everything new. And, while the film does perhaps repeat one plot beat of the originals too many, it gives most of its repeats little twists that to me feel very important. I don’t really need to explain why there’s more than just one difference between the scene between Kylo Ren and Han Solo and the parallel scene in the original trilogy nor why that’s important, do I? And while we’re talking about changes, to my eyes, it’s rather important and special too (in a good way) that Abrams also gives us a new entry in a beloved nerd mega-franchise whose heroes are a young woman and a young guy of colour, building on what came before and reaching towards inclusivity not as something to be prescribed in a dogmatic manner but as something that’s just normal (in all the good meanings of that word).

I also found myself decidedly happy with the film’s look which brings the Star Wars aesthetic back to its 70s SF paperback cover roots (that’s a compliment), its expectedly exciting action sequences (seriously, if you’re operating in the blockbuster world, good action sequences really should be a given by now, though it doesn’t seem to hurt Michael Bay his films only have crap ones), and the general air of the film very much caring about the tradition it stands in.