Only Lovers Left Alive
May. 11th, 2014 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelSo. Best damn Detroit rock'n'roll vampire movie ever.
It was a wonderful Detroit movie, which I will expand upon. It was a wonderful rock'n'roll movie, at least for anyone who views rock'n'roll (as opposed to modern pop/alternative/whatever) through a specific cultural prism embodied by, say, the Rolling Stones circa 1967. The nexus of Detroit and Tangiers, the rundown mansion filled with priceless guitars and equipment, piles of priceless books owned by transients in lovely clothes who can't carry them all, the beautiful youth with black hair in his face and unwanted fans at the door and the glorious ethereal woman who loves him... my god, this film was so on-point with everything that ever fascinated me about the idea of rock stardom. The aesthetics, the groove, all of it.
Just take on faith that it's a good vampire movie, because it is. It's also a wonderful moving love story, and while technically speaking the pairing consists of Gloomy Tortured Sensitive Artist Boy and Wonder Woman, doesn't come off as a cliche overall because it's so evident from the opener that Adam and Eve (er...) love one another, know one another, are in tune with one another. It's probably the best portrayal of a marriage I've seen on film in a long, long time. These people are deeply in love despite Adam's problems, have been married since forever, and it all feels so damn real. They cannot surprise one another anymore, so they simply enjoy one another. It's beautiful.
And then it turns into a dark, dark domestic comedy when an inconvenient relative shows up. This part could've been about a rock star and his inner circle without any vampire anything-- classic Jarmusch, all the way.
Tilda Swinton's character is just effin' amazing: a millennia-old creature who responds to the world by taking the crises in stride because they all pass and showing sheer delight at the good parts, whether it's Renaissance poetry, mushrooms out of season, or beautiful ruins in Detroit.
About Detroit: if any of you want to take a gander at Mark's Detroit, this film showcases one facet of it beautifully. I mean, this is a film about vampires who point out Detroit's shitty electrical distribution grid, fantasize about Detroit's rebirth when the Southwest runs out of water, and who drive around at night just looking at old buildings before they retire to their old home crammed with too much stuff, so I was totally down with that. But what Jarmusch chooses to show the viewer, from a drive-by of an old paint factory whose palatial ruin is sadly underexposed in "ruin porn" to the thickets of brush where houses ought to be to the inevitable visit to the Packard Plant, really captures one essential side of Detroit. The visit to "Metro Detroit Hospital" (St. John's, cough) features a lab tech with the perfect I <3 Detroit mug on his desk and the blue taxis driving around belong to a real company whose cars I pass frequently.
I've always loved Jarmusch's Mystery Train because the Memphis it shows circa 1989 is the Memphis of my childhood, something rarely seen on film despite all the damn movies set in Memphis and the many, many filmed there. Plot threads may be daft but the city is real. Authentic. He does this with Detroit in OLLA except the writing is far better.
One quibble: No one hoping to not be found ought to live in Brush Park, where Adam is holed up, because it's a well-known ruin frequented by tourists and even tour buses. If you want to be left alone, try some old mansion on Dakota where everyone will be too fuckin' afraid to come looking for you. The other quibble was more serious to me, in that if you want to dispose of a body in Detroit, the Packard Plant is one of the two worst fuckin' places in Metro Detroit to do it. That one and the Michigan Central Depot are just too well-known. Homeless people live there. Artists do installations there. You will be caught.
Scenario #1: Dump body in obviously abandoned house somewhere in the city's interior away from New Center and the police. Douse corpse and structure in accelerant, set on fire, flee. Few murders and cases of obvious arson get solved in Detroit even with witnesses.
Scenario #2: Take body to Macomb County, where it's possible to hide a corpse for months in a portapotty. Find an old abandoned farmhouse somewhere north of Hall Road and dump body accordingly. No one will find that body for years and the exposes I've read on Macomb County's morgue and coroner indicate they're too underfunded and stupid to figure out a cause of death even if you left a fresh corpse with bite wounds on their doorstep.
Seriously, my husband shouted out "Let's break for Macomb County!" when the corpse-disposal part of the storyline kicked in. The characters did not listen.
It was a wonderful Detroit movie, which I will expand upon. It was a wonderful rock'n'roll movie, at least for anyone who views rock'n'roll (as opposed to modern pop/alternative/whatever) through a specific cultural prism embodied by, say, the Rolling Stones circa 1967. The nexus of Detroit and Tangiers, the rundown mansion filled with priceless guitars and equipment, piles of priceless books owned by transients in lovely clothes who can't carry them all, the beautiful youth with black hair in his face and unwanted fans at the door and the glorious ethereal woman who loves him... my god, this film was so on-point with everything that ever fascinated me about the idea of rock stardom. The aesthetics, the groove, all of it.
Just take on faith that it's a good vampire movie, because it is. It's also a wonderful moving love story, and while technically speaking the pairing consists of Gloomy Tortured Sensitive Artist Boy and Wonder Woman, doesn't come off as a cliche overall because it's so evident from the opener that Adam and Eve (er...) love one another, know one another, are in tune with one another. It's probably the best portrayal of a marriage I've seen on film in a long, long time. These people are deeply in love despite Adam's problems, have been married since forever, and it all feels so damn real. They cannot surprise one another anymore, so they simply enjoy one another. It's beautiful.
And then it turns into a dark, dark domestic comedy when an inconvenient relative shows up. This part could've been about a rock star and his inner circle without any vampire anything-- classic Jarmusch, all the way.
Tilda Swinton's character is just effin' amazing: a millennia-old creature who responds to the world by taking the crises in stride because they all pass and showing sheer delight at the good parts, whether it's Renaissance poetry, mushrooms out of season, or beautiful ruins in Detroit.
About Detroit: if any of you want to take a gander at Mark's Detroit, this film showcases one facet of it beautifully. I mean, this is a film about vampires who point out Detroit's shitty electrical distribution grid, fantasize about Detroit's rebirth when the Southwest runs out of water, and who drive around at night just looking at old buildings before they retire to their old home crammed with too much stuff, so I was totally down with that. But what Jarmusch chooses to show the viewer, from a drive-by of an old paint factory whose palatial ruin is sadly underexposed in "ruin porn" to the thickets of brush where houses ought to be to the inevitable visit to the Packard Plant, really captures one essential side of Detroit. The visit to "Metro Detroit Hospital" (St. John's, cough) features a lab tech with the perfect I <3 Detroit mug on his desk and the blue taxis driving around belong to a real company whose cars I pass frequently.
I've always loved Jarmusch's Mystery Train because the Memphis it shows circa 1989 is the Memphis of my childhood, something rarely seen on film despite all the damn movies set in Memphis and the many, many filmed there. Plot threads may be daft but the city is real. Authentic. He does this with Detroit in OLLA except the writing is far better.
One quibble: No one hoping to not be found ought to live in Brush Park, where Adam is holed up, because it's a well-known ruin frequented by tourists and even tour buses. If you want to be left alone, try some old mansion on Dakota where everyone will be too fuckin' afraid to come looking for you. The other quibble was more serious to me, in that if you want to dispose of a body in Detroit, the Packard Plant is one of the two worst fuckin' places in Metro Detroit to do it. That one and the Michigan Central Depot are just too well-known. Homeless people live there. Artists do installations there. You will be caught.
Scenario #1: Dump body in obviously abandoned house somewhere in the city's interior away from New Center and the police. Douse corpse and structure in accelerant, set on fire, flee. Few murders and cases of obvious arson get solved in Detroit even with witnesses.
Scenario #2: Take body to Macomb County, where it's possible to hide a corpse for months in a portapotty. Find an old abandoned farmhouse somewhere north of Hall Road and dump body accordingly. No one will find that body for years and the exposes I've read on Macomb County's morgue and coroner indicate they're too underfunded and stupid to figure out a cause of death even if you left a fresh corpse with bite wounds on their doorstep.
Seriously, my husband shouted out "Let's break for Macomb County!" when the corpse-disposal part of the storyline kicked in. The characters did not listen.
