But the way <\/span>The Dead Don\u2019t Die<\/i><\/b> \u2014 Jarmusch\u2019s mostly aimless, bloodless stab at making a zombie film \u2014 lumbers along almost feels like an incredibly self-aware provocation. The wisp of a project feels like it must have come together via a stray remark made while enjoying a cup of dark roast (decaf, apparently) and a pack of American Spirits with one of the many famous friends he\u2019s enlisted to fill out his cast, which reads like a who\u2019s-who of New York independent filmmaking. (I won\u2019t rattle off every single name you\u2019ll encounter along the way, but keep your eyes peeled for pretty much everyone who\u2019s ever appeared in a Jim Jarmusch film, aside from <\/span>Dead Man<\/span><\/i>\u2019s Johnny Depp, thankfully.) <\/span>Deadpan?<\/span><\/i> the filmmaker seems to be asking his critics and his acolytes alike. <\/span>I\u2019ll show you deadpan.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The setup is this: One night it simply fails to get dark at the usual time in Centerville, USA, population 738. And as the citizens flip on the ol\u2019 boob tube, they\u2019re hipped to the fact that it\u2019s due to the fact that polar fracking has somehow suddenly altered Earth\u2019s rotation. Police officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver, who worked with Jarmusch just a few years ago on the far superior <\/span>Paterson<\/span><\/i>) notices his cellphone has suddenly stopped working, and TV anchor Posie Juarez (Rosie Perez) reports that animals have started acting strangely. Not that they\u2019re the only ones: There\u2019s clearly something weird about the town\u2019s new undertaker, Zelda Winston (Swinton). And there\u2019s also the fact that once the sun finally sinks, corpses begin to reanimate, beginning with a pair of hipster zombies (Iggy Pop and Sara Driver), who appear in the local diner clamoring for flesh and \u2026 black coffee.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s one of the more interesting (but least-developed) elements of <\/span>The Dead Don\u2019t Die<\/span><\/i> \u2014 the fact that the film\u2019s zombies are individually ravenous for whatever made them feel, well, alive when they were alive. For some, that\u2019s coffee; for others, it\u2019s Skittles or Chardonnay or cellphones or cable TV. Much like the rest of the film, this little jab at consumer culture is sort of fun but lacks real bite or purpose. Other Jarmuschian touches that infest the proceedings and attempt to elevate them include Bill Murray\u2019s sardonic police chief, Cliff Robertson, who handles the news of a zombie outbreak with about the same reaction one might react to hearing that there\u2019s a mild flu going around the office. Chloe Sevigny\u2019s character, officer Mindy Morrison, might be the only character to get more than mildly flustered at the prospect of being eaten alive.<\/span><\/p>\n That the film is so content to spin its wheels (metaphorically and literally, toward the end of its run time) would be less of a problem, were things to finally come together in a more coherent way. One of the problems of assembling such a massive talented cast means it\u2019s probably hard to get many actors together on set for long, so there\u2019s a bit of an episodic, disjointed feel between the little groups Jarmusch has banding together for survival. The \u201cthrow it at the wall and see what sticks\u201d approach on display here feels very outside the generally quite purposeful director\u2019s usual methodology \u2014 and when something does work (a line, a mannerism, a sight gag involving a very interesting car choice for a very tall man), it gets repeated ad nauseum, testing the audience\u2019s patience and causing the generally amusing and promising concept (Jim Jarmusch makes a zombie film!) to wear thin long before most of us probably expected. Jim Jarmusch\u2019s films are frequently populated by richly drawn characters who move through the world at a pace that could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":11983,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/crookedc.png\")
<\/span><\/p>\nGrade: C+<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 44 min.; rated R for zombie violence\/gore, and for language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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