![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
You drank Ian
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) is a lovely movie. Several genres cross in the middle of a vampire movie which never uses the word "vampire" (and never feels coy about it, which is the really impressive trick), but the fundamental one is the kind of loose, affectionate portrait of a long-term, long-distance relationship which invites the audience to hang out with the characters for a moment of their time. Some life-changing things happen, but mostly it's just a snapshot in the midst of the centuries. Some things never change. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are beautifully nonhuman. I expected nothing less, but it's still striking: right down to the shapes their bodies make, falling into one another in sleep. There is a shot where they lie in bed and they look less like our species, and more androgynous, and more like one another than any two people who are not immediately related by blood have any right to. She is incalculably old; she can tell the age of anything by touching it (and it delights her to learn. She is delighted by so many things: the feel of an old guitar, a diamond in space ringing like a gigantic gong, a skunk humping its back across the grass at her feet. One of the film's other genres is the classic argument of immortality, but she has trouble thinking of reasons not to go on living. It's not hedonism; it's a joy as feral as the way her eyes widen in the dark). He's younger; give him six or eight centuries and he might develop the knack. They call one another Adam and Eve. It works; they aren't. The entire film is like this—choices that could have been teeth-gritting instead lightened by a graceful deadpan and a refreshing avoidance of the ironic. Historical name-drops are de rigueur in a vampire story, so Eve uses talk of Byron and the Shelleys to distract Adam into losing badly at chess. Contaminated blood is a perpetual concern, but it's not an AIDS metaphor; it seems to have more to do with the state of the environment. And when the coyotes howl around Adam's house, well, there aren't so many wolves in Detroit. If this is typical of Jim Jarmusch, I should see more of his movies. If it's not, it's still the best contemporary vampire film I've seen since Byzantium (2012). Nice soundtrack, too. I do not understand why it's taken years to come out anywhere I could see it. Did its distributors not understand the enormous built-in fanbase that "Tilda Swinton," "Tom Hiddleston," and "vampire movie" guaranteed?
no subject
I'm so glad you felt up to going out.
Nine
no subject
Me, too. It was worth it. Today I went to the North End with
no subject
(I am a Jarmusch fan. I particularly love Ghost Dog and Dead Man.)
no subject
I hope it comes to a theater near you! It's had a ridiculous ghost-existence on the festival circuit for a couple of years now. It was out in the UK last year, but here? Naaarp.
(I am a Jarmusch fan. I particularly love Ghost Dog and Dead Man.)
(I will look for those.)
no subject
no subject
Right; I'm curious.
no subject
My theory is that the distributors understood the built-in Tom Hiddleston fanbase all too well, or thought they did.
It's possible to look at the obsessive Hiddleston fans who are all over Tumblr and to get a disproportionate idea of how much of the fanbase they represent, just because they are so loud and so completely lacking in boundaries. (My source for this is
It's even possible for a particularly short-sighted distributor to recall the kind of fanbase that the Twilight books/movies attracted a few years ago, to not realize that a lot of those folks have moved on, to conflate that with the obsessive Hiddleston fans, and to fixate on the notion that if they market the movie as a vampire movie with Tom Hiddleston in it, it will not be taken seriously as a Real Movie.
(Which is nonsense, of course, because Tilda Swinton, and also, as noted above, the kind of fandom craziness this hypothetical distributor is concerned about moves a lot faster than he thinks it does. But it's a theory.)
no subject
I think I'm losing the thread here: you mean that you think the distributors worried that by the time the movie came out, the ready-made fandom would have moved on to the next craze and they would be left with a movie that looked like "Twilight! With classier actors!" and no one to watch it?
I first heard of Only Lovers Left Alive in 2013. I found the cast on Wikipedia. I believe my exact words were: "Vampire movie with John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska. Did this just spontaneously generate out of the internet or something?" I first saw its existence confirmed on Tumblr. And then Tumblr kept being full of stills and studio shots, and they looked absolutely marvelous and people kept commenting on how marvelous they looked, and the movie kept not existing anywhere I could see it. Unless it's going into wide release later this summer and it's just not being mentioned, I genuinely think the film has missed out on most of its audience. Not everyone has a local arthouse theater taking a chance for a week. Not everyone can get to theirs even if they do. I can hope the movie will have a thriving life on DVD, but it benefited sumptuously from the big screen. And it's a bit frustrating not to be able to tell everyone I know to run out and enjoy Tilda Swinton with a blood popsicle.
no subject
no subject
I hope the serious critics know how many gifsets of Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus are still making the rounds of Tumblr.
no subject
OMG, I just realized this has the potential to be Harold and Maude only they're vampires.
no subject
Regarding the names Adam & Eve, IMDB Trivia says:
no subject
I'm glad! I'd love to see it again; I think it will hold up.
ather, he was referring to Mark Twain's satirical work The Diaries of Adam and Eve.
Yeah, without more specific allusions, I don't think that was a reference the audience was going to get.