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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?
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I'm so glad you felt up to going out.
Nine
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Me, too. It was worth it. Today I went to the North End with