A stylish bore.

^^

This is about two Vampires doing nothing for 2 hours. Hiddleston made this watchable, though.

nah it's great

Pity the vampire aesthete. He or she has lived for centuries, contributing to and absorbing art, literature, music, and science while also enduring wars and cultural decay. Such is the thrust of Only Lovers Left Alive, the new film by iconoclastic director Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai). It is an atmospheric, slow-paced, and at times wryly amusing film in which to be a 21st-century member of the undead is to be a student of the hip and the sophisticated in an age capable of transforming the archway of a majestic 1920s theatre into the ceiling of an inglorious garage.

Ancient, but still chiseled and handsome, Adam lives in a largely abandoned area of Detroit in an old house crowded with guitars, records, and photographs of artistic and scientific luminaries. He records atmospheric, dramatic guitar instrumentals halfway between shoegaze and Bauhaus and counts Lord Byron and Franz Schubert among his dead friends. His even older wife, Eve, calls Tangier home. She spends her nights speed-reading texts in any number of languages (there is a briefly glimpsed copy of Infinite Jest). She receives top-notch blood from a close friend, centuries-old playwright Christopher Marlowe, while Adam secretly purchases his from a local hospital. Sensing his worldview growing even more dire than usual, Eve flies to America to comfort Adam.

Portraying vampires as the ultimate melancholic hipsters, mourning for the world as it is and pining for a richer past, is at once a neat concept and a bit of a nonstarter. Even if by design, the elegant malaise and the nonstop catch-the-reference namedropping grows rather enervating. The point (we humans, or "zombies" as the vampires call us, need to remember how to embrace beauty and protect our world) is clear very early on, yet made again and again. Call me a philistine, but this particular film could use a modest shot of earnest mystery and suspense, of grind-house vigor, and I suspect this could be done in such a way as to complement rather than overshadow or undermine its loftier ideas. Its too-cool-for-school purity of purpose is both admirable and a defect.

Despite my grievances, however, it is not hard to spot the qualities of Only Lovers Left Alive. It is definitely a beautiful film in its own nocturnal way: poor Detroit, with its long line of empty and overgrown structures, is now an ideal location to convey an apocalypse in motion. And the cast is very strong, both in regard to actual performance and, let's face it, in regard to magazine-ready posing. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are a gorgeous, gaunt, and otherworldly pair in stylish sunglasses, and they generate a certain erotic and soulful energy, however wan. And as Eve's volatile and more bloodthirsty sister visiting from the West Coast, Mia Wasikowska exits the film almost as soon as she enters it, but still tears into her few scenes and jolts the film into action or at least as close as it ever comes to a sense of consequence and propulsion.

C+

Oh, and in regard to one character being an actual figure from history, I am certain they could have gone a far more interesting route than choosing Christopher Marlowe and the easy he-truly-wrote-Shakespeare's-plays gag. Jarmusch is just aping Roland Emmerich!