Only Lovers Left Alive

Okay, I need to be writing chapters of a novel, but, to keep my brain from melting, I slip out from time to time for a movie. And I got zero time or fingerstrength for rigging a proper review together, but, man, I did dig this one. Also, the world may be lucky that Jim Jarmusch chose to drop this movie now, instead of twenty years ago, when Sandman was in full swing. I mean, Gaiman, he gothed the world up, and there’s still remants and vestiges of that, which is all cool and great. But, had Only Lovers Left Alive hit in the mid-nineties, well, it would have been all over for good old Planet Earth. An alternate  universe Captain Kirk would have fallen into orbit one day, transported down, and there would be raggy black cloth everywhere, and eyeliner would be heriditery by then, and all the babies would be named Robert Smith. Which is to say: both the style and the tone of this movie, it sucks you in completely, it makes you want to be these cool, mopey cats. I mean, sure, there’s a sense in which they’re kind of functioning as immortal commentators on the ills of humanity—nicely dubbed ‘zombies’—and, yes, since Ann Rice, vampires have pretty much been a class-fascination for the rest of us (we want to join that club . . .), but, who wouldn’t choose to live in a dilapidated, velvety Victorian mansion in abandoned Detroit and collect impossibly vintage guitars and then have the added  . . . → → →</a