Only Lovers Left Alive Movie Review

Make no mistake about it, when Jim Jarmusch makes a vampire movie, he’s not jumping on the popularity bandwagon behind “True Blood” and the Twilight series. Those pieces of pop culture are so far outside the realm of what Jarmusch is known for that if he even gave them a second thought while he was writing and developing Only Lovers Left Alive, it was to check in on the ways his movie would be a hipper, cooler, and more loath response to soap opera lust.

Jarmusch is, if nothing else, eternally cool and hip. This is true even though his greatest audience, the film buffs who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, have now reached middle age and probably don’t have much time for indie cinema anymore. Because to watch a vampire movie made by this craftsman whose signature style is contemplation, reservation, and quietude followed by the inevitably dry offhand remark is to see the coolest damn vampires the movies have ever given us.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1986

25 Years Ago I was probably just beginning to learn my multiplication table in Mrs. Hansen's third grade class. I don't remember much else about what I learned that year. I remember studying European geography, learning the countries and possibly their capitals. Yugoslavia was still a unified country and I remember, even at age 8, that my classmates were immature in laughing at the name because it was like, "You go slav." The things that stick in our memories.

I certainly wasn't going to the movies so much, but I've seen a half dozen or so of the films that opened in October of 1986. There's little that's particularly notable. The list of releases contains the usual mix of prestige projects aiming for the awards season and popular fluff (action and comedy, mainly) to keep the investors happy.

Coffee and Cigarettes Movie Review

This review was first written and published in May 2004 on a website that no longer exists.

Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni enjoy coffee and cigarettes.

Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes is a series of short, comic vignettes in which the characters discuss such banalities as Elvis’s long-lost twin brother, the theories of Nikola Tesla, the effects of coffee on your dreams and the absence of any Tom Waits songs on the juke box. All of this is done in various coffee shops while the characters – that’s right – drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.

Jarmusch began this project in 1986 with the production of the first vignette, “Strange to Meet You,” starring Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright. The next two, “Twins” with Joie and Cinque Lee and Steve Buscemi and “Somewhere in California” with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop followed several years later. Then in 2004 he finally completed another eight short films to round out the themes and release all eleven as a feature film.