theshanecarr

Any viewing of trhis movie starts with those credits; you see that cast; Bill Murray! Adam Driver! Tilda Swinton! Chloë Sevigny! Steve Buscemi! Danny Glover! Rosie Perez! Caleb Landry Jones! Selena Gomez! And Tom "I'll whittle you into kindling" Waits! And you think; this movie can't lose.

Well, you'd be surprised.

Yes, a lot of people showed up to play with Jarmusch but Jarmusch was not ready. The script, especially in the third act, is a mess, full of fun moments but never gaining any narrative momentum. It's like Jarmusch had to start rolling on a particular date to get all these actors lined up, and so they started shooting though there was no third act in sight.

Maybe Jarmusch always works like this. Certainly Murray, Swinton, Driver, and Waits have all worked with him before. Maybe they trusted in the old Jarmusch magic to conjure something out of those blank final pages but alas, it was not to be.

The setting is Centerville - a village of 738 people whose inhabitants are just trying to go about their daily lives when the dead start rising from the grave. There's no Presidents or scientists in this movie - just the locals trying to get through the night, not understand why it's happening.

Although it's billed as a zombie movie, this is best thought of as a hangout movie. If you watch this purely for the pleasure of seeing Murray and Driver slowly trade lines with each other, or to see Swinton good-naturedly act out the offscreen uber-image of her as some sort of strange alien, or to see Buscemi be all crotchety, then you will find some small pleasures here but there is a pervading sense that the film makers had bigger hopes for their movie.

The shame of it is that you can almost see how it could have been great. There are clues all over about what this could have been. There are the signs of an environmental crime de coeur beseeching us to treat the planet better in the polar fracking which sets everything going. There are traces of a Romero-esque critique of consumerism in the zombies dedication to the rituals they engaged in when alive. (Most hilariously as some stumble about with phones mumbling "wi-fiiiiii".) There's hints of a a small-town big-city clash with Selena Gomez and her city slicker pals arriving into this sleepy hollow, and making fun of Landry Jones. There's the slightest whiff of a political commentary being tossed into the mix with Buscemi's red hat wearing farmer. There's hints of a detached observation of these ridiculous humans in the near-poetic ramblings of Waits as he observes the town from afar.

Jarmusch clearly thought he could stir these elements into one big, hilarious horror stew but when you stir this much into the pot, you need a surer sense of what you're making, and it sure feels here like Jarmusch did not.

To cover the gaps, he tried throwing in some meta-commentary on the zombie genre - Landry Jones' character is a big geek who has seen all the movies, and knows what to do. This is a route that could work (it did for "Scream") but that knowledge never leads to any new insight into the underlying tropes or fears of the genre.

Most bafflingly there is a meta bit where Bill Murray asks Adam Driver how he is so sure about what's going to happen, and Driver responds that it's because Jim gave him the full script and he's read it all. It's the kind of dumb-meta joke that does nothing for the film, and which a writer throws in when they really don't know what to write next. (And the ending suggests the same.)

Jarmusch, taking his cue from the pace of village life, directs everything at a crawl. We observe characters arriving and having conversations. People take their time. At first, it's a very welcome change of pace from a lot of similar movies, and if Jarmusch had been making a movie about the characters and goings on in this little village, I would have been all in, but the narrative becomes a fight to the death with flesh-eating zombies and yet the same indolent pace permeates throughout. It just doesn't work.

If Jarmusch thought he was making fun of horror movies, he needed to dig deeper into the urges underlying them, not simply suggest we're all so jaded now that the earth being thrown off its axis and the dead rising would be greeted with a shrug.

The truth is Jarmusch comes off as making a movie in a genre he doesn't love. It's almost crazy how he thought he could just tack on a few of the trappings and play in this sandbox. His lack of interest in zombies rings out loud and clear.

I do still love him. There's no one making films like him. I suspect after the brilliance of "Only Lovers Left Alive"'s take on the vampire genre, Jarmusch, his cast and producers thought they could replicate that movies success here, but their hopes, and mine, were, like so many zombie brains, cruelly bashed out on the ground.

This film has a lot of swell ingredients but it was left on the stove for a little too long and has become overcooked.

Writer/director Sian Heder has crafted a film about women, or more specifically about being a mother; the desire to be one, the difficulties, the loneliness, and what qualifies one to do it. It's sad and funny and recognisable all at once.

Elliot Page plays the eponymous Tallulah; a woman who has decided to opt out of society's responsibilities and restrictions and lives a life of petty crime from her van. Through a series of events and impulsive decisions, Tallulah ends up kidnapping a baby and shows up at the door of her ex-boyfriend's Mom, Margo (Alison Janney) claiming the baby is Margo's grandchild.

After all that first act running around set-up, Tallulah settles in to observe the three women impacted by this; Tallulah, Margo, and Carolyn, the biological mother played by Tammy Blanchard (last seen by me to chilling effect in "The Invitation").

All three women are coping with their sudden, unexpected new maternal situation; grand/motherhood, or it's wished-for absence. This is fertile (no pun intended) ground, and it's a shame the movie doesn't have the confidence to sit with the significance of these unintended consequences for these three women - too much time is spent on the busy-work of investigation, dodging police, and worst of all, the possibility of romance.

The film recognises the situation it has put these women in, but instead of reckoning with how they respond, it gives them suspicious detectives, and amorous doormen to spar with. But the meat of the matter is not in how others now see them, but in how they see themselves.

One particularly silly sequence has Tallulah turn manic pixie dream girl and teach Margo something by encouraging her to mess up the expensive paintings in her apartment she doesn't even like. It's all so superficial.

Luckily, the material is elevated by three brilliant actresses committing to their characters. Page and Janney (in their third collaboration following "Juno" and "Touchy Feely") are wonderful. Page brings a believable burgeoning maturity as she realises she may actually be up for this mothering thing after all. Janney excels at portraying someone closed off, and almost against her wishes, is allowing herself to open up again.

The real MVP though is Blanchard as the drunk who suddenly finds she desperately wants her child back. She takes us from potentially depressed new mother using alcohol to cope, to a woman seeing herself through others eyes for the first time in a long time and not liking what she is seeing.

You might come for Page and Janney but it is Blanchard you stay for, and I regretted the small amount of screen time the three had together.

The film is smart enough not to judge it's characters - they may do despicable things but the script always offers us some insight into why they did them.

If it sometimes indulges that desire a little too much (better to hint at or show problematic home lives than to give characters monologues where they spell it out), it's also wise enough to not hand us pat answers by the end. We have a fair idea of where things might go, but issues are by no means resolved, and that was the right place to leave it.

The final scene is so gratingly on-the-nose though that it almost ruined the whole thing for me, but I recalled the penultimate scene and felt connected to these strong but struggling women once again.

"Dementia 13". The reason I put this on is the same reason I think a lot of people will know of it; it's the directorial debut (officially anyway) of one Francis Ford Coppola. It's tempting to look at this mini-budgeted movie and try to discern the seeds of genius which would give us "Apocalypse Now", and "The Godfather".

Could I discern them? Well, there was some good stuff in here, but there's a whole lot of hokum too. If I'd seen this when it came out in 1963, I'm not sure I would have known there were great things ahead but I wouldn't have written it off either. There's something buried here.

Having recently watched "The Terror", it seems the behind-the-scenes stories can often be just as, if not more, fascinating than the movies themselves. I have got to find a book about Roger Corman and the way he churned out quickie movie after quickie movie back in the day. As an Irishman, it's even more fascinating to think that in 1962, when Ireland was in the grip of the Catholic church, when the "wrong" books and movies could be banned, that Corman was there banging out cheap and nasty horror flicks like this. Amazing.

The story goes that Corman finished making "The Young Racers" with $22,000 left over so he told his ambitious sound technician, Coppola, that he could have that money as the budget for a horror movie if he could get a script together quickly. Coppola pitched him the idea the next day, and the script was written in about three days. Filming took place soon after with actors Coppola either convinced to stay on from "The Young Racers", or who he knew from UCLA.

The movie starts out brilliantly. A bickering couple take a row boat out on a lake as strange music is heard faintly from a radio. They speak about money and an inheritance. He warns her that if he dies before his mother, she'll get nothing. Guess what? He clutches his heart, and barely three minutes into this thing, and already someone is dead. Does his wife call for help? Does she row to shore ASAP? Does she hell. She thinks about that inheritance and she sets a bonkers plan in motion to buy herself time.

From there, we get bizarre family backstory, a masked killer, a preserved body, a watery grave, a beheading - it all goes pretty over the top while trying to maintain a veneer of psychological realism. (Corman had told Coppola to make something like "Psycho", and in that he delivered, in more ways than one.)

But within that ridiculous framework, there are some good sequences. There is genuine tension as our lead characters are stalked by a killer. There is some wonderful moral ambiguity as we find ourselves rooting for a pretty messed up heroine. There's some successful creepiness in the performances, lighting and composition.

Unfortunately, the dialogue is terrible (Well, it was written in three days), the plot is unnecessarily confusing, some of the acting is awful (Patrick Magee as the doctor is in another movie altogether), the killer is accidentally (?) revealed three quarters through by lighting that reveals their face when it shouldn't, and there's a general air of rushing through everything (which is fair enough for a debut done on the cheap).

Luana Anders is great as the scheming wife - it's a shame that, like Coppola, she didn't go on to bigger things. For Irish audiences, it's fun to see Howth Castle pop up as the stately home of the family.

A fun, silly, z-list horror. Watch it in that spirit and you will have a good time.