Jarmusch’s Dead Don’t Die
Adam Driver, Selena, Chloe Sevigny + Zombies!
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film The Dead Don’t Die (a zombie-inspired riff on Vincent Sherman’s 1950 The Damned Don’t Cry starring Joan Crawford) looks just as fun, twisted and true to form as it sounds. With a small, quiet town called Centerville under zombie attack by the likes of Iggy Pop (searching for a pot of coffee, no less), Carol Kane—in search of chardonnay—and Jarmusch’s long-time partner and fellow filmmaker, Sara Driver, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is going to be a rollicking, punky ride with B-movie tropes as well as classic horror influences (George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead immediately comes to mind).
The trailer proudly acclaims that it’s “The greatest zombie cast ever disassembled” and, from the looks of it, that is completely spot on. Veteran film actors such as Danny Glover, Bill Murray and Steve Buscemi come to play along with a smart man’s dream cast of sexy women including Tilda Swinton and Chloë Sevigny. Swinton plays, presumably, the town’s mortician as she can be seen applying garish makeup to corpses while sporting a long, peroxide blonde, arrow-straight wig and, later, brandishing a samurai sword (she also has a thick Scottish brogue). Sevigny looks fetching as a fresh-faced (and terrified) cop in geek-chic glasses with her signature blonde hair scraped back in a bun to show off her New England good looks. The young and beautiful Selena Gomez resembles a hotter version of the good girl next door with her cream-sickle colored tee-shirt and pony tail who, upon watching the news of a zombie apocalypse, quips “It’s really, really creepy.”
But wait—there’s more sexiness! Rosie Perez ostensibly plays a television newscaster while hunky Adam Driver looks like he’s in the hot seat for the most zombie-killing action (a fellow cop, he can be seen wielding a machete while hanging out the window of a moving car as he lops off heads). Tom Waits looks like a deranged mountain man as he remarks “Welcome to my world, zombies” and, in my mind, there’s no one cooler or sexier than Tom Waits with his gravelly voice (or Iggy Pop for that matter—BTW, even though he’s undead, he still refuses to wear a shirt, only an opened vest).
As with any Jarmusch movie, the soundtrack is bound to be killer (pun intended), the jokes clever and the story original. Bill Murray looks better than ever as Centerville’s chief of police as he hunts down zombies in graveyards with a shotgun and it’s wonderful to see Danny Glover in a comedy now because, as impressive as he is at drama, he’s also wonderfully funny (The Royal Tenenbaums, anyone?). It looks like we’ll also get to see Jarmusch favorite RZA as a postal worker and Caleb Landry Jones (of Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri fame) as part of the ensemble as well. For fans of Jim Jarmusch, zombies and, simply those who want to have a splendid time at the movies, June can’t come quickly enough.
