Tag: Steve Buscemi

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The Dead Don’t Die

The town of Centerville’s welcome sign says it all: “A Real Nice Place.” Police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) don’t have to work too hard to keep the peace. When The Dead Don’t Die opens, they’re checking out a report by Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) that old Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) has been stealing his chickens. The investigation goes pretty much nowhere, because Chief Robertson thinks Farmer Miller’s an asshole, and all Hermit Bob will say is “fuck you.”

As they head back to the station, Cliff and Ronnie notice that there’s something weird going on. This is, of course, the set up to nearly every zombie film ever made: Two people, their heads buried in the daily minutiae, slowly come to realize that their world is being overrun by the unquiet dead.

You probably don’t associate director Jim Jarmusch with the genre, but he has obviously seen a few zombie movies in his time. Jarmusch’s primary directing mode has always been that of the observer. He favors letting things play out in long takes, the better to get to know his characters, warts and all. His 1989 masterpiece Mystery Train, which immortalized the down-and-out Memphis of the era, lingered on the bewildered faces of Jun and Mitsuko, the Japanese tourists who were discovering the real America. In Night on Earth, he got a career best performance from Winona Ryder by simply riding around in a cab with her.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

But he’s also always had a taste for genre pictures, such as his 1995 Western Dead Man, where he shot Johnny Depp in creamy duotone while demolishing the genre’s black and white morality plays. His last foray into supernatural horror was 2014’s transcendent Only Lovers Left Alive, where Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston played centuries-old vampires feeling the weight of immortality.

As one of the godfathers of independent film, Jarmusch knows how to get a project done by rounding up all of your friends and showing them a good time while they work. The difference with Jarmusch is the quality of the friends’ talents. Sara Driver, who became his partner while he was making his first film Stranger Than Paradise, appears as a zombie. Steve Buscemi, who here sports a “Keep America White Again” hat, rode with Joe Strummer in Mystery Train. Tom Waits spouted gruff wisdom in Coffee and Cigarettes. Bill Murray was the lead of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. The director worked with Iggy Pop for years to make a documentary on The Stooges. Tilda Swinton, so chillingly elegant in Only Lovers Left Alive, appears in The Dead Don’t Die as an eccentric coroner who is aces with a samurai sword. Adam Driver was magnificent in Paterson, Jarmusch’s last film. The list goes on.

Murray and Driver, joined by Chloë Sevigny as Officer Mindy, first try to make sense out of the dead rising from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, then try to contain the zombie contagion. They also serve as their own Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it happens around and to them, delivering sly in-jokes, and making the occasional meta foray. There are references to earlier Jarmusch films, such as the road-tripping tourists, played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler (slicked up like Strummer), who pick the wrong time to hole up in a seedy room at the Moonlight Motel. Jarmusch, the consummate indie film hipster, gets a laugh at their — and his own — expense with the line “Infernal hipsters and their irony!”

In the tradition of George Romero, who invented and perfected the modern zombie picture, Jarmusch uses the walking dead as satirical mirrors of society. Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it’s wifi and chardonnay.

As a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die never reaches the manic heights of Shaun of the Dead; but then again, it never tries that approach. Jarmuch’s sense of humor is dry as a bone, and his pacing deliberate. Hermit Bob, who watches the zombie apocalypse gather strength through cracked binoculars, serves as the director’s alter ego. He can’t fully participate in the rapidly decaying human society, but he can’t look away, either. One line in particular from The Dead Don’t Die seems designed to resonate through Jarmusch’s entire filmmaking career: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The Dead Don’t Die

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Lean On Pete

Despite what you may have gathered from the movie poster or the trailer, Lean on Pete is definitively not a horse movie. Sure, certain aspects feel plucked directly from Black Stallion, Black Beauty, or even Where the Red Fern Grows, but the real focus of the story is on Charley (Charlie Plummer), the disadvantaged teenage protagonist, and more broadly on the harsh, grimy life of the working class in the Pacific Northwest. Don’t expect any glamour shots of horses galloping along the beach – this film is set in stables, in diners, in crumbling industry towns, as well as in The Great Outdoors.

Charlie Plummer in Lean On Pete

The film is visually beautiful, with the palette of a faded photograph and a keen use of light and shadow. Even in the dingy bars and cheap motels of his world, Charley’s face always seems to find the light. Plummer is incredibly engaging as Charley, his candid face speaking volumes as he descends from a hopeful kid into a hardened, desperate drifter. Charley’s journey brings drop-ins from Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Zahn, and Travis Fimmel, whose performances are (mostly) convincing as a few of the drunks, crooks, and thieves who populate this dark underworld.

Charley befriends Lean on Pete, the horse who seems to be the only other soft creature in a hard place. Despite being reminded several times that Pete is “not a pet, just a horse,” he becomes Charley’s only friend and confidant, and eventually his traveling companion, as they abandon the world they know in pursuit of home and happiness. What Charley seeks is simple: he tells Pete “the nicest place he’s ever been” was a friend’s house where the family “just laughed and talked….and they liked each other.” The vision of comfort fuels these two outsiders on their exodus through the rugged terrain of Oregon toward Wyoming. When boy and horse trudge across the dry land, they are dwarfed by the expanse of flat plains and sky, giving the audience feelings of insignificance and isolation experienced by our heroes. It’s a metaphor, just like the horse is a metaphor, employed by director Andrew Haigh to tell a story about poverty and class. (You might be saying, “What’s a meadow for?” and you’d be right, seeing as we never see poor Pete the horse graze or canter joyfully in one for the entire 120 minute duration. In fact, Pete might actually be a camel, considering the amazingly small amount of water he consumes on his trek across the desert.)

Lean on Pete introduces viewers to the third class citizens of an impoverished, modern America, although there are very few details letting us know that this is a contemporary story. Charley and his associates don’t own cell phones or computers; they drive busted old trucks, listen to the radio, and watch tube televisions. It’s jarring when we see a cell phone or hear an autotune-style pop song; by making these ubiquitous cultural symbols feel alien, the filmmakers successfully show us just how disparately different classes live, despite the myths the comfortable tell ourselves. Through Charley, we experience the cruelty, violence, and trauma of poverty, and the rage and PTSD that come with it. Overall, the effect is powerful, but there are some moments that dip a little too far into cliche territory, and at times, the story relies on unnecessary cheap shots to evoke strong emotions. But if you’re looking for a film to tug your heartstrings and make you feel like you’ve walked a hundred miles in some scrappy shoes, Lean on Pete will be right up your (sad, dark) alley.

Lean On Pete

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Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

The word “entrepreneur” has its roots in a French word that originally meant something like “go-between.” By that definition, Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a consummate entrepreneur. He runs the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies —rather, he is the consulting firm Oppenheimer Strategies. We first meet him, white iPhone earbuds in place, mapping out social connections on a Starbucks napkin. He’s trying to land a $300 million deal for …something. We’re not quite sure what. And neither are any of the people he gets on the other end of the phone.

But Norman doesn’t seem to get discouraged, even as door after door is slammed in his face. When his nephew Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen) describes contacting one of his billionaire targets, Jo Wilf (Harris Yulin), as “a drowning man waving to get the attention of an ocean liner,” Norman replies that he is “a very good swimmer, as long as I have my head above water.”

Norman’s consulting business basically consists of his trying to bring people together — he even consults with other consultants, he brags. But the biggest problem is, he doesn’t add much value to the deal. Whatever water he used to carry in New York is long dried up. Now, he’s just an old widower living by his wits, waiting for his luck to run out.

Richard Gere plays the titular role in Joseph Cedar’s Norman.

But then, Norman is hit with one final stroke of luck. After talking his way into an international oil-and-gas exploration conference, he sets his sights on Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), a Deputy Minister of Trade and Labor for the Israeli government who seems to be on the way out of government. The plan is to use Micha’s name to get a foot in the door with billionaire Arthur Taub (Josh Charles) and to use Taub’s name to get Micha’s attention. Both parties think Norman is friends with the other party, and he plays the two off of each other for influence.

If this plot is sounding unbelievably convoluted to you, that means you’ve got a good handle on Norman (full title: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer). The film is at its best in the early stages, when Gere as Norman serves as a sort of tour guide through the corridors of elite New York wealth and power. People in fine suits are unfailingly cordial, until they sense that Norman is no use to them and throw him out. That all changes when, after a story break of three years, Micha’s luck turns and he becomes Prime Minister of Israel. With a single warm hug at a state reception, people are giving Norman their card instead of the other way around. And that, of course, is when Norman gets himself in way over his head. What Norman thinks of as favors for an old friend, Israeli federal law enforcement officer Alex Green (Charlotte Gainsbourg) thinks of as illegal influence peddling.

Israeli-American writer/director Joseph Cedar has crafted a story that lies somewhere between The Manchurian Candidate and the Bill Murray/Richard Dreyfuss comedy What About Bob? His biggest directorial challenge is making scene after scene of Richard Gere talking on his omnipresent iPhone visually interesting, and he goes far beyond the conventional split screen by digitally blending the halls of power with whatever random Office Depot the borderline-destitute Norman happens to be drifting through at the moment. Gere, for his part, is at least taking the role seriously. He shares some crackerjack scenes with Steve Buscemi as a pugilistic rabbi and Hank Azaria as a younger hustler who latches onto Norman late in the proceedings. But still, none of that can overcome the fact that Norman is a fairly innocuous film. Its highs are not very high, its laughs never grow beyond a chuckle, and its lows leave you with a shrug rather than a tear. It’s good to see original ideas and mature, politically sophisticated subject matter get a chance in contemporary Hollywood, but simple competence isn’t enough to make Norman more than a passing curiosity.