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Occasionally I just sometimes hate a movie far more than it probably deserves, and this is one of those. I get it, Adam is the tortured genius, a great composer (perhaps you've heard some of his works from centuries past), who nowadays composes and records bland, generic dark wave music, because that's what depressed, genius vampires do, at least when they're not wallowing in their own misery and spewing out their anguished ruminations about the state of the world. Eve is his soulmate, assuming vampires have souls, a fellow vampire who has been living in Tangier and hanging out with the vampire version of Christopher Marlowe. And yes, finally we've solved the mystery of Shakespeare's genius! There's a lot of name dropping in this movie, little winks at the audience. Adam lives in Detroit (no wonder he's so depressed, right?) and she flies back to be with her lover. Because naturally she's the one person who really understands Adam's tortured genius.
I swear I feel like Jim Jarmusch has a teenage girl inside him who just had to express her gothic fantasies in all their adolescent corny cliched glory. That's how this movie feels. One more thing, Adam is also a scientific genius, which shouldn't be surprising given how Eve is able to supernaturally read a book as quick as she can turn the pages, and he's had a very long time to accumulate knowledge. So one would think he would know quantum entanglement has absolutely nothing to do with Einstein. One would think if Jarmusch took the time to research entanglement, he would also know that. And one would assume genius boy Adam would also not dismiss something as not being a theory but proven, showing a complete lack of understanding of what a scientific theory is. The dialogue there was a little confusing, but she mentions quantum theory to which he answers her, "No, it's not a theory, it's proven," but maybe he was talking about entanglement. Still, nothing is ever "proven" in science. Yeah, I'm being pedantic, but then I'd expect a genius such as Adam to be a little more pedantic himself. And with that the movie was coming to an end, and happily so for me.
I know a lot of people liked it, and perhaps you will too, but I really hated it. I get the appeal of the vampire. They're eternal, they're sexy, they're misunderstood...they're the ultimate outsider. But when done wrong, it's easy to turn the vampire myth into a vapid and silly cliche. Equating vampirism with heroin addiction didn't help this film either. The movie does look nice. Obviously, it's shot exclusively at night, and the cinematography is very good. But I hated the film, and I just had to let someone know my feelings. So there you go.
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I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.