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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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Thursday Next's Avatar
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I think Adam is supposed to be a bit of a pretentious wanker, though, he's supposed to be a self-obsessed teenager, that's part of the joke. He's had centuries to refine his obsessions, but there are still things he pretends to know more about than he really does.

I agree that the name-dropping gets irritating, though.



I think the older Jim Jarmush movies were much better than this; take "Night on Earth" for example..
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Occasionally I just sometimes hate a movie far more than it probably deserves, and this is one of those.
No it definitely deserves it. Glad to see I wasnt the only one that found this to be pretentious empty winky garbage. Its a tedious pointless boring film where nothing happens and theres no sensation of building tension. It was just sort of a snapshot of a few days in the life of these passive reclusive creatures who live their lives at a glacial pace deriving mute pleasure from objects and laying around silently contemplating. But thats BORING in a movie. And it results in a plodding pointless film with no sensation of transition or development or discovery. It came off as just empty intellectual masturbation and an artie excuse for the writer to dwell on stuff he thought was cool and to apparently show how cool he was for thinking that stuff is cool.

Now, slow can be fine in a movie. I can appreciate the reflective slowness of the pace when the approach lends something to the story being told in the film. When theres a sense of purposefulness to the rhythm and its clear that you are going somewhere no matter how slowly and reflectively. But being given a movie with largely no story and in which the only semblance of tension is the valley girl vampire showing up and screwing things up is not at all entertaining to me.

And the incessant name dropping only added to the cheap empty pretentiousness of it all. I dont care that you and Claude Monet road tandem bikes through the streets of Paris...

It took every ounce of will in my body not to roll my eyes back into my skull permanently...

The sad part is its a very pretty movie. Theres a decadent decay that arcs from Tangier to Detroit quite well. But thats ALL there is positive about this movie really. Its beauty. Otherwise its an empty pointless vessel seemingly designed solely for the intellectual whims of its creator and not at all for the viewer.
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Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...