Only Lovers Left Alive
Jun. 27th, 2014 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe university cinema showed Only Lovers Left Alive yesterday, so of course I went to see it. It's a well-made, lyrical, drifting sort of movie, which makes excellent use of its Detroit setting to give the story a decaying ghost-town backdrop. It is also very funny, in a pitch-black and understated sort of way, and Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are both beautiful (although I do not approve of whatever torture they inflicted on Hiddleston's hair).
For all that, I admired the movie more than enjoyed it (although I did like Eve's little sister Ava), because it was just too slow-moving for my taste. I suspect that it's much easier for music lovers to enjoy; there were a lot of interludes where instrumental music plays over beautiful but static shots, which are probably more meaningful if you can either recognize the music or pick out subtleties about coloratura or whatever it is one is supposed to appreciate about instrumental music.
But of course this is central to the effect of the movie: these vampires have lived for centuries and live, or unlive, for art - for the broad definition of art that includes anything creative that people do, music or poetry or theater or science. Politics, empires, individual people are ephemeral to a vampire, but art and more generally knowledge are something they can carry with them - in their minds, if not in physical possession. "There are beautiful instruments everywhere," Eve tells Adam, and he leaves his instrument collection behind without further protest.
(I vaguely suspect that this movie is a secret in-joke designed around the fact that Hiddleston and Swinton actually are vampires. There is just no other way to explain the fact that they look like Greek statues, even though Swinton at least is nearly my mother's age.)
For all that, I admired the movie more than enjoyed it (although I did like Eve's little sister Ava), because it was just too slow-moving for my taste. I suspect that it's much easier for music lovers to enjoy; there were a lot of interludes where instrumental music plays over beautiful but static shots, which are probably more meaningful if you can either recognize the music or pick out subtleties about coloratura or whatever it is one is supposed to appreciate about instrumental music.
But of course this is central to the effect of the movie: these vampires have lived for centuries and live, or unlive, for art - for the broad definition of art that includes anything creative that people do, music or poetry or theater or science. Politics, empires, individual people are ephemeral to a vampire, but art and more generally knowledge are something they can carry with them - in their minds, if not in physical possession. "There are beautiful instruments everywhere," Eve tells Adam, and he leaves his instrument collection behind without further protest.
(I vaguely suspect that this movie is a secret in-joke designed around the fact that Hiddleston and Swinton actually are vampires. There is just no other way to explain the fact that they look like Greek statues, even though Swinton at least is nearly my mother's age.)
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no subject
Date: 2014-06-27 11:41 pm (UTC)(although I do not approve of whatever torture they inflicted on Hiddleston's hair)
I'm not sure why being a vampire requires your hair to look like that. They all had it to some extent.
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Date: 2014-06-27 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-28 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-28 12:24 pm (UTC)