You know how people look back on the 80’s and laughingly say, “ugh, what were we thinking with that hair?” That’s the kind of hindsight people should have towards modern vampire movies. People should look back on Interview with a Vampire, Twilight, and even Vampire in Brooklyn and say, “Ugh, vampires are supposed to be walking corpses not employees at a Hot Topic.” Yet, this hasn’t gotten through some people’s heads. People are actually still making vampire movies where the vampires are brooding misunderstood hyper-cool musicians with sexy hot girlfriends that all have smooth skin and perfect teeth.
And I guess they can still get hard-ons even though their hearts aren’t able to pump blood to their cocks. No, that makes sense.
When I heard that Jim Jarmusch was making a vampire film I thought that of all the auteurs that could take the vampire genre to another level, here’s the guy that can do it. I thought that his take would be another Shadow of the Vampire where the vampire is actually a sallow and emaciated corpse with no social skills and is devoid of humanity as opposed to these other films where they try to paint the vampires as being this next evolutionary step in human development with impeccable taste in wine and fashion. And here we have it, Only Lovers Left Alive – and it’s just another one of these modern vampire tales where the vampires are all brilliant poets and brilliant musicians that ritualize the drinking of blood like it’s Absinthe. Another vampire movie where the vampires wear sunglasses at night because when you’re so unfathomably cool the sun shines on you at all hours of the day.
Or is it?
I got an hour into this movie and I started to get annoyed. You’ve got two main vampires: Adam and Eve. First of all, could there be a more ham-handed attempt at a poignant coupling of names. What a deft literary reference. Aside from that, the two vampires mope around all day and they seem to have no jobs to speak of but an endless supply of money to dole out to people to get shit for them. The vampires live separately: one in (I think) Istanbul, and the other in Detroit. Well, Adam has gotten sick of living and he wants to kill himself just like so many misunderstood musicians of his time. So Eve decides to come pay him a visit to cheer him up.
That’s the basic premise of the movie.
After getting an hour into this and having to put up with a constant stream of vampire cliches I started to get more and more annoyed. But then it hit me, what if this whole movie was just a big joke on the tweens? What if this whole movie was made to look like a legit vampire movie but was actually masking an underlying message that all these modern vampire movies are fucking retarded? What if the intention was to have a certain group of people love the movie for shelling out the same bullshit that so many vampire movies are currently doing but then have it loved by another group of people because they’re in on the joke?
And then I finished watching the movie and I realized that, no, the movie is just really awful.
Let me just break down the entirety of this movie. Alright so, like I said, we’ve got Adam and Eve and they’re both super-old vampires that have been around a long time. They’ve been around so long that Adam knows how to make money out of nothing and he even figured out how to make a futuristic engine to power his home based on the ideas of a great scientist who was probably a vampire as well but is now something like a drummer in an acid jazz band. Great, good for him.
He also builds a studio in his house and spends his free time (when he’s not moping around feeling bored) recording awful goth songs with 
vintage guitars. Because only old things are good, right? I mean, even though few people can discern between the acoustic qualities of a Stradivarius and a new violin, Adam still clings to the fact that guitars made out of particle board and spit are superior to recent guitars made from materials like wenge and purpleheart. He poorly plays all the instruments himself and everything sounds like something The Doors would come up with when they were all batshit high on helium hinted heroin. Yet Adam drags himself out of bed every morning, makes sure that he looks like Jimmy Gnecco and records his ponderous atonal soundscapes.
Adam even does the one thing that every guitar play has tried out at least once in their 
lives. He plays the guitar with a drum stick!
This was the first thing that made me think this movie was playing a joke on me.
No one does this seriously! Ever! It looks like a cool thing to do but there’s no reason to do it. It doesn’t sound special. It doesn’t make any new tones. It just looks cool if you’ve never actually played guitar. And that’s the first problem with the modern vampire tale: it’s all about looking cool and casting aside the obvious point that we’re dealing with walking corpses that somehow still look like American Apparel models.
In the world of underground music, Adam becomes this Mr. Doctor figure with a legion of fans that stand outside his house just to catch a glimpse of him in the window. His tapes are circulated around by people and played across the country in dance clubs or goth clubs or any other place where shitty music is shoveled out to the dreary.
So now we’re at the point where Adam gets bummed out because he’s so good looking, that his music is well appreciated, that he lives for free, that he’s figured out free energy, that he doesn’t have to worry about getting a disease, and that he has no natural predators – he wants to finally off himself. Because, really, where do you go from here?
Why figure out a way to be productive? If I had the drive of a slug where all I did was loaf around the house all day barefoot I’d probably want to kill myself, too. I feel sorry for the vampire that turned Adam. His friends probably made fun of him. “Wait, you drink the blood of that homeless guy? Why did you turn him and not just kill him? And why did you drink the blood of a hobo? There were no politicians around?”
So Adam Skypes with his wife who lives over in Istanbul or Iraq or whatever dirt poor country she’s holed up in. Look, this is the one aspect of the movie I completely agree with. I imagine if you’ve been married for a few centuries that you’d want your space. I know that my grandparents had separate bedrooms because my granddad snored too loud. Hey, you need your sleep. But when we start clocking down the decades there must come a point where you want an ocean to divide you instead of a layer of Sheetrock.
Okay, so Eve decides to come pay Adam a visit to cheer him up. But there’s just one 
problem. Ugh, she can’t decide what books to bring with her. Vampires Problems! Cause she’s a well read learned vampire. You know how it is. When you’re alive for centuries you can tear through an Amazon Wish List like no one’s business. And even though they have Skype and computers I guess some people never got around to buying a Kindle. Nope, Eve never got around to visiting a Best Buy so she has to load up a bunch of suitcases with all her favorite books. Because if it’s one thing you’re going to do when trying to convince your husband to not kill himself is tear through a greatest hits collection of literary classics.
But of course she can’t leave the country yet. No, she has to go have a pow-wow with Christopher Marlowe. Yes, that Christopher Marlowe: author of Doctor Faustus. You see, we’re clued in that many of the world’s greatest poets, musicians, thinkers, writers, and scientists are all vampires. At least, that’s what the film alludes to. Because, I guess, in order to be brilliant you have to live on Earth for centuries. A little casual dismal to individual ambition there.
Okay, so Eve and Adam finally hook back up. Yay! What’s the first thing you want to do when you haven’t seen your partner in years? I know, let’s go for a car ride and shoehorn in a conversation that will name drop our good friend, Jack White. And by “good friend” I mean the director’s good friend not the characters. Yeah, Jack White has nothing to do with the movie in any way. Somebody just wanted to fit his name in there. Yeah, they just drive around and talk about shitty derivative rock music. This couple is fucking boring!
That’s like if I were an employee at Keds shoes company and someone decided to make a documentary on Keds shoes. So they’re talking to me about insoles and laces and I take them on a car ride where I casually point out a house that “used to be the home of John Petrucci of Dream Theater…do you ever listen to Dream Theater? I love Dream Theater.” But the documentary editor just kept that whole exchange in the movie. Even though it has nothing to do with Keds.
But wait, there’s more. It’s time for a night out on the town. I know, let’s go see a band. What band do you want to see? How about another band that the director loves: The White Hills. Oh look, they all sound exactly the same. Noisy psychedelic horseshit music where it doesn’t matter one way or the other if the guitars are actually tuned. I’m so fed up with this outpouring of affection people have for incompetent musicians that are unable to play instruments and write coherent music. It’s just bothersome rubbish. The drummer’s beating the drums as hard as he can, the guitarist is smacking the back of his guitar neck with his hand just to make noise and get feedback, and the singer is laying down on the floor acting like he’s just SO exhausted from his amazingly compelling performance. But because it’s so terrible people think it’s brilliant. It’s like how these elitist art snobs that go to a gallery and turn their noses up to photo-realistic oil painting portraits but fawn over the depth and daring in a vitrine with a plate of fake dog shit on it. “Oh look, it’s a plate of dog shit with a sign attached that reads ‘media.’ What a bold statement.”
Fuck you!
Alright, so then the couple lounges around eating blood popsicles – and if you haven’t tapped out on the movie at this point you should stick around for the new house guest that’s thrown into the picture. If Adam and Eve haven’t bored you to tears at this point you’ll welcome the debut of some sister or friend or whatever the fuck Mia Wasikowska is supposed to play in this movie. I honestly forgot because that’s the kind of impact her character had on me. Oh, she’s the free spirit though. She can’t be tamed. She’s a lose cannon. She’s a wild card, buddy. And then she kills Adam’s friend: the guy that hooks him up with crummy vintage guitars and snakewood bullets.
Uh oh. Now they have to stash a body. But, hey, they live in Detroit: a modern day version of Beirut. Apparently you can stash a body at the local Circle K and no one would know. Problem solved, right?
Nope. Now Adam has to abandon everything he’s built and “worked” for and leave the country. Yep, so long rent-free house. So long no-job. So long no-responsibilities. See ya later not-having-bills.
They go off to Istanbul-or-Snergonia and discovery yet another unappreciated musical genius playing at a local dive bar that doubles as a cock fighting venue. And when we meet this unappreciated musical mastermind are we regaled by 30 seconds of music so we can get a taste of their sound while moving forward with the movie, or do we have to sit through 3 fucking minutes of an entire god damn song so the director can shoehorn in YET ANOTHER one of his musical pets: Yasmine Hamdan. For fuck’s sake enough of this pretentious and maudlin drooling over underground artists and the merits of being unknown by critics. Here’s a news flash: IT’S ALL POP MUSIC!!
It all subscribes to the same formula that the Beatles used. None of these assholes are doing anything different, it just sounds worse. But because it’s not polished and presented as “raw emotion” it’s supposed to be deep and meaningful. As if anything polished can’t be deep and credible. And look, I’m not going to lie, this chick that was singing in this dive bar was great but she was no Azam Ali. But then again, if you’re into that kind of music you’ve heard of Azam Ali and that just wouldn’t be cool.
And to make the ending worse we’re met with the revelation that Christopher Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays. Yes, confirming the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare could’ve never written his own work. Fucking annoying.
In the end Only Lovers Left Alive is just another entry into the endless tide of modern vampire movies that portray death as romantic and being dark is “deep.” It’s nothing new, it’s nothing special, and frankly it was a big waste of time.
