The Dead Don't Die (2019)

THE DEAD DON'T DIE  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jim Jarmusch
    Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny,
    Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi,
    Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop, Carol Kane
Jim Jarmusch pays tribute to George Romero in "The Dead Don't Die", starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny as small-town cops faced wth a plague of the undead. It seems that polar fracking has knocked the earth off  its axis, causing day and night to be all screwed up and once-buried corpses to (sort of) come to life. Tilda Swinton plays an undertaker. Tom Waits plays a crazy hermit. Steve Buscemi plays a redneck farmer. Iggy Pop plays a zombie who craves coffee and Carol Kane plays one who loves Chardonnay. True to Romero, Jarmusch views zombies as a metaphor for consumerism, and he has an eye for little things that he finds interesting, despite or because of the fact that they're completely incidental. Like when the camera pans along a city street and lands on a white bicycle leaning against a tree. The bicycle has nothing to do with anything in the story, but it's there, and viewers who know about white bicycles will know what that means. Considering that most zombie movies are satires to begin with, a Jim Jarmusch zombie movie makes perfect sense: the Zen master of deadpan and the slightly less deadpan undead.