Cannes 2019 opener, The Dead Don't Die, is nothing to die for

Fremaux had said that the film had 'ties to President Donald Trump...It is a very anti-Trump movie. It talks about American hegemony. America is an extraordinary country. With Jarmusch, we can expect that he is not very happy with what is happening at present'. But after watching the movie, I felt that Fremaux had overstated this angle. The film's most overt political message came with a red hat worn by Steve Buscemi's character: Instead of Make America Great Again, it read Keep America White Again. Actor Bill Murray in a still from The Dead Don't Die. Obviously, The Dead Don't Die did not get the crowd on a high, and a muted ovation at the end told it all. In a script written by Jarmusch, the movie focusses on a fictional American town called Centerville, which suddenly begins to experience the strangest of happenings. The sun does not set, the moon hangs too low and as the earth slips off its axis, the graveyards come alive with the dead rising and walking about the town. Not just this, they pounce on men and women and in a vampire-like horror begin to suck blood and eat flesh. Priyanka Chopra's brother Siddharth's ex-fiancee Ishita returns to London, thanks mom for supporting her decisions These strange goings on get the town's three cops - Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray), Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny) - on their toes. Helping them in their mission is Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton), who behaves like a Japanese Samurai, and uses her huge sword to chop off the heads of these monstrous zombies. This is the only way that they can be silenced. As the town begins to grapple with this ghostly invasion which threatens to wipe Centerville off the map - and with reports coming in of more such disasters in other parts of the world, it seems like the end of civilisation. The cops are absolutely clueless as how to handle this supernatural happening, and Robertson has never seen anything of this kind in all his long career. And in his usual bumbling manner, he tries to knock the zombies out. The Dead Don't Die tries hard to be witty of the quiet sort of way which Murray is good at, but it lacks punch and energy. There is not enough meat to drive the script, which often looks as deadpan as Murray himself. Hardly the kind of opener one would expect from an A-lister festival like Cannes. But let us hope the 12-day event would pep up in the days to come; after all there are masters waiting to showcase their cinema. (Gautaman Bhaskaran has covered Cannes close to three decades.) DailyhuntDisclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by Dailyhunt. Publisher: Hindustan Timeshttp://www.itsarab.org/UserProfile/tabid/61/userId/54474/Default.aspx