You couldn’t ask for two actors better suited to play a couple of sharp-featured, hipster vampire lovers than Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, two actors who’ve hit the absolute peak of coolness at this point in their respective careers. And who better to direct them than Jim Jarmusch, the indie godfather who always seems to be ahead of the curve stylistically, speeding down the roadway we call cinema in his own lane? Sadly, Jarmusch falls behind the curve in Only Lovers Left Alive, a tiresome love story that’s too fascinated with cleverly subverting (it thinks) vampire lore to say anything truly interesting. Is Jarmusch’s exercise in aimless chatting a unique take on bloodsucker cinema? Yes. But he so aggressively concerns himself with subverting the myth that film becomes burdened by it.

Hiddleston plays Adam, an underground indie musician who lives in the forgotten American wasteland of Detroit, swimming in vinyl records, antiquated electronics, and vintage guitars dropped off at his grungy house by his innocent “zombie” (human) stoner buddy named Ian (a perfectly casted Anton Yelchin). His lover of centuries, Eve (Swinton), lives in Tangier, stuffing her nose in piles of dusty old books in every language and meeting with her old friend Marlowe (John Hurt) at a late-night cafe. (Yes, you can actually see hipster-stench wafting off of the screen.) Marlowe is irritated that he never got credit for writing Shakespeare’s plays, one of many obnoxiously presented wink-wink jokes about immortality aimed at fans of vampire fiction who have probably heard this stuff a million times.

Eve flies to Detroit to reunite with her precious Adam, and a steamy reunion it is–their passion for each other hasn’t dwindled a bit over the hundreds of years they’ve been canoodling all over the world. Hiddleston and Swinton sizzle, and their fiery scenes in close proximity are the film’s most engaging. The film slyly suggests that the world’s greatest artists were all members of a sort of vampire aristocracy, with Adam’s wall adorned with a gallery of portraits of supposed vamps (Buster Keaton, Joe Strummer, Mark Twain, Claire Denis, and others). Jack White even gets a shout out, as Adam and Eve drive by his childhood home on a nighttime drive through the city. The marriage of vampire lore with artistic icons is unique and intriguing at first, but it’s prodded and poked to death by incessant referencing.

It seems as if Jarmusch thought long and hard about how to represent vampire life in ways never seen before. He finds new angles. Adam and Eve get their blood in purified packets from doctors (the great Jeffrey Wright) and friends–human blood is so packed with impurities these days that sucking straight from the throat is a health risk. Their taste in the arts is so hyper-sophisticated because they’ve soaked up several lifetimes worth of music, books, and stage performance. Makes sense. Eve makes tasty Type-O blood popsicles, a culinary invention that seems pulled from the vampire section of Pinterest. These plays on the genre are clever, but add very, very little to the story at hand. Light chuckles at best.

But there isn’t much story to sink your teeth into, anyway. That’s not what Jarmusch is aiming for; leave that stuff to Stephanie Meyer. He’s defining the attitude of a culturally refined, endangered generation so repulsed by the vapid state of young people that they’re driven to the brink of suicide. (Adam has the eager Ian fetch him a wooden bullet, which he intends to off himself with. That is, until Eve shows up to perk him up and rekindle his will.) The film is perhaps more interesting as a piece hipster fiction, using vampirism as a metaphor to explain their endless love for old, tattered things.

As a hangout movie, Only Lovers is sometimes great, with Hiddleston and Swinton’s seductive repartee slipping off their tongues like melted butter. But again, vamp references distract and derail scenes often. The production design by Marco Bittner Rosner is luscious and brilliantly captured by Jarmusch (he’s a master at that). There are loads of edgy, stylish images throughout the film, like the opening shot of a starry night sky spinning and spinning until it takes the shape of a spinning vinyl record in Adam’s abode. Only Lovers Left Alive is one of Jarmusch’s most alluring films stylistically, but the self-conscious, often silly script makes it hard to fully indulge in its sensual wonders.

Only Lovers Left Alive trailer

How to Fight in Six Inch Heels

Last Thursday night at San Francisco’s beautiful Castro theater, CAAMFest 2014 kicked with a silly-fun romantic comedy to set the tone for the rest of the 11-day fest. With a ritzy red carpet and droves of sharply-dressed attendees, there was ample excitement in the air for what is one of the most important film festivals in the country for the Asian American community.

CAAM executive director Stephen Gong and festival director Masashi Niwano thanked the packed house of festival-goers and prepped them for what this year’s festival has in store (check out our festival preview for more). They then introduced director Ham Tran to the stage, a long time friend of CAAMFest who’s been showing his films at the festival for over a decade. This year he brought How to Fight in Six Inch Heels, an Asian-American production that was a box office hit in Vietnam, where the majority of the movie is set. With him were his cast and crew, who participated in a Q&A following the film.

Following a short film centered on the evolution of the real-life career of  How to Fight star Kathy Uyen, the feature film got underway. It follows a pretty, neurotic Vietnamese American girl working as an assistant to a domineering French designer in the New York fashion industry. With her fiancé working abroad in Vietnam, she begins to suspect he’s cheating with one of three models working with him when she spies a pair of red heels in his apartment during a Skype call. Determined to smoke out the would be skank, she flies out to Saigon, leaving her best friend George to cover her ass at work. When she arrives, her fashion-god friend Danny glams her up with a makeover and shoves her into the Saigon fashion world where she inadvertently becomes a bit of a runway phenomenon. Now in close proximity to the models in suspect, she’s surprised when she finds herself developing friendships with each of them.

This is light material with cutesy humor running throughout. The film is well crafted and should please general audiences, bouncing between Vietnamese and English dialogue smoothly. Uyen is strong, but it feels like we’ve seen this same quirky, romantically naive character before (The Devil Wears Prada being the obvious example). Every note she hits, while in tune, feels too familiar, which points to the film’s biggest weakness. How to Fight in Six Inch Heels derives too much from American cinema, hitting every rom-com trope and story beat in the book. Many of the characters feel overblown (the gay men especially), but most of the performances hit the mark.

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

A documentary that matches its subject’s witty, piercing intellect in its style and form, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs chronicles the philosophies and staggering accomplishments of Boggs, a Chinese American who dedicated most of her 95 years on this earth to empowering and inspiring the African American community. Director Grace Lee (no relation) uses archival footage, interviews with Boggs and several of her colleagues and friends, and clever vignettes explaining the core principles of two of her major influences, Hegel and Marx, to bring to light not just Boggs’ lifetime milestones, but her tendencies and complexities as a person.

Detroit is the setting, as Boggs calls it home and has played a big part in working to restore the city in the wake of the industrial fallout. Boggs’ most defining characteristic is her hunger to challenge and open the minds of everyone she meets. In the film’s most memorable moment, she sits with Danny Glover in her home and poses that when people talk about “quality education”, what they’re really talking about is black students aspiring to be more like white students. Glover is floored, rendered speechless, and it’s at once hilarious and inspirational. Though Detroit is a shell of its former self, activists like Boggs help to remind us of where its fallen from, why it fell, and where we can take it, if we’re willing to put in the effort and thought. A terrific film.

Cold Eyes

A remake of Yau Nai Hoi’s Eye in the Sky, Cold Eyes, by co-directors Ui-seok Jo and Byung-seo Kim, is a crime thriller set in Seoul that pits a group of undercover surveillance cops against a gaggle of gangsters, with the good guys trying to smoke out the criminals’ mysterious leader. Our hero is Yoon Joo (Han Hyo Ju), a new recruit who has a prodigious photographic memory (if she can clear her head enough to access it) who’s brought in and mentored by veteran Detective Hwang (Sol Kyung Gu). Earning the codename “Piglet”, she joins the team in identifying suspects on the street (while retaining their anonymity, of course). Leading the baddies is the cerebral, deadly James (Jung Woo Sung), who overseas the heists from tall rooftops and viciously dispatches of weak links in the operation without hesitation. The two parties are on a collision course, and as Piglet’s skills help the team close in on James and his crew, he begins to fight back, showing them exactly what he’s capable of.

Jo and Kim have crafted a worthy remake, a tense, riveting look at the classic cops vs. robbers scenario with a focus on advanced technology and modern stratagems. Watching Hwang maneuver his team through the Seoul streets like a chess mastermind is a treat, but it can wear thin. Sometimes the film gets carried away with using video game-like CG street maps that lay out the team’s positions in the city, which serves its function but feels like a bit of a cheat at times. Still, the on-foot, shadowy pursuits are heightened by the public arena, with each of the players moving through the environments swiftly but without looking suspicious. It’s incredibly gripping stuff, and the surprisingly deep character arcs for the mains (the supporting players seem half-baked) makes Cold Eyes’ characters more relatable than those in your average Hollywood heist picture.