© Le Pacte
Can't wait to see the new Jim Jarmusch film, about vampires, taking place in Tangier and Detroit, starring, among others, Tilda Swinton and John Hurt.
A review in Huffington Post (from May, but I've only just seen the review) has this to say about Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan's role in it:
what gives the movie its force is the soundtrack, which culminates in a stunning performance in a Tangier bar by the Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan. The vampires, on a hunt for blood, stop to peep at this beautiful singer as she dances and sings, waving her highly-toned arms and wearing a sparkling spangled belt, a surprise image in the misty Moroccan night.
The film is now starting to open in Europe. The US, who knows? (I've blogged about Yasmine in the past.)
3 comments:
I saw the film last night, and it's a long and tedious stretch of nothingness: Scene after scene of the leading star going to a hospital wearing dark sunglasses to get blood from an always-shaking black doctor. Plus, the apparent affinity for certain types of guitars (Example: Gretch 6120), on and on... Intermixed with a make-little-or-no-sense script, and some eerie fuzzed-up guitar soundtrack; not to mention a live performance of a band named rather stupidly the White Ills (?). As for the Moroccan connection in Tangier and Yasmine hamdan's performance... She doesn't know how to sing, let alone know how to raise her arm as the review mentions it. The whole gig is a way to ride a now-defunct wave of using qaraqeb in pop music. Her song which she sang is not a song actually: It's a medley of words taken from old, '40s songs that most Arabs still hum and sing. The anachronistic twist is that, most Moroccans do not sing these songs or maybe know of them, as their musical tastes veer off into the malhoun and the ever-present chaabi.
In two words? The whole film was a 'complete failure'.
Here is a streamable link for those who haven't seen it, and might want to waste two hours-plus of their lives doing so (subtitles in Korean! Ugh.):
Only Lovers Left Alive
H.H.
Thanks so much Hammer for the comment. I usually like Jarmusch films so I might have a different opinion when I see it. Thanks in particular for your comments about the song, really appreciate it.
It is a brilliant movie mate! Every scene is cinematographically a treat and the acting is surreal, I wanted to crawl into the movie.
Ofcourse the soundtrack knocks it out of the park for me.
I am sure you will enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe0Bb_uNjrI&index=12&list=PLmBIzjN9th9fpR17vBVxAUnVypW-v1MCL
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