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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Coffee and Cigarettes

Essential Dazzler

22:16 / 03.07.05

Has anyone else seen this?

It's an interesting little flick. 9 short vignettes starring various icons (most of which I didn't recognise) conversing, drinking Coffee, and smoking. 17 years seperate the first recording and the release.

I was well prepared to hate this, but I'm left with a rather divided opinion. Of the 9 shows I'd say 3 were brilliant, 4 were OK and 2 fell flat.

What did everyone else think?

01:12 / 04.07.05

The people he put together were inspired choices, definitely. Predictably linked? Yes, many of them, such as Iggy Pop and Tom Waits (musicians, ragged, recognizable at all angles, even the back and even possessing recognizable bodily movements) but the dynamics weren't always. There's something weird going on around the Tesla episode, in terms of what comes before and what comes after: the switch to tea and Bill Murray's haggard coffee-and-cigarettes state?
I liked it's openness about its artifice. It's very much the sort of thing you assign students as a practice run, like reshooting shot for shot a famous scene. Unlike the 'Psycho' redo, this assignment panned out, though.
And isn't this most of our lives, to some degree? Coffee and cigarettes and almost-poignant-but-yet-kinda-pointless-and-uncomfortable conversations? Node of modern lifestyles or something.

Jack The Bodiless

10:17 / 04.07.05

I really liked it, for the most part - saw it a few months ago with my other half. Started off a little muted - the one I was most looking forward to, the Waits/Iggy interface, came off as a more nuanced character piece than I was expecting. I think I was visualising kind of a De Niro/Pacino coffee shop moment, which didn't happen - each man played up a certain aspect of his personality to essentially caricature themselves instead. The Bill Murray/Wu Tang piece also wasn't as good as I anticipated - I think for thwe same reason, in that neither scene could be as good as I was hoping it would be.

My favourites were definitely the Steve Coogan/Fred Molina and Meg and Jack White scenes - the former, because it was genuinely funny, Coogan and Molina again playing caricatures of themselves with a beautiful movement of status between them, the latter, because while it was less broadly entertaining, it was subtle and just plain weird, and I found myself warming to the White Stripes in a way that their music has never managed to achieve with me.

11:32 / 04.07.05

I mean, you brought it all the way here, in your little red wagon...

Enjoyed this a lot. I liked the Cate Blanchett / Cate Blanchett as Cate Blanchett's 'cousin' scene -both basically afraid of what the other was going to say, with Shelly looking for Cate's approval while pretending not to care, and Cate trying not to hurt Shelly while actually not caring particularly. Also enjoyed the silly little jokes between sketches, specifically the idea of Tom Waits and one of the Wu-Tang clan training as doctors...

chao, any reason why were you well prepared to hate this? And which two do you think fell flat?

paranoidwriter waves hello

16:39 / 04.07.05

OOOoooo! I'd forgotten about this film (shame - on - me!), which is weird seeing as Jim Jarmusch is one of my favourite directors ('Down by Law' still makes me smile whenever I remember it), so thanks for reminding me.

Grrr....I'm so very behind on films, it's embarrassing. Time to actually leave the house and try to get enough money to buy a DVD player? I think so. Ciao.

03:17 / 10.11.05

I liked it, though there were definitely some high points and some that didn't work. It was a good choice to save the best for the end, as said before Molina/Coogan was great, and I loved Murray/Wu Tang Clan, such a bizarre piece, and I find it plausible that Bill Murray could be hiding out a diner somewhere. It just seems right.

I think this is actually my favorite Jarmush, his other features were just too long/slow for me to consider them complete successes. I get what he's going after in each, but this is the only one where I was getting enough stuff to keep it interesting.