Coffee and Cigarettes (2004) Cause Cancer

Okay, so perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad, but Coffee and Cigarettes was pretty wretched.

I should know by now that if something is ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’ that it has been labelled so by people have no clue what they’re talking about. I always get my expectations up solely through reputation and then am floored to discover that it doesn’t quite deserve it.

You see Jim Jarmusch as the director and you think that it has the potential to be good. It’s got 11 (I think) separate stories, presented in chapter-like fashion, where two or three people sit around various coffee joints and chat while puffing on their cigarettes. It has a HUGE cast, with names like Cate Blanchett, Alfred Molina, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni.

Unfortunately, not only were the conversations completely random, but they were completely boring. There was nothing arty or edgy or cool about this compilation of people in conversations that looked so forced it made you want to cry. I kept eyeing the time elapsed, hoping vaguely that the next section would be better than the last, and it just never happened. Some of it was just plain painful. I mean painful enough to make me look away on several occasions.

I suppose that filming in black and white was supposed to add some sort of jazz, but in reality it only added to the flat, tedious, life-sucking nature of this film. There were no stories, there was no plot (which I realize was the point), but other than some meaningless celebrity wank, where stars got to see themselves on camera for minutes on end nodding their heads and trying to look interested, this ranked pretty much a zero on the entertainment scale. If this is what passes for creativity these days, I’m taking the first ticket out of here. I special ordered Coffee and Cigarettes after waiting eons to find a decent copy and now find myself with an apt coaster, nothing more.

In Brief: Complete and utter tripe.