The earth is a conductor of acoustical resonance








I saw Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes last week at BAM Rose Cinemas. Coffee and Cigarettes is a collection of eleven vignettes filmed over 17 years in which famous people talk about, what else, coffee and cigarettes . There was an article about it in last month's TimeOut NY that caught my attention because the cast includes such notables as Steve Buscemi, Bill Murray, Roberto Benigni, Iggy Pop, and also Cate Blanchett, the White Stripes, the Wu-Tang Clan, etc. I had never heard of Jim Jarmusch until then. Jim Jarmusch is the eccentric Einstein-coiffeured director of Stranger than Paradise, the 1984 Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.



I was late for the movie, of course, so I missed Roberto Benigni's, which was the first one filmed in '86, and I only caught the tail end of Steve Buscemi's. Nonetheless it was interesting. I did feel like I was perennially waiting for something to happen while watching it. My favorite is the one where Cate Blanchett plays herself and her bitter, jealous cousin Shelly. In another vignette, Alfred Molina (Frida) and Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) play two actors dealing with the recent discovery that they are cousins. Bill Murray is a waiter serving the Wu-Tang Clan coffee. Jack White shows Meg White how his Tesla coil works but when the device breaks down Jack and the audience discover that Meg knows more about electric circuitry than the average person.



There were funny bits here and there but there were also really boring parts. I hated one vignette where two men, which I found out later to be Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankole, toss about the same two phrases for ten minutes. It was like a painful version of Godot, with no underlying philosophical significance. Horrible. Iggy Pop's vignette was incredibly boring as well; thank God he's such a character.



Interesting tidbit: There were not more than ten people in the theater including myself. There were two elderly couples probably taking advantage of their senior citizen's discount. One of them said, "Oh, it's just stories. There's no plot at all." Another actually went out for a couple of minutes and came back as the credits were rolling.



Over all, if not for an interesting cast, Coffee and Cigarettes would not be worth $11.25.