for those who find watching paint dry too exhilarating

Rating: 3/10 (6 September 2005)

The problem with Jim Jarmusch is that, amidst the horrible tedious undrama that makes up the bulk of his work there are those occasional bits that are great. This keeps causing me to give his movies a try when they come to TV. Sometimes you get something cool, like Masatoshi Nagase's performance in Mystery Train or Roberto Benigni as a crazy cabbie in Night on Earth, but other times it's just a horrible waste of one's life. So it is with Coffee & Cigarettes, a series of painfully dull vignettes. Many of these look as though Jarmusch got two actors and told them, sit there, work coffee and cigarettes into the conversation and try not to say anything too interesting. If those were the instructions than the film is pretty successful. After the first few vignettes I just fast forwarded after a few minutes of each, trying to find something worthwhile. Cousins was interesting in a low-key way, the thing with The White Strips was most interesting because they were such abysmal actors, but was otherwise worthless, but the final sequence, Champagne, was actually sort of interesting, simply because of the low key but assured presence of the two actors.
If you're a Jim Jarmusch fan I suppose you'll like this, for whatever mysterious reason people like his stuff, but this is for hardcore Jarmusch fans only.