Embarrassingly Bad

Rating: 2/10 (24 June 2004)

Not since Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell" have I had such a shoddy, amateurish work put before me by a director whose work I otherwise like.
I'm a believer that there are no bad concepts, just bad execution, so while it may have been possible to make a good movie using Jarmusch's structure and theme, this is not that movie. Two minutes' worth of concept was regularly dragged out to ten minutes. The dialogue was half-considered, if that. Vignettes ground painfully away towards some ill-conceived, inane "punchline". The performers, even granted that they had little to work with, were visibly floundering; given that they were for the most part playing themselves, they never came across as people who actually existed, or that they had any reason to talk to the people playing opposite them; most often, they couldn't even convince me that they had ever actually drank coffee before. Only Cate Blanchett walks away from this car-wreck with any dignity intact.
I'm normally quite generous in my ratings, but this movie was simply insultingly bad. Jarmusch should have kept the only print locked away in a vault, with instructions that it be burnt following his death.
2/10, and that's only because I smiled when Bill Murray drank straight from the pot.