Mediocre and pointless

Rating: 5/10 (23 September 2004)

A slight film by anyone's standards. It's not terrible, though. I liked about as much as I didn't like. There was nothing here to love. The film consists of eleven conversations over the title substances, and the characters are real people more or less playing themselves, for the most part. Sometimes it's about two (or more) celebrities meeting each other randomly, sometimes there's a little skit. Some of these people aren't really celebrities, but most seem to belong to the film industry in one capacity or another. For example, in one of the more forgettable sequences, a girl named Renee is bothered by a waiter. Renee is Renee French, who has worked on a show, Fishing with John, on which Jim Jarmusch appeared in the past. The waiter is played by E.J. Rodriguez, who was a musician on Jarmusch's Down by Law. There are other bigger celebrities, like Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchett, who has one of the best scenes playing herself as well as her less famous, lookalike cousin, Shelly. The best scene is probably the one between Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan. Molina, yet to hit it big with Spider-Man 2, sucks up to Coogan, a celebrity more in Britain than in the U.S., as he excitedly reveals that he discovered through geneological research that they are distant cousins. I also liked the sequences with Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano & Vinny Vella (and Vinny Jr.), and the final sequence with William Rice & Taylor Mead. The first two sequences are horrible, especially the second, starring Spike Lee's siblings Cinqué and Joie, as well as Steve Buscemi. Buscemi's never been nearly this awful, here playing a Memphis waiter who theorizes that all the bad things Elvis Presley did were actually perpetrated by his evil twin. Buscemi would be wise never to attempt a Southern accent again. And I found out after writing the rest of this that this film was made over a 17 year period. Wow, what a waste of 17 years! 5/10.