Worthless, pretentious, and over-rated

Rating: 1/10 (17 May 2004)

Coffee and Cigarettes was worthless, which is why I'm glad someone else paid for me to see it. If you actually liked this movie, I would love to talk to you, because you are just kidding yourself. You think it's cool to like movies that you don't understand, when really you don't understand them because they are crap and there's nothing there to understand. Here is a summary of Coffee and Cigarettes: The movie opens and it is shot in that terrible teen angst black and white that kids who can't take pictures like to photoshop their digital photos into because they think it will salvage an otherwise crappy color photo. It doesn't salvage s***, and it just made me realize that the movie was going to be pretentious crap, just like all those pretentious look-at-me-I- develop-my-own-pictures-in-black-and-white kids' pictures of kids playing in playgrounds photographed through the chain-links of the fence, with the links in focus. The movie is filled with a bunch of mini-scenes of mediocre B-list celebrities/actors having coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about coffee and cigarettes and occasionally making a comment about how coffee and cigarettes isn't a very healthy lunch. It's artsy how they keep repeating the title. Oh, and it's artsy how all the tables are black and white checkered. 'Cause the movie is in black and white, get it? But wait. It's even more artsy to change the whole premise of the movie halfway through when the tables stop having black and white checkers and the coffee turns into tea and the cigarettes turn into one person smoking and the other commenting on how cigarettes are terrible. Oh, and I bet it would be artsy if we insert a scene where Jack and Meg White (they're hot right now - they have that hit new album that in retrospect no one really liked that much, but they wanted to like it to be alternative and artsy - oh, there's that artsy thing again) are playing with a Tesla Coil. Then, Jack should quote Tesla about the world being a conductor of audiophonic harmony because he's a musician. Then Meg white repeats the quote and hits a spoon on a coffee cup and it makes an annoying ringing noise and then she does it again and everyone is like "stop it." The movie carries on like this. The final scene is two old guys, both of which you've seen before but you're not quite sure where, talking about some piece of classical music. This is the scene where the movie tries to redeem itself by having some deeper underlying meaning. The one old guy says he wants to take a nap, then he just dies. The classical music plays, obviously, and the movie ends. Maybe he died from lung cancer, or caffeine overdose, is that the point? Pathetic. The only redeeming scenes in the movie are the scenes with Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina and Rza, Gza, and Bill Murray. But they are bookended by the most worthless, pretentious, art-rock, deeper-meaning, repetitive, awkward crap I've seen in a long time.