Aren't coffee and cigarettes stimulants?

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2004)

This movie is a feature length riff on a trifling idea that can't withstand it. I have no problem that Jarmusch works at the quiet end of the spectrum, and I welcome ambiguous alternatives to Hollywoods brainless output, but this derails pretty rapidly. Initially it feels like a Marx Bros. routine or an Ionesco theater of the absurd skit, but it never goes deeper, or makes a point. No matter how many vignettes of people meeting for coffee and cigarettes, and what order J.J. strung them together, Jarmusch just flashes a bunch of cool earmarks at the audience hoping they'll overlook that he has made an uninvolving and easily abandoned film - Simply being cute doesn't sustain a viewers interest. His script reaches a tiresome, suffocating pattern before ever drawing you in. Although the movie starts provocatively and recovers a bit by the end, the middle provides films most desperate definition of tedium and wasted celluloid.
Remember Stranger than Paradise, and it's self-concious pauses? Jarmusch is still noodling with that idea, still attempting to make a cool product that urban hipsters will align themselves with. It's really pathetic that the deepest he will ever go is to continue playing to an audience whose coolness was defined by 1983! You could skip every movie he's made since then and jump right to this movie and there it is; Jarmusch's signature style sitting there unaffected and uncomplicated by a fresh development after 20 years.

Not since Book of Life have I seen such a tragic, posturing self-admiring blob of hipster excresence. Aren't you tired of hipsters? I have friends who still think Bauhaus are music's finest moment. They haven't grown since 1983 either. Life has moved on Jim.