Coffee and Cigarettes

Cate Blanchette v. Cate Blanchette was good, Steve Coogan v. Albert Molina and the last one (with Taylor Mead and someone else from the NYC experimental film/art scene) were OK, the rest were a waste.

i didn't like "blue in the face" at all, but from what i remember of it, jarmusch's sketch (about smoking, it being his last cigarette) was much more funny and entertaining than any of these.

in the end, i wasn't sorry i went to see it, or even that i paid $8 to go see it. i think if jarmusch had tried to tether all of the sketches to a theme (keep: coogan/molina, blanchette, waits/pop and make the whole thing about being a celebrity/being a "nobody") it could have been much more interesting. the problem was that most of it felt too "hip" and ultimately vacuous.

I'm not getting the "versus" thing--what's that all about?

Molina's tone threw me, it would have been better if he'd dialed it back a step.
Iggy/Waits had a ton of potential, it was just squandered. Same with RZA/GZA/Murray - if they'd made more of Murray's situation (trying to avoid spoilers) it could have been great.

Benigni/Wright, Buscemi/Lee/Lee and the White Stripes were far and away the worst.

this was terrible

I really liked 20% of it, didn't care for the rest.

I've actually heard that this movie is still a work in progress, and that Jarmusch plans on adding more scenes to it in years to come. That said, it's definitely worlds away from Limits of Control, and it's not easy to tell where Jarmusch is going at any point in time.

I thought Coffee and Cigarettes had just as many strong scenes as weak ones. The Iggy/Tom conversation is more awkward than it should be, and while their acting is very sincere and character-oriented, you find yourself cringing in that same queezey sense that you get when you watch anything with Ben Stiller in it.

My favorite had to be the Lee/Lee/Buscemi. Clearly the series is about juxtaposition, and in this particular scene there's sort of an underlying physical comedy that I really enjoyed (all actors present have interesting physical features, to say the least).

...excited to see what comes next.

it has a weird fixation on fame (not just famous cameos, but actually being about fame) but this is still great. there isn't much to the attempts to expand it beyond just being collected shorts, all tenuously linked, and the parallelism of the whole acoustical chamber thing is kind of an add-on. but they're great. champagne, cousins?, somewhere in memphis particularly.

i think the work on progress thing is more that he hopes to continue making the shorts, as they've been made in batches; i think as a collection the first film's kinda finished. he made a nice short for the ten minutes older films, too.