Coffee & Cigarettes

Don’t expect anything like a conventional feature film. This is a comic series of short vignettes shot over a period of 17 years by New York’s Jim Jarmusch, with the connecting theme of the pleasures of coffee and cigarettes.

While fairly inconsequential as individual snippets, the effect is cumulative, rather like that of cigarettes themselves. The pleasure for us is in seeing unlikely combinations of characters in conversation; Bill Murray with the Wu-Tang clan; Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan; Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, as well as the conversations themselves, covering topics as diverse as caffeine popsicles, Paris in the twenties, and nicotine as an insecticide.

This approach goes a long way to disprove the commonly held notion that cinema can only be exciting when people shoot each other or drive too fast.