Quick Review: Coffee and Cigarettes

"Coffee and Cigarettes" is a black and white movie that consists of a series of vignettes featuring two or three people at a time. Everyone sits around, drinks copious amounts of coffee, smokes a buttload of cigarettes, and try to make awkward conversation. And I do mean awkward conversation. Which is of course the point of it all, how we as a society find ways to numb ourselves to each other. How anything can become a drug/pain killer. Hell, I don't drink coffee or smoke cigarettes, but I still consume obscene amounts of soda and sugar. It's a meditation on man's dedicated disconnection to man.

Having said all of this, I gotta admit, most of the sequences are kinda boring, lame, or (and I'm sure this was intentional) repetitive. There are two really good bits though. In one scene, Kate Blanchett plays a pair of similiar looking cousins, one is a well to do actress, the other a hippy wanderer. Again, I am amazed at how skilled an actress Blanchett is, playing these two disperate personalities at essentially the same time. But the real reason that you and everyone else should rent "Coffee and Cigarettes" is for the sequence with the RZA, the GZA, and Bill Murray. It is Hi-larious. Bill Murray is the man, and he is totally on his game here. Also check out the deleted scene, which is extension of the aforementioned scene. Also very funny. Definately worth checking out, but not worth a buy.