The DVD

MGM releases Coffee and Cigarettes on DVD in a handsome 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The image is consistently sharp and clean, something I didn't anticipate because of the disparate ages of the source elements. Coming up with criticisms for this rich transfer is difficult, and overall, the film looks better on DVD--as a DVD--than Dead Man (the only other black-and-white Jim Jarmusch movie I've seen on the format). Less immediately impressive is the DD track, which is more or less a centre-channel mix that lights up six speaker icons on your receiver--it takes a damp-sounding supplemental outtake from "Delirium" (a.k.a. The Bill Murray Section) for us to appreciate just how good the fidelity is during the feature proper. Said outtake, Murray's hilarious, never-before-seen re-entrance, runs 50 seconds; other extras include: Tabletops (4 mins.), a montage of all the overhead shots from the film set to Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros' "Midnight Jam" and directed by Adam Bhala Lough; a 4-minute interview with the eccentric Taylor Mead (co-star of the "Champagne" segment), who says that Jarmusch had been promising him a part for twenty years; a Coffee and Cigarettes soundtrack listing; and trailers for Saved!, Intermission, Bubba Ho-Tep, Touching the Void, and Walking Tall. (Saved! and Intermission previews also precede the main menu.) It's not a packed platter, then, but it is a fine motion picture.-Bill Chambers

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

Philosopher-scientist Nikola Tesla (of coil fame) once suggested that the universe winding down vibrated to a sympathetic rhythm; art, at its best, puts a tuning fork to it. The words that we use to describe tapping that fricative synergy (archetype, the sublime, the ineffable) are also the words that we use, to borrow a phrase from Frank Zappa, to dance about architecture--to describe what's indescribable about the collective experience, the existential electricity that ranks music above painting above poetry above literature (and film the twentieth century stepchild that falls somehow north and south of each). It is the unique privilege of the cinema to be all things at its best and less than nothing at its worst: to be sculpture for Matthew Barney; photography for Stanley Kubrick; ad art for Roy Andersson; poetry for Jean-Luc Godard; hymn for Abbas Kiarostami; and music for Sergio Leone. For Jim Jarmusch, it's the Romanticist sensibility distilled deliriously through the Nouvelle Vague.

Tesla's coil makes an appearance in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes in the one of the omnibus film's eleven short subjects that features neo-punk duo The White Stripes (a.k.a. Meg and Jack White)--also the middle of three vignettes that couple musicians together. (The first pairs Tom Waits with Iggy Pop, the last packages The Wu-Tang Clan's GZA and RZA with Bill Murray.) This unofficial trilogy provides the picture with music-informed way stations along its circuitous path to greater truths about the dicey nature of communication and the essential loneliness of a considered life. That musicians present the picture's rough evolution from uncomfortable misunderstanding (Waits/Pop) to acknowledgment of non-rational understanding (White/White) to an understanding that surpasses sense (GZA/RZA) takes on a fulsome timbre when considering the kind of extra-textual baggage that musicians carry with them. They deal, after all, in a currency more indescribable than film, so that when Jarmusch then deposits actors as themselves moonlighting as restaurant workers (Steve Buscemi, Murray, and Cinqué Lee in his second of two roles), sycophants (Alfred Molina, Cate Blanchett), or assholes (Steve Coogan, Blanchett opposite herself), his casting choices, like Quentin Tarantino's, clarify themselves as character and theme in and of themselves.

Of varying lengths, each of the eleven shorts shares a checkerboard pattern, a high-contrast black-and-white visual style, a conversation, coffee (tea for the Brits, espresso for the gits), and cigarettes--first establishing the trope as a game, then introducing a stimulant, a narcotic, and a series of non sequiturs to underscore the hallucinogenic, often malleable nature of existence. The line that separates the absurd from the transcendent in the day-to-day is gauzy at the best of times, and of all the things that Coffee and Cigarettes and Jarmusch do well, their ability to convey uncertainty with gentle observational humour and a kind of gathering, anthology eloquence comes to the fore. The picture reminds a great deal of the director's Mystery Train (and Buscemi offers a theory on The King shared by Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep) and his early work as a shorts director (a few segments here originated as "Saturday Night Live" interstitials from the mid-eighties), and though he's fond of deflecting gestalt reads of his films individually and collectively, make no mistake that there is a meticulous structure to Coffee and Cigarettes.-Walter Chaw

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