Band of Insiders

I know, you're too hip to see Troy. Even if you grew up venerating some irresponsibly talented hero, a night-life Achilles such as Charlie Parker or Patti Smith, the warfare of Troy is not for you, no more than is the sober allegiance to an ancient text. It's a hipster tradition to prefer the contemporary and impromptu to the classic, the humanly flawed to the studio-made.

Not that there are many hipsters around, compared with the audience for Troy--but those few will have a grand time watching their heroes and heroines being cool in Jim Jarmusch's new film, Coffee and Cigarettes.

As several of Jarmusch's characters observe, coffee and cigarettes isn't any kind of lunch. In the same spirit, I might say that Coffee and Cigarettes delivers a buzz but isn't any kind of master narrative. It's an unabashedly modest anthology of eleven short films, the earliest of which dates from 1986, when Saturday Night Live invited Jarmusch to contribute to the program. He brought together actor Roberto Benigni and cinematographer Tom DiCillo (with both of whom he'd worked before) and comedian Steven Wright and created a brief, cheerfully pointless sketch in which the performers meet, smoke, abuse espresso and trade places, all the while talking past one another. Three years later, while shooting Mystery Train in Memphis, Jarmusch put together a second, equally shaggy episode, again working with the actors and cinematographer on hand. In 1992 came the third segment, made in a California lounge with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits. Although the pace eventually picked up--Jarmusch filmed six segments in 2003, in a two-week stretch--Coffee and Cigarettes still gives you the impression of something personal and casually assembled, like a scrapbook or journal kept over a long period.

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