please allow me to design a dialogue first:
A: "Ah, hello, you must have something to find me, right?"
B: "Well, maybe. .. Maybe this is the case."
A: "What's the matter? Ah, don't worry about telling me. Let me guess. Ah, is it this?"
B: "It seems...right. Wait, Wait, it doesn't seem to be."
A: "That's the thing! It must be right this time! Isn't it, huh?"
B: "It seems, it doesn't seem to be."
A: "It's not, that's not, that's What the hell is it? It shouldn’t be okay, right?”
B: “It seems that there’s nothing wrong.”
A: “Ah, Lord, I’m so witty. I only used it three times. The ulterior secret has been revealed. It turns out that he really came to me because of'nothing'. Let us celebrate this great moment of'nothing'."
B: "Yes, yes , Celebrate, celebrate, nothing, nothing."
If such an idiot-like dialogue appears in a certain page of a certain novel by a certain writer, it goes without saying, except for the loud laughter that cannot be measured in decibels, Or simply dismember the book into a horrible horror and throw it in a dusty corner. There is no suitable way to more freely release the evil spirit that is caused by being fooled. But Jamusch, who doesn't believe in evil, seems to want to see the angry scenes of the audience under the screen. Thus, this acrimonious sarcasm, who laughs at his own IQ and at the same time humiliates the audience’s IQ, cuts out an "emperor's new outfit", which is a bitter sarcasm who likes to laugh at himself and is ridiculed while still not forgetting to laugh at him. This is "Coffee and Cigarette", a plotless farce film that cannot even be accommodated by Robert McKee's classic "triangular plot theory".
I have always faintly thought that this movie deserves a more appropriate title-"The Blank Party of Jamush and His Friends". This is indeed a rare carnival. All the men, women, blacks, whites, Americans, and non-Americans who intersect with the works of Jamusch, whether they belong to Jamusch’s past, present, or are about to become him. People in the future are all involved in this black and white whirlpool inexplicably. Speaking in standard crappy Italian accented English, Roberto Bernini, whose hair is flying in the wind on his somewhat thankful head, "Grandma Wolf" Iggy Pop, and DJ Tom Wiitz, who has a broken gong, are tirelessly searching for it. The old man Bill Murray loved in the old days, the eternal little pervert Steve Buschmi, the music editors RZA and MZA of "Ghost Dog", even brought in the strange "Queen" Cate Blanche special. If it weren’t for the absence of John Lurie, who was forever obscured but worked so hard to "sell laughs," and the once fateful mandarin duck Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder’s absence, this movie could have been nicknamed "Jamish All-Stars" Brawl".
I want to open my mouth as wide as possible, and to maintain this rare stunned expression on my face for a longer period of time. It is definitely not because of the eleven stories performed under this dazzling lineup. I don't want to deceive myself and tell myself how funny some of these stories are, making me bewildered and falling forward. If looking at these extremely boring sketches can make a few dry smiles squeeze out of my face, this can only show that I have become the hapless person deceived by Jamush's conspiracy. Because this is really not a fun movie, even when compared with Jamush’s own past, it seems so boring.
But someone still remembers the first work of Jamusch’s school days, the not amazing "Long Time" in 1980, which tells the trivial boringness of an empty young man Parker in a day in a maddening almost frozen seventy minutes. Experienced movie? Twenty years later, when Jamush was no longer the unknown movie youth at that time, he knew that he already had enough capital, and he should indeed bow deeply to his past self. It's for myself, half for his "style movie". Yes, "Coffee and Cigarette" is such a complete self-tribute. But not as naked as Michael Haneke. The story that was finally reluctantly rounded up after desperately trying to tell was easily broken into pieces. The unknown unknown pawn was replaced with a big-name star. The color of the color film was pulled away... Only second, the most important thing is me. You can still smell the bitterness of coffee and the spicyness of cigarettes.
People are not the real protagonist of this movie. If the title is the same, coffee and cigarettes are the ones. Otherwise, Jia Muxu would not go to great lengths to shoot them all eleven back and forth. However, the film is more memorable than the coffee or cigarette itself, but it is a picture constructed by them. This picture even represents everything about this movie. Remember, in every little story, Jia Muxu tirelessly used the top-corner camera to take close-up shots repeatedly, coming every few minutes, despite the strange posture of the world in the lens, every time it flashed It's nothing more than always something like this-a background of dark and light squares like a chess board (the most amazing is the short film of "COUSINS", which is replaced by fishnet stockings on a woman's calf), light Colored trays, coffee cups and dark coffee, light-colored cigarettes and dark-colored cigarette cases, everything is lying lazily in the lens, casual but not meaningful. If this is a color world, this arrangement will only be forgotten in an instant, but under the presence of black and white film, the opposition, symbiosis, and even gradation of black and white have produced miraculous effects.
Jamush likes black and white. Perhaps the world of black and white has less unnecessary exaggeration and modification, and it appears purer and more explicit. In the black and white image, black coffee is rippling in the white teacup, and the black tobacco leaves are wrapped in white tobacco leaves. On the huge square table, only black and white are monotonously intertwined. Life should be black and white, silent, unfamiliar, and boring. It’s just that people don’t want to admit it, so they add a lot of unnecessary colors to paint out of thin air, making it so nondescript. But the secret of this disguise cannot be dismantled. After all, it is related to the meaning and value of everyone's survival. In the final analysis, no matter how great a movie or a classic movie or novel is, they can all be summed up in a few short words. In other words, their stories are actually pale and weak. Everything the artists create, the shots, the music, the editing, the language, the dialogue, and the description are all done to hide this simple and extremely destructive truth. However, when it comes to the end, the artistic coat is stripped to the end, and the pale body inside can still be exposed for people to observe, although it is unbearable. But what about real life? The cruel truth is-in the end, people find that there is nothing but nothing. Just like the "Coffee and Cigarette" by Jia Muxu, which is not worthy of scrutiny and can't bear scrutiny, if people are really interested in trying to figure out the impromptu lines of each character in each short story, they can only end up Let yourself be disappointed, because the greatest significance of their existence lies in their meaninglessness. They use their meaninglessness to fill the void that people need to fill, so that they will not be exposed to the truth of life prematurely. I would rather talk nonsense endlessly to the end of my life, and never have a moment of coldness. Otherwise, it is the faces that often appear in movies, looking at each other, and finally speechless.
In his films, Jamusch never seemed to end his teasing of the United States. From history to reality, all aspects of the United States seem to have been scolded by him cynicly. The combination of short films of "Coffee and Cigarette" gave him ample room for display. In every story, he did not forget to tease a key word about American society like a burden. The first story to be performed by Roberto Bernini is inevitably the heart knot of Jiamu Xu Wannian-a foreigner, "Are you leaving the United States?" When an American said to an Italian In this case, I don't know what the strangers in the United States will think. The second story ridiculed Elvis and his "brother", this once iconic figure of American culture has become the object of ridicule in the eyes of the "nigger" twins. In the third story, two smokers met in a cafe, smoking each other to celebrate each other's success in quitting smoking, and cigarettes became victims again. The fourth story is more like a show to those obese Americans who are addicted to food. The fifth story, the favorite of beautiful girls to read, is actually a pictorial full of pictures of guns, and the violent America is on paper. The two dice scrolling repeatedly in the sixth story tells people that to deal with emptiness, gambling is also a good choice. In the seventh story, the originally intimate cousins secretly fought against each other because of their identity differences, and their blind worship of idols could not escape Jamush’s attention. The eighth story, about the explanation of the Tesla coil, made the face of the technology power United States completely lost. The ninth story is Jia Muxu's old line, joking about the film industry itself. From Sam Mendes to Spike Lee, the inexplicable climbing stories of two people in the circle make people slightly appreciate the scorching state of the Hollywood world that Jamush has always dismissed. In the tenth story, the stubborn disease of drugs was finally put on the stage. At the end of the eleventh story, the protagonist becomes the same crazy alcohol.
In fact, whether it is coffee or cigarettes, they will always play the role of supporting helpless people in lies. Is this movie of coffee and cigarettes a big lie? Behind the singing and dancing on the screen and the hip-hop masterpieces off the screen, perhaps only a piece of chicken feathers is left behind.
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