So admittedly, I have to make do with WYSIWYG. Diss character and plot development, there is nothing much that goes on given the short running time of each of the stories. But that doesn’t mean it’s pure gibberish because it isn’t. In fact, I enjoyed it more than what I actually expected. Yes, it is a major talkie but I didn’t find myself painstakingly un-shutting my eyelids as I did when I watched Fellini’s 8 ½ or Godard’s Alphaville. Of course, it helped that it is in vignettes which after feeling weirded out on the first one, would make you anticipate for the next. Therein lies also the strength of this film, because while some subject matter laid down on the coffee table, some makeshift, may appear mundane, the humor is so strikingly addictive like coffee and cigarettes, thanks also to famous icons ranging from film to music, supposedly playing themselves in fictional situations.

There is the frantic Roberto Benigni with Steven Wright, Cate Blanchett playing two cousins, Bill Murray chilling out with the Wu Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, White Stripes’ Jack and Meg White, Alfred Molina meeting up with British comedian Steve Coogan, Steve Buscemi and others that are probably more popular but thanks to my limited and juvenile pop-culture knowledge, I couldn’t recognize. The characters have the ability to be memorable themselves despite the arbitrariness or outright lack of justification, perhaps also because of their mere presence or iconic stature, say Cate Blanchett, or Pop and Waits who are Jarmusch’s musical deities.

Some situations are so blatantly pointless that sometimes border on annoyance yet there is always some x-factor injected in it that you cannot entirely dismiss it. Say the seemingly urgent rendezvous of two friends that ends up with actually nothing major except that the other one leaves restless because he couldn’t quite accept the fact that the other would actually tell him there’s nothing wrong despite the feeling of urgency, or the blonde bombshell reading a gun/ammunition magazine who’s pissed at the smitten waiter who keeps on wanting to refill her coffee cup. Perhaps it’s probably the humor, which is infectious in the scene where Alfred Molina, who may possibly be gay, meets up with Steve Coogan, who may possibly be a distant relative thanks to the well-researched genealogy (which may possibly be an obvious ploy).

Jarmusch is consistent with the minimalist style which prevails in every episode – the overhead lingering shots of coffee cups and cigarettes and the black and white contrast of the picture which is similarly matched by the melding of both black and white actors, the juxtaposition of both cultures. There are repeated references to ill-effects of both drugs and Nikola Tesla’s theory of acoustic resonance made more obvious in the Jack and Meg White episode where Jack displays to the uninterested Meg his ‘Tesla coil’. With the jarring ambiguity to the first-timer, this is clearly an artist’s self-indulgence. But like the smitten waiter, I’ll bear the brunt of the bombshell’s rejection not so much as to get close to her but to be engulfed in the intrigue of her obsessive connection to her coffee cup.