Coffee and Cigarettes

So about 8 PM I got tired of waiting around for bugsybanana to call about seeing Shrek 2 and went into Manhattan and saw Jim Jarmusch’s latest, Coffee and Cigarettes. It’s an odd film, a collection of shorts, all groups of two or three people sitting around talking, drinking coffee and smoking. Pieces of dialog recur among the conversations, but there’s not really anything in the way of story, just amusing conversations. My favorite was the one with Cate Blanchett playing both herself and her cousin. The most awkward and agonizing was the one with Renée French, which at least had Renée French to look at.

Ginger snapping

Via Anyway, I’ve learned that there are not one but two sequels due out soon to Ginger Snaps. The original was a very clever teenage werewolf movie that I highly recommend to anyone who likes Buffy — it’s got that same viewpoint, that same way of treating the supernatural as a metaphor for adolescence, that same sharp wit.

The first sequel, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, seems like a reasonable follow-up on the first one. The second, Ginger Snaps Back, has the two teenage protagonists somehow back in the 19th century — what the fuck?

Ah, well. Looks like the first two are both out on DVD (Did Unleashed get a theatrical release at all?), and reasonably priced, too.

Ooooh, I’m dyin’!

Went up to the Hoboken Historical Museum today, for some shorts from the Hudson County film festival. I walked, which almost was a mistake, since Hoboken’s north-south numbered blocks are two or three times as long as the Manhattan blocks I use as internal calibration when judging how long it’ll take to walk some number of blocks. I got there about 15 minutes late, which turned out not to be a problem, since they were 15 minutes late in starting, almost as if they’d been waiting for me.

The two shorts I’d gone to see were Sparks — a short romantic comedy billed as involving the World Trade Center, when actually it was set in Jersey City and just had shots of the WTC to establish setting at the beginning and end, and it turned out I’d seen all but the first few seconds at 111 Open Studios last fall — and Popaganda, which I’d thought was a documentary about Ron English, but which turned out to be an eight-minute music-video-like trailer for the full 82-minute documentary. (There’s a one-minute QuickTime trailer hosted on English’s website, and “Read Between the Lies”, another video which uses footage from the short I saw, though it leaves out the naked woman splattering fake blood on a billboard of a giant coat-hanger.)

Among the other films they showed was one from 1906, a silent “Boy Detective” short (in which the protagonist appeared to be played by a woman) filmed a few blocks from the museum. I made a point of walking down that block on the way home, and it was still recognizable a century later.

I stopped at a Starbucks and finished off Mason & Dixon, which was becoming a bit of a chore towards the end. And I ate far, far too much junk over the course of the day. Y’know those new guacamole-flavored Doritos? Well, they taste a whole lot like Doritos, and not much like anything related to an avocado, but afterwards they leave a somewhat guacamolic aftertaste. I am ashamed to know this.