By all the accounts I have read (including one that I swear I read by Alice in Texas but cannot now find), and certainly by this one, Jarmusch's movie Coffee and Cigarettes is mostly very dull.

Although, these bits sound fun:

The only two episodes that generate any comic energy from the premise are the most non-Jarmuschian. In one, Cate Blanchett plays both a star called “Cate Blanchett” and, under a long black wig, her loser cousin Shelby in a strained encounter in the lounge of her hotel. The loser cousin is a laugh, but Cate as “Cate” visibly struggling not to condescend or provoke is a miniature masterpiece. Miss Blanchett pulls off single-handedly what most of the double-acts never quite manage – two people meeting for coffee and never connecting. She’s topped only by Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan’s scene, in which the actor “Alfred Molina” requests a meeting with fellow Brit “Steve Coogan” while he’s visiting Los Angeles. Alfred says he’s a huge fan of Steve and Steve replies that “obviously” he’s “aware” of Alfred’s work. Molina says he asked to meet for a reason and slides a manila folder across the table. “What stage is this at?” Coogan demands. “Is it greenlit? Is it a treatment?” So Molina explains that it’s not a project, it’s just that he was doing some genealogical research and discovered that they’re cousins – they share the same great-great-great-grandfather, and that’s pretty amazing and exciting, isn’t it? Maybe they can hang out, get to know each other. Coogan doesn’t think so.

This encounter is the only one that has any narrative resolution – indeed, for Jarmusch, it’s almost an O Henry twist. And Molina’s rueful big-heartedness, which anchors the scene, is almost the antithesis of a Jarmusch performance. One notes also the curious fact that, in a movie about coffee, the most effective episode features a couple of tea drinkers. “Shall I be mother?” offers Molina, sweetly offering the pot. “I’ll be my own mother,” mumbles Coogan dourly. That may be the best exchange in the picture.

Coffee and Cigarettes was filmed over a long period, which makes it a boring film done very interestingly, I think. By the sound of it, the various mostly very boring episodes in it only involve a succession of cameos by different people. But why not have the same people coming back again and again throughout the making of the movie, getting gradually older?

If practised more regularly, this method could solve the problem of movies where a succession of actors who look very unlike each other form a queue to play the same alleged character. Answer: have the same actor play the same character over a period of thirty years.

The trick would be to have a flexible story, with the possibility of dramatically expensive special effects which could be added towards the end, after you have filmed the earlier scenes cheaply and on the basis of which you raise the money for the final expensive climaxes. You could start with your cast aged about ten and doing cheap things, and then they could get older and do gradually more dramatic things. Of course, with growing children involved, the legal situation would have to be sewn up very tight, and the story might have to be about bolshy teenagers rather than biddable ones. Like I say, duck and weave, scriptwise.

How about a bunch of kids lost in space in a small and nasty (and hence cheap) space ship, finally contriving to find their way back to (final scene – very expensive) civilisation! The excitement and with it the cost per frame would build slowly, as and when the money for the later scenes was raised. The Anabasis, in other words, with the sea at the end being expensive and special effecty, but most of the film being claustrophic and cheap.

As cameras get cheaper, and as a steadily increasing proportion of humanity dreams of being film stars and film directors, this will happen more and more often I think.