0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
News alert! Brazil may enlist Hollywood's help in touting the underexplored health benefits of drinking coffee. In case you wondered, the bean is the country's principal export--after knockoff Pele football uniforms. U.S. coffee consumption has waned in recent years, it seems, and authorities worry that Americans might be blaming caffeine for ailments ranging from anxiety to hypertension.
The solution? A movie, of course. "A film could change everything," gushes Brazil's scientific adviser, Darcy Lima. Yes, it could--but only in the hands of the right director. So the question. Who among Hollywood's glitterati could capture the romance of coffee drinking even as he communicates (subliminally, to be sure) its efficacy in reducing not just heart disease and colon cancer but also alcohol consumption and smoking?
I don't drink the stuff, but here are my picks for "Caffeine and You: A Love Story."
Read More on News
Woody Allen, director of "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan": Max adores coffee. Idolizes it. Without it he would be lost in a miasma of depression, neuroses and a small studio apartment on West 48th Street with inadequate closet space. When people ask why he drinks so much Conilon Robusta, he replies that he is participating in an experiment in human (cough) sexual perversion--and he's the (cough) control group. He meets a zaftig brunette named Alison Poska and immediately wants to do to her what George W. Bush is doing to the United States. Max asks her out for a coffee and, sensing that she is only mildly ambivalent, invites her to his place where they make mad, passionate love for three hours, stopping only for shots of Brazilian Chapado de Ferro espresso. Alison cheats on Max with her philosophy prof, confirmed when Max discovers them drinking Dunkin' Donuts decaf out of Styrofoam cups.
Pedro Almodovar, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Bad Education": A sexy coffee researcher in a low-cut lab coat seduces the son and, later, the daughter of her lover's ex-fiancee, who herself is having a tempestuous but ultimately unsatisfying affair with the president of Brazil, who has been in a coma. He comes out of his torpor just long enough to utter the seemingly random numbers 36, 27, 39. The researcher's lover and his son (also her lover) believe the numbers are merely the ramblings of an old man remembering the curves of a girlfriend, but the researcher and her lover's daughter (also her lover) decode the message as the recipe for perfect espresso: 36 grams of coffee, 27 meter-kilos of pressure and 39 degrees (Celsius) of hot water.
George Lucas, "Star Wars": A long time ago, somewhere far away, King Zigurata sends unmanned drones containing raw coffee beans to all quadrants of his empire. One is intercepted by a nefarious galactic trader, Moka Java, who synthesizes it artificially and uses it to enslave the population of Regula 1. But a rebellion, led by O-Big-Kona-Grande, is afoot. Recruiting young troops in the caffeine mines of Regula, O-Big-Kona and his protege Nuke Oldcoffee unleash a computer virus that confuses the emperor's automated coffeemakers into serving weaker brews. The emperor, rendered too listless to summon the power of the Dark Side, orders O-Big-Kona and Nuke to be freeze-dried and sold in convenience stores throughout the quadrant. By the time the emperor realizes that Nuke is his son, he's been consumed by Wookie construction workers on the graveyard shift.
I don't know what these might do for coffee sales. But they'd slake my unhealthy passion for movies.
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines