It may seem odd that a coffee blog would review a film, but I feel uniquely qualified to take a look at Coffee Wars given its subject matter, stars and medium.
This blog started out as a side project to help bolster my writing portfolio after completing my Creative Writing degree, a degree which featured the modules of writing for stage and screen where we also had to do critical analysis of scripts. So, I feel I have some standing in film criticism albeit very basic. Secondly, as a vegan coffee enthusiast, I feel I can probably accurately identify the talking points around veganism within the coffee industry, alongside my own concerns and experience as a trained barista who has worked in a speciality coffee café. Thirdly, I have seen pop-sensation Kate Nash over five times in concert, watched the Netflix show Glee, solely because of her involvement, and still follow her career with a fairly in-depth interest so I couldn’t possibly miss the opportunity to give this a watch since she takes on the starring role. So, there you go, this is how I find myself watching Coffee Wars (available via Google Play, iTunes, and Amazon) and I feel I have to preface this review by stating that it’s clearly pro-Vegan propaganda. This is evident from the fact it’s made by a company called Veg Good Films, a company that makes vegan friendly films in order to promote the lifestyle. Now I, as a fully-fledged vegan and eco-type that cycles to work and walks everywhere if it takes under an hour, have no issue with this at all, and feel more media should be doing more to help promote a more sustainable lifestyle in an entertaining way. But for the sake of transparency, it feels only right to mention it. The film centres around Jo (played by Kate Nash), a struggling barista who is trying to keep her vegan coffee shop afloat and so enters the World Barista Championship for the prize money, where she also encounters her arch-rival, Rudy. Now, I’m not one to pick too many holes in fictious storylines but the very concept seems a little flawed. The speciality coffee scene is full of hipster types that are only too happy to indulge in out-there dietary requirements and I don’t think a vegan coffee shop would particularly struggle in this day and age. Also, you don’t really get big cash prizes in coffee competitions. I think the World Barista Championship might garner you about 5,000 euros, which ‘aint bad but not the 50,000 euros, business saving levels of cash the film depicts. Supposedly set in London, it’s fairly evident to anyone who’s spent a significant portion of their lives in the British capital that it’s not filmed there, and that most of the sets have more of a European feel, although I admit this is just splitting hairs. Really, we want to know how accurate the coffee scenes are. From the off, the attention to detail given to espresso-based drinks makes it fairly obvious that the amount of research put in has covered most of the groundwork of being a barista fairly extensively. Kate Nash plays a struggling café owner with a frantic energy that really works well with the character of an angry vegan who’s also a struggling artist of sorts (I can’t imagine where she got the inspiration from) and therefore allows her comedy chops to shine. I have a slight reservation about how intense the character has been written, given that vegans are so often portrayed as extremists and I find, person ally, the softly, softly approach is far more effective. There’s also a lot of coffee shop hipster stereotypes being heavily relied on, which I fully understand are there for comedic value, but were perhaps lost on me. For example, rather than referring to losing their mojo when something goes wrong, characters consistently refer to their doojee which sounds awfully like douche-y and feels like just another dig at speciality coffee and the image it has. That being said, there are some really fun moments that play with coffee competitions, such as the underground latte art competition, as if it were some illicit fight club, which also leads to a joke about what sort of images you can create with milk patterns, one person producing the Mona Lisa whilst another splashes out a perfect facsimile of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The cast is certainly stacked enough to generate significant interest with a lot of big British and Irish names in this film, with Kate Nash in the lead role, Jordan Stephens from Rizzle Kicks supporting, Saoirse-Monica Jackson of Derry Girls fame and then comedy giants Hugh Dennis and Sally Phillips also crop up. If anything, it’s sort of powered forward by the performances more than anything else although you do get the sense that this was probably a lot of fun to make. Of course, being a vegan film, it is inevitably going to raise vegan issues and, for the most part, it does this without being too preachy. There is one moment where Jo compromises her vegan ideals in order to win a local competition and all of her friends drop her. This seems a little harsh on the messaging side since so few vegans have rarely been perfect, often we do slip and have to pick ourselves up and go again. Creating a negative atmosphere around these momentary lapses is not going to help – and yes I am aware this was done for narrative purposes as well, I just felt it worth pointing out given that the whole point of this cinematic excursion is probably to encourage those more meat focussed to take up a greater vegan focus. This follows on to bring up the interesting notion of plant milks in coffee competition. I’m not quite sure what the rules are around this and I’ve certainly seen competitions where plant milk rounds were included but I’m not sure if you are forced to use dairy milk or marked down if you don’t. Perhaps in latte art competition but it is something I’d be keen to look into further. Finally, it also raises the question of whether Kopi Luwak, the coffee produced from the excretions of a civet cat, can be considered vegan. I myself have wrestled with this question when I reviewed this type of coffee, however, I don’t think I played it off for toilet humour. In any case, as a concept it’s quite a clever idea and it probably sets out to achieve what it hopes for from watching it. Whether it’s worth the watch, well that’s down to you really. |
AuthorThe Mean Bean Machine (Vincent Wood) Archives
October 2023
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