Be Cool, John Travolta returns as Chili Palmer, the reformed mobster he first played in Barry Sonnenfeld's glibly entertaining 1995 adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Get Shorty. That movie arrived in theaters hot on the heels of Pulp Fiction, a film that in turn owed a serviceable debt to Leonard's oeuvre. But while Get Shorty rode the Pulp Fiction craze with finesse, largely propelled by Travolta's star presence and a screenplay from Scott Frank that distilled the original book to perfection, Be Cool is running on empty and fueled by nothing more than the faintest vapors left over from those earlier successes.
Directed by F. Gary Gray -- a director with a clutch of tight thrillers to his name, notably Set It Off and the crackling remake of The Italian Job -- this new film was written by Peter Steinfeld, whose draggy, generally unfunny screenplay for Be Cool packs in a lot of the same characters from the Leonard novel -- the sequel to Get Shorty -- and far too much of its overworked, conceptually anemic plot.
Having tried his hand at movie producing in the first story, Chili this time turns his attention to the music business, or more precisely, to two of its hopefuls: a record producer, Edie Athens (Uma Thurman), and a young R&B singer, Linda Moon (Christina Milian). Complications and bad behavior ensue -- most generated by various stereotypes sporting gold chains and attitude.
The sole exception to this parade of unsavory types is a gay Samoan bodyguard, Elliot Wilhelm, played with great good humor by the Rock. Charming and unexpectedly funny, the Rock wears his muscles and his role lightly. Although the character is subjected to a number of crude gay epithets, none of which I recall from the novel, the Rock deflects their sting by making Elliot into a pussycat and stealing the show.
Elliot looks like a stone-cold killer, but that isn't the part he yearns to play: he sings (his cover of Loretta Lynn's You Ain't Woman Enough is all heart and no ear), but what he really wants to do is act. His audition monologue for Chili will be the only reason to recommend Be Cool when it shows up on DVD.
Shortly after the movie opens, Edie loses her husband, a new status she greets with a lot of hard drinking and a series of black T-shirts emblazoned with the words mourning and widow.
This is about as funny as the rest of the movie gets and as creatively ambitious.
Like the novel, Be Cool is crammed with situations and characters, none of which inspire interest (among those overstaying their onscreen welcomes are Harvey Keitel, Vince Vaughn and Cedric the Entertainer, outshone by the Rock and Andre Benjamin, aka Andre 3000 of OutKast).
Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here.
Travolta, wearing black and the glazed look of the overly pampered and chronically bored, is the film's gravest disappointment. Conveying diffidence rather than cool, he registers more like a reluctant guest than a star. Mostly, he doesn't register at all.
Gone is the self-assured stride, with its animal heat and infectious rhythms, and gone, too, is the expansive sense of pleasure Travolta brings to his finest performances, as if he were delighted to be there and wanted us to be just as happy.
Considering the pleasure Travolta has given filmgoers during his three-decade career, it is hard not to wish that the old studio system, with its factory routine and career controls, still existed. At 51, Travolta is too young to be recycling his greatest hits.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits