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.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
There is an old British curse, “may you live in interesting times,” passed off as ancient Chinese wisdom to make it sound more exotic and profound. We are living in interesting times. From US President Donald Trump’s decision on American tariffs, to how the recalls will play out, to uncertainty about how events are evolving in China, we can do nothing more than wait with bated breath. At the cusp of potentially momentous change, it is a good time to take stock of the current state of Taiwan’s political parties. As things stand, all three major parties are struggling. For our examination of the
RSS