This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #25: Be Cool
I’ve never seen this movie before (it’s my husband’s), though I have seen Get Shorty once, which Be Cool is the sequel to (watching them out of order because that’s what happens when you don’t give your sequels alphabetically-later titles). So I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in 2005, when this movie came out. I feel like maybe The Pussycat Dolls were a thing? This movie makes me feel like it’s referencing the time when people were trying to make Nicole Scherzinger a thing — like, a solo thing. I could be wrong. Maybe The Pussycat Dolls were later.
Anyway, this movie, like its predecessor, is satirizing a lot of things: gangster stereotypes, the movie business, the music business, girl groups, rap groups, etc. It really crams a lot in there. Unfortunately, it only feels like maybe half the people working on it were aware it was a comedy. I’m unsure at this moment whether the writer of the screenplay was one of those people. Elmore Leonard wrote the novel, of course, and I really dig his stuff — as will be immediately apparent when we get to the undervalued masterpiece Out of Sight — but some of his slickness and ease with the written word and with the worlds of hoodlums and wannabes seems to have been lost in the translation of this one. Get Shorty was revered in its way — Hollywood loves a good inside joke, which was all Get Shorty was, really, one big mock-up of Hollywood insiders — but despite its overtly meta jokes, Be Cool falls a little short of that insider-y vibe. It feels a bit slapped together, sloppy, loose around the hinges.
There’s also the problem of its jokes not aging that well, what with T-Mobile Sidekicks, dusty caricatures of both black men and white men who “act like” black men, and some cringe-inducing attempts at gay-bashing humor, but if you can tune some of that stuff out, it’s really not all that bad as far as lightweight comedies go. The attempts to go meta land fairly well, and whoever costumed Uma Thurman was just goofy enough to put her in cutesy t-shirts advertising her newly widowed status. Plus, Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin) is really kind of delightful as the awkward and clumsy rapper Dabu, and The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) is often downright hilarious.
The entire plot, concerning Christina Milian’s character Linda Moon, is tortured, it’s true, but without it how could they have shoehorned Steven Tyler’s terrible acting into the mix? And really, I would watch this movie just to see the late Anna Nicole Smith make out with Danny DeVito on the Kiss Cam at a Lakers game. Not even kidding.
Viable Option 