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Entry tags:	be cool

Be Cool (2005)

Be Cool

Directed By: F. Gary Gray (Director of The Italian Job)

Starring: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Danny DeVito, Vince Vaughn, Robert Pastorelli... and more people than I have room to mention

Rating: **** 1/2* out of 5

This movie just made playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon a lot less of a challenge...

Wow, where to start? This was possibly the funniest thing I've seen since Blue Colar Comedy Tour and Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again, and one of the most intelligent stupid movies ever. Sequel to Get Shorty, this movie probably has hidden jokes that would make sense had I seen the first one, but stands on its own rather well. The first line? "I hate sequels." I generally don't try to think of these movies in terms of just how good they are, they're not meant to be films or cinema, but this one truly deserved the four and a half out of five stars I've given it. THe plot can get a little convoluted, hard to coherently explain that is, but the acting was absolutely amazing.

John Travolta reprises his role as Chili Palmer, an ex-gangster turned movie producer, on the streets of California looking for his "next big hit", but in the music business instead of movies. He's sick of the movies-- "You know that in order to keep a PG-13 rating, you can only use the word 'fuck' once?" and is looking to get out and in to movies. His friend Tommy Athens (briefly and wonderfully portrayed by James Woods) asks him for coffee and to produce a movie about his (Tommy's) life. In the midst of a discussion about the pointlessness of such a task, Chili gets up to go to the men's, leaving Tommy to death by Russian mafia.

Christina Milian (singer of "Dip It Low") makes a stunning screen appearance (granted I haven't seen Man Of The House, but just about her debut to me) as Linda Moon, a struggling singer with soul and jazz roots discovered by Tommy and rescued by Chili from a skeezy club where her manager Raji (Vince Vaughn) and his bodyguard Eliot (The Rock) watch to make sure she doesn't get stolen away.


Starting with The Rock, we have a gay bodyguard who wants to be an actor-- his trademark? Being able to raise one eyebrow. Take that at face value, it took me a while to make the connection of The Rock and the eyebrow move... when I made it, I started laughing my ass off. Raji (Vaughn) makes his first appearance pimped out and with Linda Moon rolling her eyes at him, "He thinks he's black," she explains to a questioning Chili. In order to get the fabulous Ms. Moon as his first and only find, Chili has to first get her contract from Carosel Records, represented by Raji and Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel).

An ex-shylock, Chili talks his way out of the club and finds himself in business with Tommy's widow, Edie (Uma Thurman), who is in charge of the joint venture NWT, an indie record company whose main claim to fame is the DubMDs, a thuggish rap group produced by Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer) and led by his wife's bumbling cousin, Dabu (Andre Benjamin, AKA Andre 3000 of Outkast). Their entrance is one of the best scenes in the movies as Sin leaves his uniform clad daughter eating pancakes in his Hills mansion to walk out as three Hummers rolling on spinners pull up blasting rap laden with more offensive words than you could shake a .45 at. His admonition? "This is the SUBURBS, man!"

Cameo appearances by The Black Eyed Peas and Aerosmith (says Steven Tyler, "Now, Chili, I'm not the kind of singer who makes appearances in movies") add a nice spice to the movie and allow for some throwbacks to the greatest movies ever, including a Pulp Fictionesque dance scene between Thurman and Travolta.

Now, the main premise of the movie is that everyone's in line to take Chili out. The Russians because he's an eye witness to Tommy's shooting, the DubMDs because he's promised them the three grand Tommy owed them, Raji and Nick (Vaughn and Keitel) because he's stealing Linda's lucrative contract, and most likely a few others as well. Robert Pastorelli, a childhood favorite of mine (he played Eldin on Murphy Brown, comes in as Joe Loop, an eccentric hitman who hangs out at a swing club downtown. His encounter with Raji after a failed hit in which he takes out the Russian hired to ice Chili provides one of many chances for an almost f-bomb.

Have I mentioned that this movie does everything it possibly can to be R without having to move up to an R rating? Well, it does.

As you can probably tell, Chili doesn't get hit by the end of the movie, though a few N-word swinging Russians do get iced, and he ends up... well, let's not get in to messy details.

Granted that's not my most coherent movie review ever, but I'll leave it that I'm still just laughing so hard I can't even begin to explain what made this so funny. The only problem with the movie was that the end wrapped up a little too quickly to be as neat as it was. 118 minutes left it just short of two hours, so I appreciate that they wrapped it up, but it was a little too easy. It keeps the extra half star, though, because it wasn't sloppy and they threw in a few more awesome cameos.

Good times and great laughs, a fabulous Saturday night movie that kept me laughing so hard I almost peed a little.