Uncool
Get Shorty follow-up is just as lame as everything else coming out of Hollywood right now
—Noel Murray
Two years ago, I was almost embarrassed by the heavy presence of mainstream and quasi-mainstream movies on my year-end Top 10 list, but what could I do? I love indies and foreign films, but in 2003, the populists were at the top of their game. Last year, on the other hand, wasn't so good for Hollywood, and so far 2005 has been an absolute bust. Granted, this is a traditionally fallow time of year, but the studios often dump one or two oddball masterpieces in the first quarter, like The Hunted two years ago and Dawn of the Dead last year. This year? Not much reason to leave the house.
I had hoped that Be Cool might provide some relief. It's the sequel to the breezy 1995 action-comedy Get Shorty, with John Travolta reprising his role as Chili Palmer, a mafia collector turned Hollywood player. In the sequel—as in Elmore Leonard's novel—Palmer dabbles in the music business, encountering a succession of starry-eyed dreamers and not-as-dangerous-as-they-pretend loonies. Vince Vaughn plays white gangsta rap wannabe Raji, who manages promising singer Linda Moon (played by Christina Milian). Palmer emancipates Moon from her contract and introduces her to his record-company-executive friend Edie (Uma Thurman), the widow of old organized crime associate Tommy Athens (James Woods), who has just died owing money to the Russian mob and to gun-toting preppy hip-hop magnate Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer).
All of this works like gangbusters in the trailer, and even the feature presentation includes a funny character turn by wrestler The Rock as a gay bodyguard and some refreshingly relaxed conversations between Pulp Fiction vets Travolta and Thurman. But director F. Gary Gray shoots Be Cool all wrong, relying on a lot of close-ups and tight edits. To develop any kind of comic momentum, actors need space and time to play off each other. A lot of the scenes here look like they were performed one line at a time in separate rooms. Peter Steinfeld's script is also pretty moronic, ditching Leonard's carefully layered life-as-a-movie/Hollywood-as-a-crime-syndicate themes and hewing too closely to a needlessly twisty plot. Without Leonard's meaningful attitudinizing, the movie seems about as savvy as an episode of The Brady Bunch. Overlong, agonizingly self-satisfied and dopey, it's as lumbering as Get Shorty was fleet.
But even worse than the film were the trailers that preceded it: King's Ransom, an inert-looking, misogyny-tinged caper comedy with the unfunny duo of Anthony Anderson and Jay Mohr; A Lot Like Love, a wannabe-hip post-emo romantic comedy with Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet; and a remake of The Amityville Horror, which promises all the cute-kids-who-see-ghosts and J-horror-rip-off effects that are making every recent horror movie look like the product of a single, rusty assembly line. The multiplexes are groaning with remakes, retreads and non-star vehicles. As I walked through the lobby, I saw a big display for the upcoming Guess Who?, a remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with Kutcher (again) in the Sidney Poitier part and Cedric the Entertainer (again) in the Spencer Tracy part.
Right now, I really hate going to the movies.
