Not Cool

Be Cool

Directed by F. Gary Gray

Be Cool could be called "alive" only because it has a pulse. This belated sequel to 1995's Get Shorty isn't a painful experience; between Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Steven Soderbergh's icy-elegant Out of Sight, Hollywood now has a template for translating Elmore Leonard, which means this particular type of machine is now expected to drive itself while the actors and filmmakers steer. The title says it all; being cool is the be-all and end-all of this glorified product that keeps artistry and feeling at arm's length.

Eleven years ago, with the release of Pulp Fiction, few critics noted that Tarantino was a conceptual hipster cousin of Leonard, an oversight Tarantino himself redressed with Jackie Brown. With Be Cool, the master and the apprentice change places. It's a money-train sequel to a hit Leonard adaptation that would not have existed without Tarantino's Fiction breakthrough, but which seems more a Tarantino homage than a conscientious Leonard adaptation.

Fiction's shadow completely engulfs Be Cool not just because of its mix of brutality, scuzzball humor, eclectic music and race-baiting, but because the filmmakers reunited Travolta with Fiction costars Uma Thurman and Harvey Keitel. (Pulp Fiction hasn't aged well-the filmmaking still seems assured, but the pop-culture references and cute-shocking violence and racial epithets seem defiantly of their time.) Be Cool reaches a been-there nadir in a climactic scene wherein Cedric the Entertainer plays record producer Sin La Salle-a volatile family man with a posse of bickering cartoon gangstas who hold their guns sideways-lectures a white racist on the black man's enduring contributions to Western culture, then kills him. Both the buildup and the climax feel secondhand, and the line itself is an indictment of the film itself: "Don't tell me to be cool," Sin says. "I am cool."

This time, former mafia shylock turned movie producer Chili Palmer (John Travolta) jumps into the music business and mentors a gifted young r&b chanteuse, Linda Moon (newcomer Christina Milian), freeing her from the clutches of assorted comically sleazy manipulators in the process. It's not a bad idea for a sequel, and in the right hands it could have been jaunty, corrosive fun. Leonard's source novel is a cynically amusing page-turner with an undercurrent of Nathanael West-ean disgust; in both books, Palmer was a kind of nasty fantasy version of Leonard-the no-illusions professional who beats the insiders just by doing his thing; a player who knew he was a player, moving among thieves who fancied themselves artists and titans of industry.

But director F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator) and screenwriter Peter Steinfeld skate along the surface and offer a slick, shrink-wrapped, modern cousin of a Rat Pack picture. Watching this film, it's easy to forget how sweet, wise and sad Leonard's fiction can be. Offhand, I can't think of a scene in Be Cool that's as visually striking and emotionally vulnerable as the time-fracturing sex scene in Out of Sight; or as Kubrickian funny-horrifying as that long take, wide-shot sequence in Jackie Brown where Sam Jackson's arms dealer drives minion Chris Tucker to a vacant lot a measly block from his apartment and then executes him. Gray's direction favors glibness over insight and showcases most of the rat-a-tat dialogue tv style, in alternating close-ups, which robs us of the pleasure of seeing actors' in-the-moment body language.

Most damagingly, you're inclined to think of the characters not as characters, but as movie stars kidding around. In Get Shorty, Gene Hackman became Harry Zimm, frazzled, desperate exploitation filmmaker. In Be Cool, Zimm's counterpart, slimy music manager Nick Carr, is just Harvey Keitel barking and muttering and trotting out the same "I can't believe the balls on this kid" smirk you've seen in five or six similar pictures. Travolta's Palmer felt fresh in Get Shorty-the thug-as-entrepreneur-but Travolta has played Palmer variants so many times that it's hard to think of him as anything but John Travolta, a smug, swaggering, well-fed movie star.

Nothing in Be Cool constitutes art, or even vigorous entertainment, and the racial needling and angry posturing are pro-forma; you don't believe them for a second. The film feels like a bookend to the Pulp Fiction era of film history, which lasted longer than anyone could have imagined. Time to close the book.

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Iraq war documentary Gunner Palace, about the experiences of the 2/3 Field Artillery in Baghdad, who've set up shop in the late Uday Hussein's monumental bachelor pad, aims to mix irony, empathy, horror and bawdy humor-a recipe mastered by fictional war pictures (M*A*S*H, Full Metal Jacket, Three Kings) and by Vietnam-era New Journalism (specifically Michael Herr's Dispatches). The film's blackout-sketch structure works against momentum and most of the soldiers aren't defined enough, despite onscreen titles reminding us of who's who. But this inherently powerful material nearly attains pop-art distinction anyway, thanks to the rock-rap soundtrack (provided by the soldiers themselves) and the improvisational beauty of Tucker's camerawork (watch for the shot of a distant soldier checking out a possible explosive device, his actions framed by two worried comrades in the foreground).

Gunner's Palace also confirms François Truffaut's remark that there's no such thing as an antiwar picture, because movies can't help making war seem beautiful and exciting. One grunt quotes a monologue from Full Metal Jacket while floating in Uday's swimming pool; when the gunners go on a night raid, they blast "Ride of the Valkyries." They're at war, but they've got movies on the brain.

What the fuck was Salon thinking when it fired Charles Taylor, intellectually serious film critic and one of the finest, funniest wordsmiths in American journalism? Will Salon, a haven for provocative criticism and fresh cultural commentary, now become yet another unpaid arm of the entertainment business, serving up "features" that are actually long, snarky ads for the latest movies?

The Jacket

Directed by John Maybury

An ambitious headtrip that adds up to less than the sum of its skills, The Jacket borrows from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Jacob's Ladder and adds a splash of Altered States. Gulf War hero Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) gets framed for a murder he didn't commit and ends up in a mental institution, undergoing sensory-deprivation treatment (i.e., torture) at the hands of supervising Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson, splendidly cold and hateful) and his right-hand woman, Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The treatment is supposed to cure Starks. Instead it causes him to experience intense hallucinations wherein he imagines himself 14 years in the future, falling in love with the daughter of coffee-shop waitress Jackie (Keira Knightley), orphaned daughter of the woman he was convicted of killing; he also learns that he died in that hospital and dedicates himself to preventing it.

Brody is a slightly blank actor with a hint of entitlement-qualities that were perfectly suited to The Pianist-but they're insufficient here. He can't match the awesomely fractured intensity of Knightley's performance, which matches up nicely with the cosmically mopey parts of Brian Eno's synth dreamscape soundtrack.