Cool and the Crazy (1994)

Thanks for the memories!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

"Cool and the Crazy" seems like a promising film. It has Alicia Silverstone and Jared Leto, who were better known as "the girl from the Aerosmith music videos" and "the guy from 'My So-Called Life" respectively, when this film first aired on Showtime in 1994. It is also directed by Ralph Bakshi, whose previous films, all of which were fully or mostly animated, included "Fritz The Cat" (1972), "Heavy Traffic" (1973), and the animated "Lord of the Rings" (1977). These films were not to everyone's taste. However, you couldn't deny the ambition that went into these films, nor could you not respect Bakshi's taste for the unorthodox and his steadfast refusal of the cinema status quo."Cool and the Crazy" is not animated, which will surprise many Bakshi fans. It is also poorly acted and written, and is by far the most half-baked film Bakshi ever put out. Given the bright futures of its two young stars and the good reputation of Bakshi, it comes as a huge disappointment.If you find "Cool and the Crazy" on DVD, you may not know how or why it was released. It originally aired part of Showtime's "Rebel Highway" series. It was one of ten low-budget made-for-TV movies created as a tribute to the 1950's exploitative B-movies "with a 90's edge". So in a way, this film is supposed to be campy. However, since fewer people had cable back then, let alone a subscription channel like Showtime, and not all of the films featured in "Rebel Highway" have received DVD releases yet, you wouldn't know that fact unless you did Internet research like I did. Regardless, being intentionally campy and low- budget is no excuse for an underdeveloped story.Silverstone and Leto play Roslyn and Michael, two '50's teenagers who get married right out of high school at the same time (in the same ceremony even) as Roslyn's best friend, Joannie (Jennifer Blanc). One year later, Roslyn and Michael have a baby, and Michael is struggling to make ends meet with his job. Roslyn, fed up with her humdrum lifestyle as a housewife, goes out on the town with Joannie every night. Both women cheat on their husbands more than once, and Michael gradually gets more suspicious of Joannie.There's a good setup here for a story. Unfortunately, both Silverstone and Leto are very unconvincing as teenagers in the '50's, and as a distraught married couple. Silverstone looks and acts more like a teen of the '90's, and even wears her hair like a '90's girl would. She also seems really jaded when her character should be agonizing over the monotony of her married life.Leto is not too bad in his role, but it's interesting how he suspects Joannie and doesn't really seem to know her that well. Did the two couples not get married together as the first scene shows? Plus, they live close to each other, so wouldn't they know each other pretty well?Such an unexplained plot point grows even bigger when Joannie's husband, Frankie (Bradford Tatum) discovers Joannie's infidelity. Leto acts like he doesn't even know him when he arrives at their apartment. To make the scene even more forced, Frankie, when trying to get through a crowd of neighbors who gather around to see what the noise is all about, parts the crowd by making an laughably-awkward scream. It sounds like a crow after being hit by a golf ball.Eventually, it turns out that one of the men Roslyn sleeps with, Joey (Mathew Flint) is psychotic. At first, Roslyn is turned on by Joey's bad boy image, but he gets too attached to her, not even leaving her alone when Roslyn calls the whole thing off.There is a chase where Michael goes after Joey directly following his kidnapping of Roslyn. There is also a enticing sex scene between Michael and his co-worker, Lorraine (the beautiful Christine Harnos from "Dazes and Confused" (1993)). With both scenes, you're supposed to root for Roslyn and Michael not to drift apart, I guess. However, they make such a miserable couple that I sort of wished Michael would have run off with Lorraine. Instead, the ending was a bit of a cop out, and was way too over the top. The resolution was even worse at the end.Seeing as how Bakshi made this film, I wondered if I would have been more interested in it if it were animated. Considering drawing a scene is much harder than pointing a camera at live humans, I'm guessing more thought would have been put into the story that way. Instead, we get characters that are so underdeveloped that we don't care about them, the acting is sub par, and in the end, you have a very forgettable film. It's good that Silverstone and Leto had better roles waiting for them in the next few years to come. In Silverstone's case, if you liked "Clueless", you should stay away from this film.

I sat watching this film waiting for some sort of climax,some clue that they don't think the world revolve's solely around smooth talking, drug dealers and spoilt, young, house wives,something at least to keep me interested. Alas nothing happened...the characters are confusing and the plot takes an average storyline about ten miles too far. I had a sinking feeling after watching this film, i think they call it regret. Regret that i spent an hour and a half watching the worst acting and the worst drawn out, anti-climax of a story ever. I admit a few scenes are interesting such as the one with Joey and Roslyn on the beach, when she just can't refuse his his raw sexual magnetism. Funny stuff! But over all an extreme disappoint.

I really liked this movie. It is very hard to find since it is out of production. It is about Roslyn, played very well by Alicia Silverstone,who is a young newly-wed with marital problem. She goes out wtih her friend, played by Jennifer Blanc, to a dance and meets bad boy, Joey, played by Matthew Flint. Joey is no good, and is married himself, and this affair is hopeless from the beginning. What I like about this movie is that Alicia is EXTREMELY believeable when she is on the beach with Joey and she tells him to stop his advances, but she also wants him to continue. She whispers desperately, out a different era in American high school dating, for him to stop, "someone will see us", etc. The choice of soft backround music from the 50's really set the mood, also. Why this movie has had so little attention, and why your other writers do not seem to forcast the eventual greatness of Alicia Silverstone from this movie is beyond me. Of course, now the only edition of this movie is in PALS, in German.

I never saw "Beverly Hills 90210," but I did see "Rebel Without a Cause". It's possible that this film could be a hybrid of both with its "who's going to sack up with whom" dramatics, as well as the occasional flashes of gang violence and car chases. This story, however, is set in the '50s.Alicia Silverstone and Jared Leto were high-school-sweethearts-turned-young marrieds-with-an-unplanned-child couple who struggle to find themselves amid a marriage gone sour. Alicia is cheating on Jared with bad-boy Joey (Matthew Flint, in a loud, obnoxious performance), so Jared decides to get even.The film's jazz soundtrack adds some ambience to the film, and the seedy look of L.A. during the fifties is OK, but on the whole, "The Cool and the Crazy" is mainly for fans of the stars. Ralph Bakshi might want to stick to his cartoons from now on...