I can’t be cool like Chili Palmer, and neither can you. No one can, so don’t even try. Chili doesn’t just embody cool — he *defines* cool. He’s so cool, in other words, that he can take something uncool and make it cool just by deigning to be associated with it. Like *Be Cool* — though I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting that *Be Cool* is anything other than cool from the get-go. It’s a Hollywood paradox: *Be Cool* is cool because it’s about Chili, but it wouldn’t be about Chili if Chili deemed it beneath his notice — if there was no possibility of cool to be found in it, then Chili would have nothing to do with it. There’s a Nobel Prize to be had in the exploration of this kind of pop-culture quantum physics, if only Stockholm cared about the *important* stuff.

I like a good mind fuck as much as anyone, but hey, Mr. Movie, do not roll over and light a cigarette before you’ve done your job. Jack Starks is a Gulf War vet wrongly convicted of murder (or is he?) by reason of insanity — his brains got scrambled by a bullet in Iraq … more…

There’s a moment, toward the end of *Kinsey,* when the sex researcher — by this point half-renowned, half-reviled — is giving a lecture about the disconnect between public morality in the United States and the private behavior that all the preaching and haranguing in the world isn’t going to change. (C’mon: Who *doesn’t* love orgasms? Who *isn’t* getting nowhere near enough of them?) While Kinsey rants passionately, a middle-aged couple stand up and stalk out, looking like they’ve smelled something bad.

If you’ve ever dreamed of the many ways in which, say, rugged tough guy Tommy Lee Jones could be emasculated, your dream has come true. Confrontation with yards of lacy, sexy lingerie hanging in the shower? Check. Confusion in the ‘feminine products’ aisle of the supermarket? Oh, you know it.