reviews

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.

It is suggested in *A Company of Soldiers* that those Americans who protest the invasion and occupation of Iraq are simply too afraid to come out and fight — if they have the energy to organize marches and demonstrations, they should sign up for the *real* battle. The cognitive dissonance required to come up with such a stubbornly diametric take on protest is downright stunning… until you consider that the man who proffers this bizarre idea is one of the grunts actually doing the fighting.

When I tell you guys that it’s my job to watch bad movies so you don’t have to — though, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve actually ever put it that way before, but it’s true — it’s movies like *Son of the Mask* that I’m talking about. My suffering will have been in vain if you succumb to the slick marketing — like the TV ads that try to make ‘Jamie Kennedy’ sound like ‘Jim Carrey’ — or to nostalgia for the 1994 film (which I think is astoundingly mediocre but is a work of genius compared to this one) and end up in a movie theater where *Son of the Mask* is showing. And *your* suffering at that point will certainly be in vain.

Just when you thought the kids’ movie was lost forever in a cesspool of toilet humor and cartoon violence, along comes a wonderful film like this one, smart and sweet but unsentimental and warmly genuine in its portrait of childhood innocence and the adventure of growing up. The trials of 10-year-old Opal (newcomer AnnaSophia Robb, … more…