Any movie critic can tell you what a newly released DVD is about & spoil the ending for you. I plan to ruin your entire DVD watching experience by highlighting it's flaws, it's missteps, it's examples of poor editing, casting, and point out the ridiculous holes in the plot. If you're cynical, you'll appreciate this valuable service I'm providing. If you're easily impressed, then don't say I didn't warn you.  - Mean Jean

A deadly trio is now in vid stores, be warned.

Taxi

First is Taxi, a movie that had great actors, funny situations & plenty o� hype surrounding it, yet still managed to fall flat. The best stuff from this movie is in the ads for it, if you have seen those, consider yourself money ahead & skip this one.

For the brave, foolhardy or defiant that will insist on renting this one in spite of my warning, here is what you�re in for. Jimmy Fallon plays the most unconvincing, unrealistic cop ever put in a motion picture. He acts as though he were embarrassed by such a role, and his ill at ease demeanor will have you wondering if he tested for this role or if it was just handed to him because he�s funny on SNL.

Queen Latifa is supposedly a bike messenger turned taxi driver, who parks her car in her apartment. She is so skilled at mechanics that she is able to disassemble & reassemble her car every night to get it into the elevator & safely into her NY apartment. I could be wrong about this, but since no explanation is offered on how such a thing could be, I could be right.

They meet & embark on the roller coaster thrill ride® journey when Jimmy Fallon�s driver�s license is suspended for stupidity (in his driving skills as well as in the script) and he seeks her help to bust the bank robbers. These bank robbers are so unbelievably stupid that though they could make millions of dollars on the runway or in ads as models, all they can think of to do to put food on their table is rob banks.

Coincidentally, these chicks also know their way around combustion engines. In this movie, the only people too stupid to know which end to put gas in are the guys.

Naturally there is the conflict between the stupid cops and the smart & sassy Q.L, who is too clever to be outwitted by anyone. Watch her persuade harried bureaucrats & inefficient cops presiding over the impound lot to keep their office open & doing her bidding through flattery & snow jobs so she can get her heart�s desire. Marvel at sequences so strained to fit into this mess that they are virtually unwatchable. Try to hold in your scornful snorts of derision until the happy ending, which I can�t even remember, due to the trauma on my brain cells this movie caused. Trust me, stick to watching the ads on this one, then you can pretend like you saw it & make all your friends worry about you until you repeat after me: �Yeah, I saw it. It sucked.�

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Hitch

This movie has such funny jokes & bits & actors in it, yet it still manages to be spectacularly unsatisfying. This is due to the unrealistic conflicts choking it. Apparently when the scriptwriters went to scriptwriting school, they learned that in order for a movie to be interesting, there has to be a conflict of some sort. They must have learned this on the day they learned that the movie going public is full of morons, because the conflict in this is so dumb & far fetched that it strains the credibility of a child.

Supposedly a loser in love is successfully able to coach others on getting long term romance with the women of their dreams. In real life, this rarely happens, yet in this movie Will Smith is doing so well in this line of work that this is how he affords a zillion dollar a month spacious McMansion apartment in NYC. So Will Smith meets some girl, I can�t remember how, & in spite of the fact that he�s supposedly such a moron with his personal love life, he exudes the opposite to her, just like the guys he�s coaching. Yet apparently, in the world of dramatic conflict in a script for plot advancement, this means his dates with her have to be a Twilight Zone of Murphy�s Law sequence, where  everything goes wrong that possibly could. 

As I said, some of this is hilarious stuff. The humor in this almost outweighs the stupidity & lack of realism. So then, borrowing heavily from �How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days�, the girl�s job as a writer for a gossip column sends her & WS on the roller coaster thrill ride® to the height of the conflict that I doubt you�ll care much about, as the entire sub plot revolving around one of WS�s clients is so stupid it�s insulting, even though it�s funny.

I am glad we rented this movie rather than buying it. We watched, we laughed, and then promptly forgot about it.

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Be Cool

Here is the last of the bad summer DVD rentals, a movie that strains to be hip as it simultaneously disappoints & amuses.

A few summers ago, Diet Coke gave everyone who bought a case of coke a free Elmore Leonard booklet, a few chapters short sampler of �Be Cool� right on the heels of his movie, �Get Shorty�. I was so struck by his lack of talent, his pedestrian wording, his forced hipness that I wondered how on earth he had managed to become a successful H�weird writer. Then again, that makes perfect sense.

So I didn�t see �Get Shorty�, but I�m sure it was a lot like this movie, chock full of attempts to show you he�s hip & gets the inside jokes & even manages to crack some, in the vain hope that he�ll come across as an insider rather than a star-struck outsider who desperately yearns for acceptance.

�Be Cool� follows the roller coaster thrill ride® of a guy that�s named after a food as he tries to disentangle himself from the world of making movies to relaunch himself as a music biz insider. Coincidences rain down on him, ensuring his acceptance into this fake movie version of the music biz.

There are traces of good in here. The Rock, for instance, has somehow managed to evolve into an actor that�s not as much of a cartoon-like caricature of an actor as he was in his acting debut. Some of the jokes are really funny. But mostly this movie is like cotton candy, fluffy & fun with no depth or substance.

James Woods has a bit part in this, and overacted so ferociously that for the time he was on the screen I thought he had morphed into Al Pacino. Uma Thurman also tried hard to be dramatic in her unconvincing role as his widow, trying to hold her little indy record label together.  Somehow you are expected to believe that a chick with no street smarts or book knowledge managed to start it up and find raw talent that managed to become wildly successful. Somehow you�re supposed to believe that she then let her husband run the financial end, though he knows less about such things than she. Naturally he runs it into the ground & loses all the money & here comes the hard to follow sub plots where the Russian mafia is inexplicably out to kill the food man.

As every movie John Travolta & Uma Thurman play in together has the obligatory dance scene, this one is no different. As every movie Ahnuld is in has the obligatory catch phrase, this one is no different. Is it hip to frantically ape other movies trademark bits, or invent your own?  Apparently the redefinition of the word hip now means making the same movie everybody else does, casting the Viper Room as an almost central character, using Shakespearean lingo to describe modern loan sharks, throwing in trendy pop groups, rappers who really are ganstas & many throw away inside jokes. With "Be Cool" you can't help but to notice that though Elmore Leonard tries hard to be a cutting edge writer, he is really the exact opposite.

The one scene I though was going to be hip & different had Uma telling John Food that she wanted to try something with him, or know something, I can�t remember. I was hoping she would then ask him to let her watch him as he shaved his chin, but no, alas, it�s just yet another attempt to be like everyone else & throw in a love scene though she�s only been a widow for a few days at this point. I think watching a shaving a dimpled chin scene would have been far more interesting, educational, true to life & entertaining.

Show the king he has no clothes: stay away from this movie in droves.  Rent it & watch it with all your friends, to save everyone money. This movie is not good or hip though it tries hard to be both. It�s funny, but so are cartoons.

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