Cool World
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Movie Reviews of Cool World
Movie Review: Could be a bit better
Summary: 3 Stars
I think that this movie could have been done a bit better. It had a good concept and some well done scenes but it drags on a bit too much. The weird fantasy enviroment is awesome and it makes this film worth a peek if you like weirdness. The plot however can be viewed as a series of loosly conected holes together by stunning animation.Movie Review: Cool World
Summary: 2 Stars
Cool World is a weird mix of live-action and animation. There's the real world, with flesh-and-blood people, some of whom discover they can cross over to Cool World, which is like a tawdry version of a Warner Bros. cartoon; anvils routinely fall on various cartoon extras, and countless noisy animated creatures race around the colourful scenery...but a few Doodles (animated characters) are really interested in sex with Noids (real people). It turns out that too much shenanigans between Doodles and Noids crossing crazily between worlds can cause damage to the fabric of reality--like, destroy Cool World and Real World--especially if Holli Would, a sometimes drawn/sometimes real Kim Basinger--tampers with a Spike (some kind of key to keeping the worlds from intermixing) at the top of a casino in Las Vegas.
Here's the real problem in this surreal film: we never care about the real-world characters...that would be Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) and Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne). Harris is a fella who has a horrible motorcycle accident in 1945, before finding himself transported to Cool World, where he proceeds to make himself at home in a place where he can forever escape from reality beside a doodle girlfriend. His mother dies in that motorcycle accident, but that doesn't matter; it has no bearing, unfortunately, on what happens to Frank Harris, and could easily have been written out of the movie. But I can kind of forgive the 2D nature of Pitt's character because he inhabits a 2D world for most of the film--his only connections are to shrieking cartoon pratfallers, along with a few over-the-top doodle females who have only one emotion, sultriness, if that's an emotion (if it isn't, they have no emotions). But I can forgive Pitt's character for having no complexity and very little personality: he's chosen to live in cartoonland with all its freedom from logic, tragedy, and edges.
But Gabriel Byrne's character--Jack Deebs--is also completely uninteresting, and he has no excuses. His real-world scenes add nothing to our interest in him. We see him being released from prison--it doesn't matter. We see him thrash around in Cool World--it doesn't matter, but at least it's an entertaining place to toss him. Then, whenever he's thrust back into the real-world, Jack Deebs STILL doesn't matter. We see him buying comics at a comic-book store, where he is recognized as the creator of Cool World: it doesn't matter. We see him interact with his two neighbours: it also doesn't matter. Byrne is a good actor, but he's got nothing to work with here, when it comes to making us care about him, or what happens to him. With the scenes in Real World feeling as superficial as what happens in Cool World, the entire film begins to fragment into meaninglessness. And near the end, when both realities are in jeopardy as Real World begins to morph into another animated world..uh...: it doesn't matter.
Cool World, as a locale, is the best thing about the film, with its manic energy, it's hopping, howling, animated cast of thousands of unidentifiables. It's fun to watch, in the way that most cartoons are fun to watch. But the films is still obligated to make us care about the flesh-and-blood characters, and instead they're just bland.
Despite my low rating, this film is actually worth a look, just for the strangeness of it. But as a comedy--if that's what it's supposed to be--it is funny/strange, not funny/ha-ha. Enjoy the funny/strange, I guess. But anything flesh-and-blood in this film is dull, and all the real world scenes are flat.
Movie Review: Tough Times in Toon Town
Summary: 2 Stars
"Cool World" is Ralph Bakshi's bizarre live-action/animation combination that followed by four years the ground breaking (and far more entertaining) "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" But its weirdness is wholly on the surface, weirdness for weirdness' sake, and that's exhausting. The film only runs 94 minutes, but it could have been told in six.
The story is very simple: in 1945, Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) is pulled into the Cool World after he's injured in a motorcycle accident; 50 years later, ex-con Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), who made a name for himself in prison by drawing (unwittingly) Cool World-inspired comic books, is lured there by one of its denizens, Holly Would (Kim Basinger, although only her voice was used over another woman's rotoscoped body for animation). Holly -- who will remind men of every beautiful, psychotic girlfriend they couldn't resist -- wants to enter the Real World. Apparently, the only way to do that is by having sex with a `Noid ("humanoid" to us). As a Cool World police detective, Harris knows that lead to the destruction of both worlds, although how is never explained. Even "Ghostbusters" had a better explanation for why they shouldn't cross the streams of unlicensed nuclear accelerators: "It would be bad."
Most of the weirdness in "Cool World" comes from the background characters -- all of them inexplicably ugly, except for Holly and Harris' girlfriend, Lonette -- and its urban setting, a trashed city of twisted towers inhabited by ugly, angry toons (called Doodles) engaged in an endless cycle of assaulting each other. Imagine a story with scenes Hieronymous Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" playing in the background, only making even less sense, and you'll get an idea of the bizarre, incoherent visuals.
The story is a mess, full of plot holes, non-existent foreshadowing and, at the end, a deux ex machina to give it a happy ending. "Cool World" runs only 94 minutes, but tons of extraneous material was thrown in for padding; a sequence in which a Thumper-like rabbit is shooting craps has absolutely nothing to do with the story. The live-action camera work is clumsily handled, and the actors at times recite their lines as if they have no earthly idea what for. There's a joke about comedy that goes like this:
"Ask me what's the most important skill in comedy?"
"All right. What's--"
"Timing!"
In "Cool World," the actors aren't in on the joke. They slur their lines, drag them through time as if they're paid by the second. They're confused, and they know it. One scene with Pitt is priceless; after delivering some Bogart-like lines to a toon, he swivels his head with an expression that seems to ask, "Did I really say what I thought I said?"
The intermingling of reality and fantasy worlds is becoming a movie genre, with "Roger Rabbit," "Cool World," "MonkeyBone," "Space Jam" and "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" each taking a swing at it. Of them, only "Roger Rabbit" has delivered a satisfying, coherent story. The rest need to have a cartoon anvil dropped on them, if only to teach a lesson about how to animate comedy.
Movie Review: one liner
Summary: 2 Stars
I only rmember one thing from the entire movie that I just sat thru.
One toon calls another "pencil d##k". I laughed and laughed. Then I went back into my coma. Not a very good movie at all.
Movie Review: This World Ain't Cool, It's Just Annoying
Summary: 1 Stars
Cool World is vaguely interesting, random, strange, weird, but never is it, for one second, funny or anything close to enjoyable. What exactly were they going for? If it was to please cartoon fetishists, mission failed: the film is PG-13. If it was to create an interesting film around a vaguely interesting premise, mission also failed. The characters are dull and lifeless, the acting is just short of competent, with Brad Pitt coming off the best, and he's forced to used a hushed tone for most of the movie. The writing is awful, the pacing is unbearable, and they consistently fail to live up to what their interesting premise and all the interesting things you can do with it.
If they were aiming for a dark comedy, mission also failed. Unless you like random-cartoon characters randomly appearing and doing random crap to each other. Also, the music. The music is god-awful with a mix of techno and early 90s pop. It speaks to the movie, which is off-putting. Take it from me, don't watch the movie, just move on. There's nothing to see here in this epic failure of a film.