Cool and the Crazy

With Cool World being a critical and commercial bust, Ralph Bakshi found his last feature film work making a movie for Showtime based on a script he'd had laying around for more than twenty years. Well, it certainly does feel like the work of a much younger and inexperienced filmmaker than someone who had been making feature films since the early 70s, but this is Ralph Bakshi we're talking about. Getting the young talents of future stars Alicia Silverstone and Jared Leto is kind of amazing considering, and Leto in particular does everything he can. However, the film is just an endless stream of thin cliches, dull caricatures, and half-thought out tripe in the guise of wisdom, holding no real interest from beginning to end.

Michael (Leto) and Roslyn (Silverstone) are high school sweethearts who married right after school, had a baby, and are struggling to find the happiness they expected from the American dream. He doesn't get paid enough and is gone too long. She has to take care of the baby (and also works? I think), and their sex life is boring. Roslyn's friend Joannie (Jennifer Blanc) begins an affair, and it makes her happier, opening up the idea to Roslyn who decides to take a ride home from Joey (Matthew Flint) one day when she catches his eye. They're quickly having an affair (the seduction scene is so on the nose and unsexy it could only come from Bakshi), and Michael figures it out. There are fights and screaming. Roslyn and Joannie are completely disgusted that Michael would even consider the idea that they were having affairs. Roslyn and Michael end up splitting after Roslyn won't stop hanging out with Joannie.

Michael hooks up with a coworker, Lorraine (Christine Harnos), who is a beatnik and can't believe, like, all of Michaels bougie hangups, man. She tells him off by saying something about how he wants something that can't exist: a happy marriage, essentially. The Roslyn Joey affair grows with Joey hating his own wife, being a general thug, dealing drugs sometimes, killing people other times, and lording over Roslyn while manipulating her easily. Joannie and Roslyn realize they had it good with their husbands even if life was kind of dull, there's an attempt at reconciliation, but we need an action ending so there's some ruckus in the café, a car chase, and an attempted murder to iron things out. And then...Michael and Roslyn don't actually end up together?

I just can't with this movie. It's a completely uninteresting vignette of half-remembered mores being broken forty years after they were broken and left behind, the kinds of things that Bakshi had been making fun of to one degree or another since Fritz the Cat. It's just told in a straight, melodramatic style this time instead of with animated characters and some kind of supposedly slick satirical edge (that his earlier films never really had anyway).

As I wrote earlier, Leto gives the role of Michael his all, but Michael is more caricature than character, so his valiant efforts only go so far. Silverstone is more out of her depth (she's just honestly not a great actress) in a role that honestly should have been a walk in the park. The only performance really worth paying attention to is Flint as Joey, and that's mostly because he's the one allowed to go furthest in terms of the actual crazy that the film's title implies. It's mostly empty show, though. There's nothing to really grasp onto here.

I really just see this as the final proof that Ralph Bakshi simply had no idea what he was doing when he set out to make a career in feature films. This is the last nail in the coffin of his career, and it was rightfully earned. That it's mostly just boring instead of animatingly dreadful is something, I guess, though.

I think it actually does need to be viewed. Its awfulness is actually compelling.

A melodrama, sketches from the lives of three couples celebrating their weddings at the same time. All of them decide to get married early, although by the standards of the 1950s this fact is not really something special. Despite the seemingly serious attitude at first, and the fact that two couples have children, they themselves are in many ways far from understanding adult life and the concept of responsibility as such - they quarrel like teenagers, without looking, go on spontaneous benders, commit rash acts, confusing one thing or another with some abstract freedom, which they themselves cannot define. As usual, petty squabbles and random connections eventually accumulate like a snowball and one day can / will come out sideways. As a result, it can be concluded that watching the twists and turns of young and sometimes hysterical newlyweds who are not particularly smart is more boring than interesting, regardless of the relative vitality of the stories in question, as real life can be very different.

There is a 1958 film with the same name, "The Cool and the Crazy", but apart from the name and some subtleties, it does not have any common plot features with the 1994 version, which, among other things, separately suggests the idea of how much the later film adaptations are in fact a free narrative with a predominance of the vision of the directors of the 1990s and how much they actually reflect the spirit of the past.

"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.

Unhappily married couple Roslyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Michael (Jared Leto) lead separate affairs that lead to violent repercussions for all.

This was one of the last films from American International Pictures, produced by Lou Arkoff and Debra Hill. The director was Ralph Bakshi, who had made his name with "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic".

Some credit should be given for the casting, as both leads have now gone on to bigger things and most likely few people have ever seen or even heard of this picture (hardly a gem).

What is most strange is the morality of the narrative. Cheating is not so much a bad thing in itself (according to this film), but bad when things turn violent with the competition. So, I guess, if married women choose better men to have affairs with, the whole thing is no big deal...