After wowing the crowds as a loan-shark-turned-movie-producer in Get Shorty, John Travolta signed up for the sequel Be Cool. Sadly director F Gary Gray failed to recapture the magic with this satirical spin on the music business. It was "lazily adapted" from the novel by Elmore Leonard and duly slated by the critics. In the end it was a modest moneymaker although it fell well short of the $80m bagged by the original film.
Hot Footing It
Much of the hype generated by the studio focused on the reunion dance between Uma Thurman and John Travolta (after their ‘The Batman’ boogie in Pulp Fiction). Amid the usual waffle, a 20-minute 'making of' featutette recalls this day of shooting and there's a second featurette in the Close Up section that's entirely devoted to the sequence. However, Travolta is careful to point out that this isn't just a mindless rehash of a classic QT moment. "In Pulp Fiction we were two people hell-bent for death,", he says, "In this movie we're playing two people who are cool and rugged, but they're hell-bent for life."
In spite of Travolta's smooth moves, producer Stacey Sher concedes that The Rock's big gay Samoan "stole every scene he's in" in another of the Close-Up featurettes. "I’m bad," boasts the big guy. "I'm the second coming of Fred Astaire!" That's a wry assessment of his camp performance of You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man), which is seen in the snippets in the film but included in full for this DVD. Frankly it's hilarious, but The Rock took his preparation very seriously. Cameras go behind the scenes to find him rehearsing in a recording studio and taking intensive dance lessons from 'Chicks International'. No doubt the ex-wrestler took a few body slams from his pals after that display.
Cut And Dry
The Rock and Vince Vaughn are the highlight of 14 deleted scenes. After Chilli (Travolta) promises to make Elliot (The Rock) a star, Raji (Vaughn) tries to tempt him back onside with his pitch for 'Samoan Alone' - a homosexual riff on the Macaulay Culkin comedy. In the 'making of' featurette, Vaughn reveals that he did a lot of improvisation for the film and this is probably one of those moments. Unfortunately the remainder of the scenes aren't very funny at all and the gag reel is only vaguely amusing, eg Cedric The Entertainer takes a call on his mobile phone in the middle of a scene. Cue half-hearted laughter.
Ho-hum profiles of Cedric The Entertainer, Andre 3000 and Christina Milian fill out the Close-Ups menu, but there's absolutely nothing on the process of adapting the book for the screen and no attempt to bridge the gap between the first and second films. An audio commentary by writer and director might have gone some way to addressing this, but apparently they couldn't be bothered. As a result, this DVD edition of Be Cool feels distinctly lukewarm.
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