Unhappily married couple Roslyn and Michael lead separate affairs that lead to violent repercussions for all.Unhappily married couple Roslyn and Michael lead separate affairs that lead to violent repercussions for all.Unhappily married couple Roslyn and Michael lead separate affairs that lead to violent repercussions for all.
- Joannie
- (as Jennifer Blanc)
- Neal
- (as Richard Singer)
- Girl
- (as Catherine Nagan)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe first, and to date, only feature-length live-action, non-rotoscoped film directed by Ralph Bakshi.
- Quotes
Joannie: Listen, Roslyn, I've been thinking.
Roslyn: After what I just heard, you were not thinking.
Joannie: Come on, come on. This is serious. This is our lives, not some dress rehearsal. I'm tired of being some slave. I spent my whole life watching my mother cook and clean, never leave the house, never leave the valley. She died looking a hundred. She was only 45. She started out just like us - love in Hollywood High. Next thing you know, there's no money, no love, nothing. She raised all of us. So what? She broke her ass like a Mexican maid, and maybe every two weeks, she'd scrape together a few pennies for a hair set and wash, reading her Hollywood magazines for her high on Hollywood boulevard next to the studios. Big deal.
Roslyn: You're having an affair, aren't you?
Joannie: We have to live before we die. We're kids playing mothers to kids... and that includes our so-called husbands.
- ConnectionsEdited into Rebel Highway: Cool and the Crazy (1994)
- SoundtracksI'm Walking
Written by David Bartholomew (as Dave Bartholomew) and Fats Domino (as Antoine Domino)
Published by EMI Unart Catalog Inc.
Performed by Blues Traveler
Courtesy of A&M Records
"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.
- D_Burke
- Sep 23, 2010
Details
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- Also known as
- When I Catch Her I'll Kill Her
- Filming locations
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- See more company credits at IMDbPro