Discover Top Posts Tagged with #cookie 1989

Hateration holleration, movie edition:

COOKIE (1989): Cute but underwhelming mob comedy starring Emily Lloyd as the title character (full name Carmela Maria Angelina Teresa Voltecky), a hotheaded teenage smartass and the daughter of a notorious mob boss (Peter Falk) and his longtime mistress (Dianne Wiest), who becomes her newly paroled father's driver and eventually comes up with an elaborate scheme to get him out of the life, settle accounts with an old enemy, and free him to finally marry her mother. The considerable charm of the three leads makes this pleasant background noise, although the script never really gives the premise the comedic sparkle it needs. Also, while Lloyd is delightful, Cookie remains curiously out of focus as a character throughout, and there's a distinct sense at several points that some of her scenes may have ended up on the cutting room floor. Ricki Lake has a small part as Cookie's friend Pia, although if you blink, you might miss her.

COOL WORLD (1992): Weird Ralph Bakshi live-action/animation hybrid about famous cartoonist Jack Deebs, recently released from prison (Gabriel Byrne) and drawn into a cartoon world he thinks he created, where a sexy "Doodle" called Holli Would (Kim Basinger) is determined to make herself real despite the best efforts of human cop Frank (Brad Pitt), who for some reason is responsible for enforcing the segregation of Doodles and humans (whom the Doodles call "Noids"). The seedy, lurid cartoon world is a throwback to Bakshi's '70s efforts like FRITZ THE CAT, but here devoid of any apparent point or direction, satiric or otherwise — given Bakshi's early embrace of rotoscoping, you'd think blurring the lines between reality and animation would be right in his wheelhouse, but if there's a thesis here, I've never been able to spot it. I'm not a big fan of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, which is a neat premise in search of a story, but its allegorical positioning is never in doubt and it beats you over the head (sometimes literally) with the principles of its cartoon logic, whereas the rules that govern the Doodles of Cool World never make much sense and often seem completely arbitrary. Ultimately, though, it's the misogyny that drags COOL WORLD down: Holli's determination to become a Real Girl is the only coherent character motivation in the whole movie, but the story treats her with such withering contempt that it starts to feel awfully sticky well before the end.