Behind the Music - Be Cool

Be Cool is a film confused about where cool dwells.

For the record: It's not hiding in F. Gary Gray's film. Gray throws a juggernaut of pop stars - from Aerosmith's Steve Tyler to the Black Eyed Peas to OutKast's André 3000 - at audiences, hoping the bum's rush of celebrity will do the work where a listless script and direction have failed.

In this sequel to Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard's loan shark-gone-Hollyweird hero Chili Palmer (John Travolta) returns to L.A.'s 21st-century theme park where movie references drop like acid rain and the new jack gangsters are all entertainment industry folk.

In this thin satire of the music industry's propensity for thuggery and keeping their musical acts locked in virtual slavery, Be Cool's record producers and managers are actual gangsters. They pimp out their acts, live large off the proceeds and wave guns in their competitors' faces when they threaten the profit margin.

Be Cool boils down to a turf war between rival music producers, including Chili, who are all fighting to represent a pop tart singer and chip off the Britney block, Linda Moon (Christina Milian).

Moon, a soft-serve cone of pretty, boring music industry product, is mysteriously presented in Be Cool as some paragon of pure, principled talent in a corrupt, frontin' world.

Chili teams up with a record company widow, Edie Athens (Uma Thurman), to wrest Linda from under the thumb of sleazy music company mogul Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), whose specialty is disguising glorified lap dancers as girl groups.

Any comic value Be Cool inspires is drawn from the ludicrously overinflated Leonard characters who perform cartoonlike exaggeration of familiar types, some with dexterity and others with ineptitude.

Moon's manager, Raji (Vince Vaughn), is a lanky white boy who, in a common contemporary joke, wants to be black. Raji sports pimped-out chic (as envisioned by white movie executives) and practices conjugations of "bee-otch." Vaughn provides some of the film's funnier moments, though his rubbery Swingers shtick often veers into the scary-funny histrionics of vintage Jerry Lewis. Less amusing, and indicative of Be Cool's adolescent attitude is Raji's beefcake body guard (the Rock), who is mocked mercilessly for being a sissy.

And deep in the 'burbs is the domesticated Wharton School grad Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer) who, when the need arises, can turn into a gun-totin' hip-hop music-producing gangsta. If you don't play Sin's acts, he sics his mega-thug band, the Dub-MDs, on you to run over your face with their convoy of absurdly tricked-out Hummers. The Dub-MDs include a genuinely funny André 3000 as a wannabe thug who keeps shooting off his gun at inopportune times.

Gray should be cutting Tarantino royalty checks considering how much he lifts from that director's act. Travolta and Thurman re-do their Pulp Fiction sexy dance, and black characters launch irate Tarantino-esque monologues over the use of the "N" word. Director Gray steals mercilessly from Tarantino's popularization of white guy reverence for a superior black cool.

The entire cast of Be Cool is coasting on the fumes of better movies and better days. Travolta, resurrected from the doldrums of Look Who's Talking for the self-referential cool of Pulp Fiction, was a stroke of good casting. But Be Cool is a film that assumes a good joke can be milked ad infinitum, and that Travolta's increasingly strained hepcat act can withstand constant recycling.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com