Cool World

 This movie was released in July 1992.  It stars Brad Pitt as Frank Harris, Kim Basinger as Holly Would, Gabriel Byrnes as Jack Deebs (the artist that allegedly drew the place) and Candi Milo as Linette, Frank's love interest.  In the movie, Frank is a real person detective in the Doodle's place "Cool World."  He loves Linette, but as sex between a person and a doodle would cause great havoc and destruction, he isn't actually with Linette.  Holly doesn't care about rules or propriety and would do anything, including sleeping with real people to become a real girl, herself.  Holly leads everyone on a nightmarish roller coaster ride in her quest to become human, and ends up calling the artist to the world in her quest.  Jack Deebs is warned about the dangers of possessing a fountain pen, here and the actor, Byrnes does a good job playing a confused and overwhelmed artist.

This movie came out on the heels of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." and improved and expanded the genre of movies that mixes animation with real people.  Its actually my favorite crossover animation movie of all time.  I decided since I did a review of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I was going to review other favorite movies.  "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is actually my third favorite movie of this type.  Its almost like, back in the early 90s, Apple invented Windows applications and technology, but IBM perfected it.  The plot of this movie is intricate.  Kim Basinger does a bang up job with her vixen + villain role in this movie and the ending is somewhat, poetic justice.  Brad Pitt is a reliable and professional actor who does an awesome job in this movie.  His skepticism of Holly is refreshing.  Holly expects everyone to fall for her see-through charms and Frank isn't having any of it.  Holly's malice toward everyone isn't instantly obvious and that is Basinger's success here.  I think there needs to be more mixed genre's of movies like this and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" but I gather the type of movie is probably somewhat complicated to pull off.

Holly is probably best classified as a "maneater."  She cloaks all of her bad intentions in flirtatious and deceptive sexual aggression that looks like coercion.  Even the audience doesn't realize the extent of her malice till near the end of the movie.  I'm guessing Basinger has met a few of these types of chicks in real life, as have I, and I think Basinger's portrayal is awesome.  The way men fall for Holly and drool over her is certainly similar to real life examples of the diva.  Too bad, so few of them get even close to the just desserts that Holly gets by the end of the movie.

5 stars