Thoughts on Cool Blue

On Hulu I watched an old movie called Cool Blue (made in 1988, released in 1990) starring Woody Harrelson as a starving artist who becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman he had a one night stand with, and while trying to find her, he uses her memory as a muse to fuel his artwork to be successful. I thought this was going to be a fun, quirky After Hours kind of movie, but it mostly felt half-baked and pointless.

Harrelson and a young Hank Azaria are fun to watch as a couple of broke losers bemoaning their poor existences at 27 years old, and it’s cool to see Azaria in a scrappy mode sometimes lapsing into his future cartoon voices, like when they do phone sex work and he talks like Moe the Bartender. But then later he gets this super melodramatic breakdown scene in a bar that felt way too much for this nothing movie, and felt more like an overwrought singular monologue audition scene than something more organic within the movie.

The female lead, Ely Pouget, had an effective distant cool about her, but her character felt empty. She has a jerk husband that she keeps disappearing from, but comes back to, just so he can rub it in her face about how she can’t survive without him. And at the end, she and Harrelson reunite and have this big dramatic argument as if they were a couple with history, when they hardly know each other and hadn’t seen each other in several months, it also felt weird and like the scene belonged in a different movie. The movie just didn’t seem to have any real focus to it, like it was trying to be this quirky L.A. comedy about weird locals and the art scene, but when Azaria asks Harrelson at the end what he learned from all of this and he doesn’t know, I thought, “Yeah, I don’t know either!”

Also, the movie had this random Sean Penn cameo where I could not get a read on what he was doing in this movie. He just pops up in blonde wig in a bar, talks in a German (?) accent before dropping it back to his natural accent, spits out some pearls of wisdom to Harrelson, and just exits the movie. It could have been cut from the movie and wouldn’t have made a difference.

So I wanted to like this, thinking it would be some fun weird obscure movie, but it just felt weak and underwritten, with some decent lead performances salvaging it.