As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie Review

Which is to say, not very cool.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater December 4, 2013

Coming-of-age dramas have the benefit of being instantly relatable. We've all been there. We all know what it's like. If not identical, we've at least shared similar experiences—changing attitudes, changing bodies, changing family situations. The trouble with these kinds of films, though, is that they can sometimes feel so familiar as to be routine. The same struggles. The same themes. The same types of relationships, recycled endlessly. Watching As Cool As I Am—directed by Max Mayer (Adam) and adapted from a 2003 novel by Peter Fromm—you may be struck by the intense feeling of having seen this same sort of film before, only done far better. I was reminded of Ang Lee's bleak and beautiful The Ice Storm, which covers much of the same territory—nascent sexuality, parental infidelities, a disintegrating family—with finer nuance and greater emotional range. In comparison, As Cool as I Am seems stunted and immature; it wants to act like an adult movie, but it just doesn't have the necessary knowledge and experience yet. Part of this is due to the film's distinct straight-to-video/made-for-TV vibe, a combination of low-budget cinematography, overplayed acting, and a sentimentality and cautiousness that keep the movie from examining the raw, harsher realities of growing up.

Set in some nameless small town in the American southwest, As Cool as I Am charts the emotional and sexual development of sixteen-year-old Lucy Diamond (Sarah Bolger), a tomboy who dreams of being a chef and so idolizes Mario Batali that she actually dresses like him, down to his characteristic orange Crocs. She's mousy and precocious and just beginning to blossom, newly attracting the attention of the kinds of guys who drive Mustangs, throw massive house parties, and pass out peppermint schnapps to girls they're hoping to bed. Lucy's yet to even kiss a boy, but that soon changes when she starts fooling around with her childhood best friend, Kenny (Thomas Mann), a junior existentialist and high school wallflower who's afraid he's going to lose her to the popular crowd. ("You're too beautiful to be invisible anymore.")

Both Kenny and Lucy are perhaps abnormally responsible for their age; when they have spur-of-the-moment sex almost by accident, she's wise enough to drop by Planned Parenthood the next morning, while he suggests they abstain from then on in order to better focus on their relationship. Their maturity is a clear response to their respective families; Kenny's parents are divorced, and Lucy's folks dropped out of school when they were seventeen to have her. Her father, Chuck (James Marsden), works a logging gig that has him away from home for months at a time—he seems to like it that way, as it removes him from the responsibility of parenting—while his wife, the desperate, lonely Lainee (Claire Danes), is a "beautiful mom who goes to work in stripper heels." The added wrinkle here is that Chuck is such a gender role traditionalist, and so insecure about his own earnings, that Lainee has to work her telemarketing job in secret. (He's also weirdly obsessed with the stories of how martyred saints were killed, but that's neither here nor there.)

The two teens are carrying a lot of familial baggage, and it only gets heavier when their parents discover the kids are sexually active. It's the old "I don't want you to make the same mistakes that I did" dilemma, and it sets in motion a chain of unhappy events that force all of the characters to take good hard stares into the psychological mirror. Lainee looks for love in all the wrong places, hooking up with a slimy marketing guru and then getting involved in an emotional affair with a married man. Chuck deals with his feeling of having wasted his life by convincing himself that his family is his life, though this clearly isn't true given his propensity to disappear for weeks on end. Kenny is sent to live with his father on the opposite side of the state, and Lucy runs through a gauntlet of awful teenaged experiences in his absence—drunken excess, rape and pregnancy, an AIDS scare. With all the trauma and lesson learning, As Cool as I Am gets to be a bit much in an instructional, after-school-special sort of way. At the same time, the film tip-toes around Lucy's series of tragedies, never giving them the gravity or honesty that they deserve. This is soft-boiled melodrama, eggy and undercooked.

In terms of stylistic choices and filmmaking acumen, the movie is just as bland, verging on mushy. The camerawork is Lifetime Original-worthy and the tone is sometimes goofy in an unintentional way. I all but checked out entirely when Mario Batali's spirit appears in the reflection of an oven door, guiding Lucy on as she whips up an edifying dinner for herself. Batelli shows up so often—usually in clips from his TV show—that you start to wonder if he paid to be some sort of human product placement, rambling on about extra-virgin olive oil. He's nearly more of a presence here than Claire Danes and James Marsden, who appear to be phoning it in and calling collect. In her first feature film outing in six years, Danes seems especially out of place, carrying over some of the tics and emotional jitteriness of her bipolar character on Showtime's Homeland. The younger performers are better here; Bolger and Mann are awkward and funny in a believably teenaged way, and they're responsible for the authentic warmth the film occasionally musters when it isn't delivering The More You Know-style messages.

As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I couldn't track down any technical specs on how As Cool as I Am was shot, but considering the film's budget and the way the footage looks, it was probably an all-digital production. Visually, the film is uninteresting—the cheap-looking lighting is the main culprit here—but I can't knock IFC's 1080p/AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which is free from distractions and most likely true- to-source. There is some slight noise inherent in the image, especially in darker scenes, but there are no blatant compression artifacts or other noticeable issues. (No DNR or edge enhancement either.) If not exceptional, clarity is decent at least, with fine detail easily visible in closeups, though longer shots tend to look a little soft. For the most part, color is realistically graded, with a bit of added warmth in the highlights. Black levels and overall contrast are consistent and unproblematic. As Cool as I Am is no looker, but you can't fault IFC's Blu-ray for that.

As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

IFC gives us two audio options, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track and an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mixdown. Considering how insubstantially the rear speakers are used, the two mixes are practically indistinguishable. Sure, the multi-channel track offers some breathing room for the music, along with occasional ambience—party chatter, light wind, car tires crunching gravel, etc.—but nothing you'd miss if it wasn't there. That said, there are no real audio issues here. Dialogue is always well-balanced and easily understood, and the surrounding sound design—what little is required from a talky melodrama, anyway—is clear and dynamically solid. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in bright yellow lettering inside the frame.

As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes (HD, 4:20): A quick EPK featurette with clips from the film and interviews with Claire Danes and James Marsden.
• Trailer (HD, 2:21)

As Cool as I Am Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As Cool as I Am just isn't as cool as the better coming-of-age dramas to which it inevitably draws comparisons. It's sometimes funny and briefly heartwarming, but sentimentality and a lack of real, piercing honesty keep the movie from being more than just another cautionary, life-lesson-delivering after-school melodrama. IFC's Blu-ray release is slim on supplements— all you get is a trailer and a short EPK featurette—so if still want to see the film and you're not terribly concerned about the best possible picture quality or lossless audio, I'd skip the Blu-ray and wait for the movie to show up on Netflix Instant.