As Cool as I Am

The story unfolds about a family living in suburbs of a major town in United States, having husband and wife and their daughter. Father being a lumberjack stays away from home for the majority of the time. He is from the old school and thinks that family is a bond which should remain intact at all times whatever the circumstances may be. The mother who works at a local advertising agency is often dressed up way too bold unlike a mother has to be dressed. The daughter is free bird who has a boy friend since her childhood and she remained focuses on him. During the time the father is at home everybody restricts their normal routine and stay close to him and once he leaves for his job they return to their normal lives. The mother who got married at an early age still thinks that she is a unmarried woman and likes to screwed around to her follow employee's, and she dressed up in a fashion that she is a teenager which she is not supposed to do. The daughter in the later part of the movie started changing her boy friend and started to screw around like her mother. The father one day caught the daughter while she was making love to his boy friend tries to hit her boy friend who in fact was a strong guy over powered the father and hit him. The daughter tries to console dad who slap her on her face and left back to work as an escape route. The mother found her college boy friend and ran away with him to Mexico. The daughter joins a café and started showing cooking lessons. Till now! It was about the movie and their role the actors played but in real life in Pakistan, it does not hold true as depicted in the movie. The bond of family is not so weak that if husband is working in some other city or he is working late it means that the wife should start acting like a prostitute and should be screwing and flirting around and the daughter is screwing entire class for that matter. Though the acting and setting was perfect and I gave this movie 9 out of 10.

This is at tops a TV movie designed for a Sunday afternoon when you have nothing better to do. It does stray along way from Pete Fromm's book which is considerably more intense and describes the falling apart of a family in greater detail than the film. The performances were OK, James Marsden and Claire Danes gave below par performances compared to their other work. Sarah Bolger carried the role of Lucy off nicely but for obvious reason didn't commit to the character 100%. For those interested it might be worth doing a search for a Matthew J. Clark short called 'Dry Rain' based on a short story by Pete Fromm.

If you do enjoy the film it is very much worth reading the book which goes into many of the implied topics in the film in greater detail.

Firstly, I need to say that I enjoyed this film, I did. It held my attention and I felt satisfied afterward. Yes, it was mildly predictable in places but not annoyingly so.

What did frustrate me though was the lack of depth. A couple of other reviewers mentioned this so I'm glad I'm not alone: There were so many issues that I thought were going to be explored further and just.... weren't. Even the ending, although mildly cathartic, left me with unanswered questions.

Still, taken at face value, the film was... nice.

Hmm... I'm realizing this review is a bit 'meah'; not really negative, not really positive, but that's a direct reflection of the film's content, so sorry!

As Cool as I Am isn't really a gripping film, and will likely be far away from my favorites of the year, but in terms of trying to revitalize the coming-of-age drama with a delightfully contemporary idea and script is succeeds solely on that merit. It concerns Lucy (Sarah Bolger), a well-mannered fourteen year old who has a lumberjack father Chuck (James Marsden) who is away for long periods of time due to work and her mother Lainee (Claire Danes), who might as well be her age thanks to her attitude and approach to reality. Lucy always had the idea that her family was "stable" in that they functioned like a normal family. However, as she gets older, she realizes her family is a "real" one, with problems and conflicts that are usually not instantly noticed by kids. This whole idea of "stable" and "real" families is discussed in the opening monologue, pretty much admitting the film will not be a narrow look at this common issue that is quickly growing.

That issue is having a child at a young age. Chuck and Lainee had Lucy when they were both seventeen, making them not much older than her in retrospect, leaving most of their decisions to be rather impulsive and quite questionable. For such a contemporary issue - having children and kids young and, often, out of wedlock - this one is scarcely brought up and thrown into public eye. Director Max Mayer, of the 2009 sleeper-hit Adam, brings a mature and focused look to the subject by allowing each character some expression and a moment when their personality comes out.

Lucy is already becoming a young woman, and with an unstable family life and an absent father, this leads her on a path she wouldn't normally take. She becomes more flirtatious, acts differently around her guy friends, and on several occasions almost consents to sex. This plot alone wages the question "are teens more likely to become rebellious if they do not have both parents playing a significant role in their life?" When her father returns home, and realizes that Lucy has, for one, driven the car unsupervised after her mother arrives at an interview, and has gone on to kiss several different boys, he becomes mad and very violent out of nowhere. That's his moment to shine; would his anger be so prominent and consuming if he had been home consistently? The only other main character is the mother, whose reckless behavior is almost as bad as her husband's absence. She becomes flirtatious at the office, even so far as to have sex with a co-worker not long after beginning to work there. After finding this out, Lucy can use this as bait to justify her actions rather than be awkwardly silent when he mother ridicules her for her behavior. The character's actions are one big, tangled cycle that only fuel and unintentionally elaborate on each others decisions.

As Cool as I Am asks a lot of questions and, in the end, quietly leaves the audience with deteriorating optimism that maybe Lucy will end up unsatisfied later in life, and at only fourteen, this idea likely hasn't crossed her mind. Writer Virginia Korus Spragg does a smooth job at developing the characters on the surface and subtly evoking commentary on the new generation of kids, many of whom likely to be raised by a more uncertain, rushed generation of people. I see another cycle coming along.

Starring: Claire Danes, James Marsden, and Sarah Bolger, and Jon Tenney. Directed by: Max Mayer.

"If memory is malleable then the future is too." Lucy is a sixteen year old girl who is too smart for her own good. She spends her free time learning how to cook and hanging out with her friend Kenny. Her mother (Danes) and father (Marsden) had her when they were young and not ready for that responsibility. Now with her dad gone all but 4 times a year and her mom acting like a kid herself Lucy is left to discover life for herself. This is a movie that again proves my point that a movie can be entertaining and worth watching involving great acting rather then special effects. This is a movie along the line of What Maisie Knew only involving an older child rather then a 6 year old. Parents that should not have been allowed to have children and a child who is more mature then the parents. You really root for Lucy the entire time and by the time the end come you feel extremely sorry for her as well as relief. That is a hard combination to achieve but that's what great writing and acting does. Overall, a great movie that is pretty depressing but I recommend this. I give it a B+.