Rent Stay Cool (2009)

Stay Cool review by Alyse Garner - Cinema Paradiso

A successful author returns to his hometown to give a commencement speech to students about to graduate from the high school he attended as a kid. However his trip home is fraught with sexual and romantic complications, both of the past and present.

Starring Winona Rider and Hilary Duff, Stay Cool is essentially a romantic comedy, loosely tethered around the theme of age and growing up. It is a fairly standard rom-com when it comes right down to it, with all the expected jokes, ‘twists’ and clichés; with nothing definable about it that makes it stand above it’s peers, even the light comedy flirting of Hilary Duff is barely worth the ticket price.

The occasional humorous moment crops up when lead character Henry (Mark Polish) finds himself staying back at his parent’s house and furthermore, sleeping in his old bedroom, that hasn’t changed since about 1988. He proceeds to borrow his father’s car and be embarrassed by how un-cool his parents are; it’s all very tame and obvious though.

And that essentially sums the film up in its entirety, there is very little else to it at all.

It’s a shame really, when the writing and directing twin brother duo Mark and Michael Polish have made a couple of interesting and charming movies over the years; fairer representations of their talents can be seen in Twin Peaks Idaho (1999) and the more recent Astronaut Farmer (2006).