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04:23 AM :: Cool as Ice.
Last night we attended the first of six shows in the Neo-Futurists' sumemr series, It Came From The Neo-Futurarium. The concept is simple: each night, a group of actors reads through the transcript of a long-forgotten (or best-forgotten) movie. In the past they've done Up The Creek, The Jazz Singer (the Neil Diamond version), The Care Bears Movie, and a large number of long-forgotten foreign titles.
Last night's premiere show was the Vanilla Ice "film" Cool As Ice, and the show was packed, thanks to the event being mentioned in this week's Chicago Reader and Onion. (Local A/V Club author Nathan Rabin was spotted in the crowd; he was the one wearing the "Hipster D-Bag" T-shirt, which is of course an Onion product.)
The crowd got to see an amazing production. The entire cast stepped up to the challenge of acting in a terrible hip-hop movie which contained: a motorcycle vs. horse race; a house decorated in a style that was described as both "crazy" and "wack;" a stupid subplot involving gangsters tracking down the heroine's family, because they were in the witness protection program; and a cameo appearance by Naomi Campbell (affected by a guy holding up a large sign that said "I AM NAOMI CAMPBELL").
The director, Dina Connolly, had the part of "Johnny" (aka Mr. Ice) down cold. (Ha!) In an interview with Connolla and Ice over at Decider.com, Mr. Ice advised Dina to just lip-sync the rapping so she wouldn't have to stress out over it, but Dina had all of the raps down pat. And her dance moves were impeccable. It really did feel like we were in a rap dance club from the early 1990s!
The whole cast was impressive. Rachel Claff offered a master class in facial expressions of a stereotypical "good girl falling in love with bad boy" role. Film fest co-curator Bilal Dardai did more acting with a big floppy hat pulled over his head than pretty much the whole cast of the original film version of Cool As Ice. (and he can bust some INCREDIBLE moves!) Khanisha Foster showed admirable range in switching between characters (difficult to do when you're playing both a cool-as-ice rapper and a backwoods granny type). Phil Ridarelli got more laughs with a simple curtain than Vanilla Ice got when he was rapping with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which should TOTALLY be on the film list for next year, if only to feature a cameo by Connolly). Ryan Walters got plenty of laughs with just the juxtaposition of the two roles he had to play (stuck-up loser boyfriend, and excitable kid brother). And Curtis Williams offered some inspired musical accompaniment for the whole play. And did a killer Naomi Campbell imitation.
In short, Cool As Ice was a huge success, and the film fest is off to a wonderful start. The first show has raised the bar very high for the rest of the series, and it's going to be very exciting to see how the rest of the shows stack up.
