What is cool 1992: Movies

Cool Movie Couple
Both are unpredictably, yet undeniably, sexy. Sarah Jessica Parker: crackerjack district attorney on TV's Equal Justice, Steve Martin's dizzy temptress in L.A. Story, the thinking man's sex symbol. Nicolas Cage: charmingly devoted husband in Raising Arizona, actually ate a real cockroach in Vampire's Kiss, dangerous, but dangerously sad-eyed.

They'll add a few degrees to the month of August, when they come together as two waylaid lovers in the romantic comedy Honeymoon in Vegas. The plot is goofy: Boy meets girl. Boy takes girl to Vegas for quickie wedding. Boy loses girl in poker game. But their chemistry is powerful. He's a wimp. She's cocksure. Arm in arm, they upstage the countless Elvis impersonators that director Andrew Bergman (The Freshman) uses as the movie's window dressing. And that takes a hunk of burning love.
— Jess Cagle

Cool Movie Trailer
The voice is ominous. ''In this city...'' it intones over images of pretty, red-haired Allison (Bridget Fonda) taking out an ad for a roommate, ''on this street, in this apartment,'' the voice continues as Allison meets the plain Hedra (Jennifer Jason Leigh), ''an ad for a roommate brought a stranger into Allison's life. Someone who shares, someone who cares.'' (Hedra, it turns out, wants Allison all to herself.) ''Someone who borrows, someone who steals.'' (Hedra climbs into bed with Allison's boyfriend.) ''Someone who would kill to be her.'' (Hedra threatens Allison with various weapons.) ''How do you lock the terror out when you've already invited it in?'' the voice asks. , ''Single White Female. Living with a roommate can be murder.''
— Anne Thompson

Cool Seduction Scene
That four-alarm explosion in the opening sequence of Lethal Weapon 3 is a mere campfire compared with the sparks that fly when Lorna Cole and Martin Riggs (Rene Russo and Mel Gibson) start comparing scar tissue. The sexual tension mounts as the two take turns peeling back denim to display old bullet wounds in a competitive peekaboo. Refusal to acknowledge Riggs' pièce de résistance — a scar that leaves him stripped down to his tight, black BVDs — leads to a skirmish, which leads to a long, hard kiss. But Cole is still determined to come out on top. So she uses her martial artistry to put Riggs in his place: beneath her in a sexy tangle on the hard, wooden floor. Ka-BOOM.
— Melina Gerosa

Cool Film Veteran
Mary Wickes began her acting career as a nurse in 1942's Now, Voyager. She learned all about playing nuns in '66's The Trouble with Angels. And all about sleuthing as the cranky housekeeper in Father Dowling Mysteries. Now, in Sister Act, the 75-year-old actress gets all the best lines as the tough habit-ué who longs for her rustic convent with no hot water (''Now those were nuns,'' she says). The movie's a hit, but Wickes still voices the character actor's lament: ''I just wish Mary Lazarus had had a few more scenes.'' Hail, Mary.
— Jess Cagle

Cool Rebirth
At last we know why Laura Palmer was wrapped in plastic when she washed up on the shores of Twin Peaks two and a half years ago-to keep her fresh, of course. It worked: This August Laura returns, alive if unwell, in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch's R-rated, 2-hour-14-minute prequel to the strictly PG-13 TV series. Which is good news for Sheryl Lee: Originally hired for just four days of playing dead in the Peaks pilot, the 25-year-old actress has vaulted to a starring role in the movie, which details Laura's nightmare wanderings through Northwest passages of sex, drugs, and molestation in the last week of her life. ''Because it's a film, we can take it a lot further,'' says Lee, who is currently starring in Broadway's Salome opposite Al Pacino. ''For Laura to go through all the things that you only heard about on TV was very interesting. People don't take the path Laura took unless they're in great pain. So for me, the film wasn't necessarily about defending her — it was about showing that every one of us has the potential to walk on the wild side.'' Lee says another sequel is possible, but Laura's life-after-death story may finally have reached a uniquely Lynchian happy ending: In the film, it is said, Laura doesn't just die — she goes to heaven.
— Mark Harris

Cool Director
Tim Burton has done what few mortals have: He has bent Hollywood to his will. Recognizing the hipness and huge popularity of his work, Warner Bros. gave the 33-year-old director a free hand and a $55 million budget to make Batman Returns, the sequel to the 1989 megahit, any which way his darkly witty imagination took him. After all, the studio sages figured, Burton directed Batman, which brought in almost $1 billion worldwide — over half of that from merchandising. What's not to like?

Burton was a hired gun on Batman, directing Michael Keaton as the Great Caped One from a script developed by producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters. But on Batman Returns (again with Keaton), he was top gun, overseeing eight script revisions and inventing many of the characters, sets, and costumes himself. Not that the young director's own costume is particularly dramatic: He still favors the art-student look of grungy black clothes, long bedraggled hair, what-the-heck affability. ''Two years ago I could not return people's phone calls and I was just crazy, wacky Tim,'' he says. ''Now if I don't return people's calls I'm an a--hole. I'm still the same socially inept person I was two years ago. But it doesn't matter anymore.''

In fact, Burton's awkward outsider's response to the world, born of his childhood as a lonely, artistic kid in Burbank, Calif. (his father worked for the parks department; his mother owns a gift shop), has given most of his movies their tone of surreal humor. In Edward Scissorhands (1990), Burton's most personal movie, a suburban boy with hedge clippers for hands embodies all the gawkiness and isolation of adolescence. And suburbia was also the setting for the live-action short Frankenweenie (1984), a subversive retelling of the Frankenstein story, in which a boy brings his dead bullterrier back to life after the pet has been hit by a car.

On the strength of Frankenweenie, Burton was hired to direct Pee-wee Herman in Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), which was made for less than $7 million and grossed more than $40 million. He followed that with the haunted-house comedy Beetlejuice (1988), starring Keaton, which returned an even bigger payoff of $80 million.

Now Hollywood's most unprepossessing hip director awaits the payoff of Batman Returns — a sequel he didn't think he wanted to do at first. Burton says he feels closer to his second Batman baby than he does to his first. And he's particularly happy with the addition of Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), a secretary who flirts with Bruce Wayne by day and a leather-clad dominatrix who clashes with Batman by night.

''It just sort of feels like a pretty normal relationship to me,'' Burton says, waving his arms like windshield wipers. Himself married to German-born artist Lena Gieseke, he sees in Batman and Catwoman an accurate depiction of relations between the sexes. ''People kind of connecting, not connecting...in synch, not in synch...Probably much like you have at home.'' He then breaks into laughter that's like the cackling of a gnome.
— Trip Gabriel

Cool Movie List
Cool Minions
The flock of killer penguins in Batman Returns.

Cool Shades
Goldie Hawn's secondhand pink plastic sunglasses in Housesitter.

Cool Credits
The explosion outtake at the bitter end of Lethal Weapon 3's closing credits.

Cool Performance
Brendan Fraser's Cro-Magnon leftover in Encino Man (modeled on Chauncey Gardiner in Being There).

Cool Catch
Geena Davis doing the splits to snag a pop fly in A League of Their Own.

Cool Title
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.