I am not any kind of an artist, I’m sorry to say, though like everyone I hold onto a fantasy that I might someday become one. Were I an artist, in whatever medium, I would work imagistically, because it’s the image that I prize. I am increasingly bored and uninterested in plot. What I care about, in movies and novels, is the images that artists create, the set pieces, the mise en scene. It’s part of why I love Terrence Malick, why BladeRunner 2049 works for me despite a so-so story, why I put up with Drive’s pretension.



It’s for this reason that I come to sing the (very qualified) praises of Cool As Ice, the 1991 movie that served as both the high water mark of Vanilla Ice’s career and as its coda. I know that overthought appreciations of bad movies are a dime a dozen on the internet, so I’ll spare you the usual so-bad-it’s-good cliches. I want to focus instead on one aspect of the film: the cinematography. There’s something special here, and there’s a reason for it.

I was bewildered and ecstatic when I learned that the film was in fact shot by Janusz Kamiński, who would go on to lens Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and dozens of other famous films. It confirmed what I’ve long felt - that despite its inherent and existential ridiculousness, Cool as Ice looks amazing. There are more interesting shots in this 90 minutes of nothing than in many film careers.

Part of this stems from one particular set. A central plot point (one of like three plot points) has our hero shacking up with two weird elderly tinkerers, whose home is like if you built a house only out of stuff you bought at an art museum gift shop. One of Ice’s homeboys is having trouble with his motorcycle and the tinkerers are going to fix it. (The homeboys and homegirl are both the best part of the movie and characters who have literally nothing to do for the entire runtime.) So there are several vignettes where it’s just Ice and his friends passing time in this wild house, and it leads to some truly evocative images. This aspect of the screenplay is inexplicable and yet gives the movie its only real novel element, aside from the inherent novelty in the character of Vanilla Ice, a creature so inherently self-parodic it feels like a glitch in the Matrix.

None of this makes Cool as Ice good. But visually, it is legitimately well shot and full of striking visuals, and that’s more than half the battle. I mean, if you’re going to make a movie about one of the briefest flashes of artistic relevance we’ve ever seen, why not make it gorgeous to look at?