Such a frustrating disappointment

Did you people see the same film I saw?

An action-packed slog

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Starts out with Robert Patrick as a struggling writer trying to crank out a novel his agent can sell--ends up becoming overly concerned with the woman living across the way from him whom he can hear getting beat up at night....but this just turns out to be the first of many mistaken impressions on Patrick's part. It turns out that this woman who's played by Teri Hatcher is an actress who like Patrick is also struggling to get her career up and running...as the two characters pursue success (and each other) they kind of become increasingly odd in their behavior. Patrick starts the movie seemingly meek and mild mannered and Hatcher seems to be rather commandeering when they first start interacting with one another....eventually this dynamic reverses, and it does so kind of abruptly---the idea i think was that in success, Patrick's character ends up becoming more and more dominant--there's a couple of references during the course of the movie directed at Patrick's character to "uncage the animal inside" which he seems to take to heart. Anyways in the blink of an eye--Patrick's novel after some adjusting is eventually released and successful enough that a studio wants to buy the movie rights and his agent negotiates it so that he writes the screenplay himself. Hatcher decides that she wants to be the leading actress in the screenplay based on the book (the book was inspired by her, so in essence she'd be playing herself or at least Patrick's lightly fictionalized version of her) This is where the movie falls off the tracks as Patrick almost immediately gets incredibly angry at this idea, and well things escalate from there to the point where things stop making sense. The ending kind of teases us with the idea that Patrick had been down this road before, there's a character who appears at the very beginning who appears again at the very end, and his reappearance made me wonder if he was real or imaginary, but it really doesn't matter because nothing that happens in those last 15-20 minutes fits with the stuff that happened in the first hour or so...except that that that reappearance of the character at the end does kind of suggest that this had all happened before (and presumably will happen again...so maybe it fits too well?) i'm not sure i can recommend this...there's a lot of overheated dialog, and a couple of sex scenes between Patrick and Hatcher that features plenty of nudity and that's all well and good--- I was with the movie the whole way, but it kind of lost me once Patrick started getting irrational and angry and while that may have been the point (The Cool Surface maybe referring to what we show people on the outside versus what's actually happening underneath???) I'm not sure it was one that was well made by the movie.

This almost worthless piece of tripe demonstrates what happens to good actors when they're subjected to mind-numbingly bad direction. The result is a film the performers have to walk around the rest of the careers feeling embarrassed about.There is one decent thing in The Cool Surface. Teri Hatcher goes topless and, yes, they are both real and spectacular. Outside of celebrity boob gazing, the only other use this thing could have is as an example to beginning film students of how not to tell a story, handle actors, film a scene or write dialog. The students would get an "A" for best efforts at detailing every last way this film sucks.The main character of this garbage is Jarvis Scott (Robert Patrick), a novelist in Los Angeles. And when the movie doesn't make a comment or an allusion about how "Los Angeles novelist" is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or Nazi Zionist, you know right away you're in for a bad experience. Naming the main character Jarvis and giving him the worst bangs that any man has sported since the late Roman Empire are also good signs of how crappy this film will be.Anyway, Jarvis behaves like a bi-polar basset hound, alternating between clingy neediness and seething indifference. He becomes obsessed with the actress who lives next door, Dani Payson (Teri Hatcher), who herself behaves like a bi-polar Donald Trump with better hair and great jugs. One second she's a reasonably nice, if somewhat distant, girlfriend. The next second she's a man-hungry vamp who gets off on being dominated and is driven to succeed at any cost. Robert Patrick and Teri Hatcher spend the entire movie snapping from one emotional extreme to the other, usually for no reason and always with nothing in between. There are points where it looks like Hatcher is trying to erase her own performance from her mind while she's still giving it. There's another stretch where Patrick adopts this weird tone to his voice, like he's trying to imitate somebody you don't know.Now, Patrick and Hatcher may not be the greatest thespians in the world, but they're proved over their careers to be perfectly capable performers with some measure of screen presence. Yet, watching them in The Cool Surface, you're amazed that they ever got another job that didn't involve sexually gratifying someone with a Garden Weasel. I mean, they couldn't have done worse if the only thing writer/director/idiot Erik Anjou did was jab them with a cattle prod in between scenes.I could go on about the vapid plot where Jarvis writes a book based on his relationship with Dani, it gets made into a movie where Dani gets the lead role, she starts screwing the director and then Jarvis shows up wearing an African tribal mask…but I think I'll spare you all that inanity. I will say, in fairness, that some of the cruddiness of the story may be from writer/director/idiot Anjou's attempt to meld what was really happening with nightmares and fantasies that were only in Jarvis' head. He may have been attempting that but if he was, it was so poorly conceived and so ineptly executed that it looks much more like Anjou just didn't know his ass from his elbow.I never thought I'd have to tell you to stay away from a movie that features Teri Hatcher's bare breasts. Well…that day has come, my friends, and it's a sad day for us all.

Robert Patrick is very hot in this film. Nice twists of plot but who really cares when you can view for eye candy. He is as always a superb actor, but baby, he sets the screen on fire in this one with his sexuality alone!

Tormented writer draws inspiration from the life of the girl-next-door for his next novel. But, as topless Teri Hatcher looks to be giving him the book his publisher has been begging for, the writer falls for her. The kind of film where anger can only be represented by a character punching a table top.