Snow Angels

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful," but my dear,
this movie is anything but delightful.

Usually in film, if you see a gun in the first act, you know it will go off in the third. In Snow Angels, after a deceptively innocent and yet subtly tense beginning as the faculty leader of a high school marching band tries to engage his group by asking them if they have a sledgehammer in their heart to use while playing “Sledgehammer,” two gunshots ring out in the distance and stop everyone cold. Since young teenage Arthur (Forbidden Kingdom’s Michael Angarano) and his adorable photography student girlfriend Lila (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby) are present and accounted for from the start, we know they’re safe. But the question then becomes who and what has occurred in their seemingly normal, small community.

Helping to establish the film’s ominous tone aside from the sound of the shots themselves, All the Real Girls director David Gordon Green and his incredibly talented collaborative cinematographer Tim Orr (Choke) present the film’s title amidst a black background. Then, working its way into the tale as a nearly cinematic equivalent of a chamber piece of music, they introduce us to the setting with a series of innocuous imagery depicting the town as though it could be anywhere in these United States as residents go about their daily lives and we meet its incredibly small cast of characters.

In doing so, we’re driven into the past as Snow Angels’ narrative moves several weeks earlier. Yet a morbid shadow of doom lurks over the setting’s inhabitants first with Arthur’s unhappily married parents (Jeanette Arnette and Griffin Dunne) until the film fixates on the characters we instinctively know will be present in the deadly conclusion. Unfortunately, the film avoids the classical rules of Shakespeare in foreshadowing the tragedy by naming the character(s) who will perish in the Bard’s plays by listing them in the title but from the moment we first glimpse Kate Beckinsale’s struggling blue collar mom, Annie, and her estranged, off-balance husband, Glenn (Sam Rockwell), we get the sense that they will be the ones marching towards an inevitable death. And if it’s not their own, we realize it will be someone nearest to them. While the film’s trailer leads us in one direction, our director (who adapted the screenplay from Stewart O’Nan’s novel for three years for another filmmaker before he ultimately helmed the project himself), takes us in quite another.

Another independent filmmaking exercise in gloomy dysfunction, the actors are all top-notch and it’s their individual work that keeps us watching, even though we’re never entirely convinced any of the lead characters are worth caring about which—while it normally wouldn’t be a problem as cinema always offers its fair share of flawed heroes and surprisingly humane villains—in this film, it makes the final impact seem less provocative than the director had hoped.

As the primary caregiver to her toddler daughter, Beckinsale’s Annie works as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant opposite Arthur, whom she used to babysit when he was younger (which leads to some odd, flirtatious conversations as we realize the extent of Arthur’s previous crush on his old babysitter). However, while Arthur soon begins to fall for the geeky yet earnest new girl in school, Lila, Annie’s romantic life is far more unconventional as we discover her meeting the husband of her best friend and coworker Barb (Amy Sedaris) in a sleazy motel for frequent illicit trysts as one of the many items on her to-do list alongside shopping for her elderly mother.

While extramarital affairs always seem to end badly, Annie’s seems destined to explode by way of the match in Snow Angels, who is introduced fairly early on when we become acquainted with Rockwell’s Glenn. A recovering alcoholic turned ultra-devout born-again Christian, the mentally unstable Glenn who is temporarily residing with his parents, repeatedly tries to get back together with his ex, from taking his daughter for the day to arriving at Annie’s unexpectedly. When he grows increasingly obsessive and also learns of her affair, we sense that it’s only a matter of time before all of their lives intersect in a devastating showdown yet I wasn’t expecting the utter level of hellishly disturbing depression the film had in store for the audience as it kicks us hard roughly one hour in before careening towards its inevitable yet nonetheless, overwhelmingly bleak ending that puts us down for the count.

Recently released on a DVD formatted so that viewers can choose to watch it in either its original theatrical widescreen version or the television-formatted fullscreen along with various language options, it's the type of film that should come complete with a pre-approved prescription for the strongest anti-depressant on the market since essentially it is Sophie’s Choice meets In the Bedroom. Breathtakingly photographed by Tim Orr, most notably in a final scene involving the marching band as snow begins to fall, the film is saved by its actors. This is especially due to the fearless nature of Sam Rockwell who is no stranger to taking on the most awful roles imaginable and offering a surprising level of humanity to each. Yet in the end-- other than mere pity for what had happened-- I couldn’t bring myself to become that emotionally involved with such a self-involved female protagonist as the one penned for the otherwise talented Beckinsale.

And ultimately, I thought that, like Margot at the Wedding and The Savages, it was yet another indulgent indie about characters with whom we not only do not want to spend any time with in reality, but are even less interested in seeing on film. Although it’s infinitely better than the misanthropic and overwhelmingly dejecting Blindness, watching both of these films in the same week, let alone the same month, damn near turned this reviewer off film… at least for a day or so.

Who’s ready for a comedy? Obviously director David Gordon Green and Tim Orr were as well-- which may explain their choice to follow up Snow Angels with Seth Rogen and James Franco’s stoner comedy, Pineapple Express. For, when it comes to dealing with Snow, to quote Bob Dylan, "everybody must get stoned," yet I think this one will send most reaching for Prozac.

The Final Season

Director: David M. Evans

Typically film critics rail against the perils of predictability and contrivances in contemporary cinema, yet a different attitude seems to be adopted by most when it comes to the All-American genre of underdog sports film that never seems to go out of style. As San Francisco Chronicle writer Mick La Salle wrote, citing the similarity of the genre’s offerings, “Funny thing about theses sports movies. They’re all the same. They’re never bad… they’re rarely exceptional. In fact, their appeal may be their sameness.”

The Final Season is such a case—a warmhearted, inspiring film that despite its modest production values, works the same way that chicken soup does when one has a cold, or mashed potatoes and/or macaroni and cheese do after an awful day—it’s a film that comforts, nourishes, goes down easily and doesn’t ask too much in return. Similar to the quintessential underdog he played in Rudy (one of the best sports films of the 90’s), Sean Astin pulls double duty as both producer and star in this true story, playing unlikely high school baseball coach Kent Stock, who, at the tender age of twenty-four after just two months of assisting the legendary Coach Van Scoyoc (Powers Boothe), finds himself taking over the Norway High School team.

After winning nineteen straight state championships under Van Scoyoc, the small Iowan community with a population of 586, that-- as the townspeople state-- grows baseball players similar to the crops on their farms, must come to terms with bureaucratic changes all made under the guise of “progress” that mandates that the Norway High School Tigers will be playing their final season before merging with the larger Madison High School.

As illustrated in the film, the vindictively villainous School Board President Harvey Makepeace (Marshall Bell) fires Coach Van Scoyoc out of petty spite and, in the hopes of sabotaging the team’s last competitive year, replaces the coach with the impossibly young, earnest Stock whose only experience heading up a team on his own was as a girl’s volleyball coach.

While the primary focus of The Final Season is on the development of the team and interplay between the Norway community, other subplots are introduced and, despite engaging us from the outset, are given little time to satisfactorily develop such as a terrific storyline about a rebellious Chicago teen played by Forbidden Kingdom star Michael Angarano whose widowed father (Tom Arnold) drops him off with his Norway grandparents in the hopes that the change of scenery will turn the young man around.

Angarano, who has some great scenes that beg for more exploration including a few confrontations with the film’s most valuable player, Powers Boothe, is shortchanged by the film. Yet these few time-wasting subplots aside including a likable turn by Rachael Leigh Cook as Stock’s love interest, The Final Season is further proof of director David M. Evans’s love of America’s favorite pastime following his terrific family classic The Sandlot, which he’d also penned.

Another solid and slightly above average entry into the overcrowded underdog sports genre, the film manages to further compel audiences with its timely storyline of small communities like Norway becoming ghost-towns when economic and political issues force them to close their schools, leading to devastating effects as businesses follow suit, which is something that seems to be hitting us yet again in the wake of our struggling economy.

The Forbidden Kingdom

Director: Rob Minkoff

In Michael Mann’s Heat, audiences felt their breaths catch waiting for Al Pacino and Robert De Niro to converse together onscreen in the diner, each sizing the other man up in a way that feels nearly Shakespearean. In the movies of Nora Ephron, we felt a similar thrill when Tom Hanks fell in love with Meg Ryan and the two began their happily ever after in the sunny, flower-filled Central Park conclusion of You’ve Got Mail. And in the first onscreen pairing of legendary action stars Jet Li and Jackie Chan for director Rob Minkoff’s The Forbidden Kingdom, as soon as Chan stumbles into the same scene as Li and utters, “Do you come here often?” the last thing I wanted for the men was the two to chat or fall in love. Instead, like nearly every other audience member and undoubtedly Chan and Li themselves, I wanted to see them fight. And fight they do in this uneven but gorgeous spectacle before their characters end up on the same side in helping a modern day South Boston teen who, via a pawnshop and a magical Bo Staff that’s propelled him back in time to ancient China, return the staff to its rightful owner, the Monkey King (Li in a second role).

Beginning as a near homage to Back to the Future, the movie opens with Kung Fu movie obsessed Jason (Shia LaBeouf look-alike Michael Angarano) being forced to aid in a robbery by a band of dangerous bullies that goes wrong and hurls him into the past where he soon meets Chan’s Drunken Master inspired Lu Yan, a perpetually wine-chugging fighter specializing in Drunken Fist which he explains is the “secret Kung Fu of the south.” To restore the order of the land, Jason and Yan decide to bring the Bo Staff back to the Monkey King, who the evil Jade War Lord (Collin Chou) has frozen in stone for roughly five hundred years “give or take a few decades,” and on their peril filled journey to the Five Elements Mountain, they find their team increasing with the addition of a beautiful vengeance seeking orphan Golden Sparrow (Yifei Liu) along with the monk Lan Cai He (Jet Li). The characters and indeed plot from Young Guns screenwriter John Fusco (who is currently writing the questionable new version of Seven Samurai), were derived mostly from “Chinese mythology and adventure pulps” as well from the “Chinese epic story Journey to the West [which is] one of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature,” according to IMDb.

When the battles with an evil witch with stark white hair and other dangerous allies of the War Lord become far more treacherous, Back to the Future morphs into The Karate Kid as Yan takes it upon himself to teach Jason how to fight. The introduction of this element not only provides the characters with more plot from scripter Fusco who went through, as IMDb reports five rewrites (some during the film’s shoot) but also gives the film’s producer and fight choreographer the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping (Crouching Tiger, The Matrix trilogy, Kill Bill 1 & 2) a chance to style some of the most thrilling and high flying fight scenes we’ve seen in years which, even when the film becomes self-consciously cheesy, are worth the price of admission alone.

Although it’s hard to fault a film with this much sheer entertainment value for its inability to sit side by side with works like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to which, I believe most of the audience was hoping the first collaboration of Li and Chan would compare, for fans of the actors, especially my personal favorite-- the hilarious and charismatic Chan, it’s definitely a treat. And hopefully it’s also one that will lead to even more pairings and possibly a grander cinematic approach, aside from the film's major standout that comes in the form of the jaw-dropping, majestic cinematography by Oscar winning Peter Pau (Crouching Tiger). However, until we get there, The Forbidden Kingdom is a great place to start.