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Reviews
Frozen River (2008)
Baffling
A lot of people seem to like this film, so maybe I'm missing something, or maybe they find the characters more compelling than I do. But five minutes into it, my eyes began to roll from the laughable portrayal of characters and lifestyles obviously foreign to the writer, and direction that is surpassed daily by 12 year old you tubers. From the opening shot, an embarrassingly long pan of mostly a bathrobe, then a too-tight closeup of the actress doing an exercise from a community college drama class, to the ending, where we are to believe that everything is wonderful now that Dad's disappeared and Mom's in jail. Because now the 15 year old caretaker of his younger brother has a mentally and emotionally challenged woman and her baby to deal with, too. The filmmakers forgot to show any aspect of bonding between this new "family," or what dynamic had made this arrangement beneficial to any of them ,and the fact that the main character expressly told the young mother to buy a "single-wide" for them to live in, and the last shot is of a truck delivering half of a "double-wide, had me more worried than ever about the kids." Or I should say "kid" because the younger boy was as neglected by the film as he was by his mother, who worked in a Dollar store, but still couldn't manage to get the kid a single token gift for Xmas. Bleah.
The writer has an irrational fear of propane torches, and to set this up, has a shot of the young man applying the torch to a threaded pipe joint. Wearing welder's goggles. If this is such an important shot, couldn't the writer have at least talked to someone who had ever used a propane torch, to find out, oh, I don't know, maybe what they are used for? The character later uses it to accidentally set the trailer on fire, and later to threaten his gun totin' Mom, who has already shot the Dad in a domestic dispute. Bad move, it would seem.
The lead character feeds her kids popcorn and Tang for breakfast and dinner, but buys cigarettes and shoots at stuff when she's annoyed. She spends no time at all with her kids, but only works part time at the Dollar store. We know why she's broke, but we don't know what she does with the rest of her time, except make sad faces at herself in the bathroom mirror and record and re-record the message on her voice mail.
Apparently the business of smuggling illegal immigrants is so quick and easy, that I'm surprised more people don't do it. You just drive up to this trailer unannounced, and a guy comes out 5 seconds later with two people who get in your trunk, and he hands you 1200 bucks. Or, if he's out of people, you drive to a Go-Go joint, and the sceptical Russian thug finally walks around a corner (outside, in the frozen North, mind you) and comes out with two Chinese women who were just waiting for someone to show up, I guess.
But watch out, because the frozen river you've been driving back and forth across for the last few days is bound to be melting, now that it's night time, where in this world of suspended logic, it gets warmer closer to midnight.
Be prepared for long shots of non sequiters, like road signs with no useful information, lots of shots of the road in front of the car, stuff on the bathroom shelf, the inside of a bingo parlor with no meaningful relation to the story. Endless closeups of Melissa Leo's face, that have you wondering whether the director is her stalker, because she can't seem to stay very long on anything else when Leo is in the same scene.
Leo's character is a negligent parent, manages to be late for the part time job she depends on, is violent, bigoted and rude, except to the dickhead manager of the dollar store, whose abuses she has endless patience for.
There's nothing to like about her or the other lead, who for reasons no one can pretend to have understood, let someone take her baby away, so she hides outside their house and stares through the window at him. When she sees him in public, she walks up to the two women who have him, and stares at him from three feet away. But, using a rare Native American invisibility cloak, the women don't see her.
My general impression is that the writer has sympathy for people like the characters, but doesn't really know any. Which is fine, I guess, but it's a mistake to try to show others what their world is like.
Night Tide (1961)
An all-time favorite of mine
Don't get me wrong... I don't think this is a great achievement in film making.
I stumbled across this movie on late night TV, back in the early days of UHF, when, at 13 or 14, it was very exciting to me to have new channels that were so low budget that they showed things that, in the light of mainstream, 3 channel, VHF programming, seemed very much like they were being beamed in from another galaxy.
Through the lens of adolescent angst that I saw it through, this is a movie about unbearable loneliness, brilliantly captured by Dennis Hopper, whose only way out of his loneliness is through a beautiful woman from another world that he can't fully understand.
Like Kabuki theater on Darvon, he moves through the shadows of this overfiltered dreamworld of seaside 1960. The real monster is loneliness, and unlike most horror movies, the monster wins this one.
The setting, the off season seaside resort (and it could have been any, not just Venice Beach) was perfect, being there by oneself is possibly the loneliest experience one could have, hinting at a livelier, fun=filled world that, because of time, is unattainable.
It represents to me, maybe the first "indie" film I saw and recognized as one, "indie" in the original sense of a movie that was not made to be a box office hit, but because someone HAD to make a movie about something they felt strongly about, or had an artistic vision that had to be shared. Many of the earlier examples of these movies found their way onto UHF, because they were cheap to rent. But they got me hooked, and as soon as I could drive, sought out the art theaters in nearby towns that showed what was then called "underground" cinema, Kenneth Anger, John Waters (pre-flamingoes) I am Curious (Yellow and Blue.) These films are not as enchanting to me now, but then, none of them ever lived up to Night Tide for me.
For sentimental reasons, this has always been, and will always be, one of my very favorite movies.