Frozen (Sundance Review)

It’s hard to watch someone fight for something that you know is going to turn out badly. In Frozen, which hits theaters in February, three mid-twentians (handsome boy, hot girlfriend, and equally handsome best friend) bribe their way on a ski lift.

Before I get too far, there’s something I have to ask you, readers. Does it cost $250 dollars to ride a ski lift? That’s what they pay. Even split three ways, that’s far more than I’d ever pay to fall down a mountain. So either skiing prices have gone up since my last time on the slopes (which was never) or this was some special mountain that was actually covered with pure, Columbian nosecandy. Either way, they overpaid.

Back to my original point. Watching someone push, shove, sneak, overpay, or flirt their way into danger is borderline infuriating. That’s exactly what happens to these three. For those who haven’t seen the trailer, heard about the plot from a friend, or couldn’t picture what could possibly go wrong on a ski lift, they get stuck. For a week.

Minimalist thrillers like Open Water, The Blair Witch Project, and Open Water 2: Adrift have gained enough popularity over the last few years to pave the way for flicks like Frozen. This second generation (see also: Buried) have larger budgets, bigger stars, and in this film’s case, more gruesome deaths. What’s great about these lost/stuck thrillers is how their premises alone automatically get you thinking of how you’d get out were you to find yourself in that situation. And you speak with such confidence! I’d tie my clothes together and make a rope. I’d repel across the wire. I’d just jump. But don’t think for a minute that the filmmakers didn’t think of all of these options before principle photography began. That wire is sharp! That ski lift is high! They cover them all. And did I mention that there are wolves? Mean ones!

Being stuck on a ski lift in the middle of winter with no one coming to save you is a terrifying concept by itself. The wolves aren’t necessary and in Frozen they distract from just how messed up the situation is. If you jump down, the wolves will eat you. At least it’s quick. But what about jumping down, hurting yourself, and then dying slowly in the snow? That’s messed up.

Overall, the film serves its purpose. You won’t ever look at ski lifts in the same way. The dialogue is just as sloppy, clichéd, and poorly delivered as you’d expect it to be but the frostbite scenes are even grosser than you imagined. You know why you want to see Frozen. So go see Frozen.

Directed by: Adam Green
Written by: Adam Green
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell, and Kevin Zegers.
U.S.A., 93 min.

Unseen DVD Blog-a-Thon: Fatal Attraction

Cinexcellence is hosting the Unseen DVD Blog-a-Thon.
Synopsis: pick up a DVD you normally wouldn't, watch it, write a little something.

For those of you who've never seen Fatal Attraction, this is the movie that teaches you that cheating on your spouse leads to the death of your child's pet. Every time. If you cheat, Mr. Tiddilywinks gets put in the wood chipper. Every time.

In short, Michael Douglas plays a businessman who has an affair with a co-worker, Glenn Close. Shortly afterward, she turns into a crazy ass stalker. She does all the usual stuff: nighttime phone calls, creepy mixtapes, destruction of property, etc. But then she goes above and beyond her stalker duties. Wrist slitting, (fake?) pregnancies, and Whitesnake hair. She's a real sicko.

Right away, the title made sense to me. Anyone who finds Glenn Close attractive deserves to die. Period. Her name is GLENN. That's not a sexy actress name, that's a computer programmer name. Also, being born after 1960 automatically disqualifies me from understanding why Michael Douglas ever had a career. The man looks like a unhappy California Raisin. I watched It Runs in the Family. The next day Future Scott called and said the pain wasn't going away.

There are just too many sex scenes in this movie. I'm no prude, but Ernest Does Dallas was sexier than Fatal Attraction. The last time I saw Glenn Close naked, she was crying on the floor of a shower. Now, that's either a scene description from The Big Chill or a personal story that I'll end now. Glenn Close nudity is a lot like gym class nudity. You know it's inevitable but you do everything you can to divert your eyes. Also, watching Douglas struggle to get his tighty-whiteys off wasn't pleasant either.

Disgusting sex scenes aside, the movie turned out to be pretty entertaining. There are some really tense scenes when you realize that Close isn't playing a monster, she's playing a woman with mental problems. It screams Play Misty for Me but still works as a sex thriller. The director, Adrian Lyne, knows about sex flicks. He's made Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Lolita, and my favorite Diane Lane film: Unfaithful.

All in all, if you're looking for a well-made film about something that could actually happen (the stalker part, not the sex with Glenn Close part) then you might want to pick this up. But from the looks of his filmography, Lyne has quite a few other movies you might want to watch instead. Just take a look at this successful director's progress.


He went from this:
To this:
His movies may all be pretty similar...but least his casting has improved.

Thanks to Cinexcellence for hosting the Unseen DVD Blog-a-thon. Without it, I might have never seen Fatal Attraction. And without seeing Fatal Attraction, I would have had to think of another reason to put up another Diane Lane picture.

Assault on Precinct 13

Assault on Precinct 13

Following the release of his first feature-length film, the comedic space film Dark Star (1974), low-budget superstar, John Carpenter, scraped together $100,000 to create his homage to Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959). The result was Assault on Precinct 13, a grim thriller which was shot in beautiful Panavision.

Not limiting his homage to just Rio Bravo, Carpenter also uses this opportunity to reference Howard Hawks films such as The Dawn Patrol (1930), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Red River (1948), as well as Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered (1947).

In Rio Bravo, John Wayne's character, John T. Chance (a pseudonym used by Carpenter for the film's editing), must defend a small jail from a violent gang of outlaws attempting to free a prisoner.

Assault on Precinct 13 features Austin Stoker as Ethan Bishop, a police officer who must defend a Los Angeles police station against a vengeful and well-armed gang.

Austin Stoker as Ethan Bishop (Top)

Laurie Zimmer as Leigh (Left)
Darwin Joston as Napoleon Wilson (Right)

When the gang attacks, Bishop finds himself surrounded by an interesting crew. Two female secretaries, Leigh, a badass-under-pressure (Laurie Zimmer) and Julie, a complaining stick-in-the-mud (Nancy Loomis). Two prisoners, Wells, a dangerous felon with a knack for finding bad luck (Tony Burton) and Napoleon Wilson, an anti-hero like no other who's headed for Death Row (Darwin Joston). This ragtag crew defends themselves against a group of determined killers armed with stolen weapons, all of which are equipped with silencers.

The film's conflict really begins when a father and his young daughter are introduced, driving through the dangerous Los Angeles neighborhood. Kathy, the young girl, is played by Kim Richards, a Disney actress best-known for her role as Tia in Escape to Witch Mountain (1975).

Kim Richards (left) from Disney's Escape to Witch Mountain

A run-in with the gang members sets the story in motion, leading to a chain of events, that no one could have expected. Carpenter states in an interview that "the movie is driven by random violence, chance, and fate." It this element of randomness and the gang's mysterious motivations that gives Assault its charisma.

The first time Assault was presented to the MPAA it earned an X rating. This was mostly due to the infamous "Ice Cream Sequence." The Ice Cream Sequence (posted below) was deemed too violent for U.S. audiences. They informed Carpenter that he would have to cut it out to receive an R. Not wanting to lose edit such an importance scene, he talked to his distributor about his problem. The distributor arrived at a simple solution: cut the scene out for the MPAA and release the film intact to theaters. The con worked. Theater-goers experienced the film with the Ice Cream Sequence intact.

[This clip contains major spoilers!]

[This clip contains major spoilers!]

A group of strangers with little in common are forced to band together to overcome unsurmountable odds. With the power and phone lines cut, the band of unlikely heroes carefully shoot off their limited rounds at the killers crawling through the windows. One by one, they keep coming. Parallels are often drawn between John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Carpenter is quoted as saying, "Everyone who's made a low-budget film has been influenced by [Night of the Living Dead] and if they say they weren't, they're lying."

In what Carpenter would call "one of the grimmest shooting experiences" of his life, the cast and crew shot for 24 hours straight, 8AM to 8AM. The crew moved quickly, shooting the principle photography in twenty days. Once principle photography was completed, they shot the finishing piece of the puzzle, the film's prologue which followed various members of the gang as they take a disturbingly graphic blood oath. This gang, whose members seem more like machines than human beings (in a good way), will not be stopped.

Anyone who has seen Assault remembers the remarkable score. Just like Dark Star, Halloween, and well...pretty much all of his films, the music was created by Carpenter, himself. Keyboards. Synthesizers.

Dun-nun-nun-nunun. Dun-nun-nun-nunun. Dun-nun-nun-nunun. Dun-nun-nun-nunun.

The director/writer/editor/composer based this memorable theme on the score from Dirty Harry and from the baseline of Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song."

Here's the film's theme. A gift. Give it a listen, put it on your iPod, press it onto wax, give it to a neighbor, whatever you want. That's the nice thing about a gift, you can do what you want with it. Feel free to re-gift it. I won't mind.

Assault on Precinct 13 - Main Theme (MP3)
Download (Rapidshare)
Download (zShare)

This is one of those films where all of the elements come together to create a film of such solidity that one would be hard-pressed to find many faults in either its form or content. The story works. The look works. The music works overtime. Plus, the British like it, so it's got to be good. When the film was released in America, critics deemed it too violent. But when Carpenter took it to England for a screening at the British Film Institute it was received extremely well. Carpenter affirms that the European support for his films is the reason his career took off. "In America, I'm a bum." If that's true, then he's a bum who made a kick-ass siege movie worthy of praise world-wide.