pabloretana

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The takeaway from Against the Ice is that not all CGI is bad – which doesn’t necessarily mean that some of it is good, only that some examples are comparatively worse than others. There is a scene in this movie that will remind you of The Revenant, except that the bear in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film is one of its most memorable aspects; as for the one in Against the Ice, let’s just say that I’ve seen more realistic bears in those Coca-Cola Christmas ads. Now, both scenes involve lots of computer generated imagery and a stuntman pretending to be a carnivoran mammal of the family Ursidae, so the difference between awesome and pathetic lies in the performance of the actor being attacked; like in pro wrestling, the encounter between Leo DiCaprio and the bear may not have been spontaneous, and its outcome may have been predetermined, but that doesn’t mean the actor didn’t take an actual beating, getting thrown around to and fro like a ragdoll by way of wires; moreover, all of his facial and body language is committed to selling the gravity of the situation, which in turn makes the bear, CGI or not, look like a million dollars. Meanwhile in Against the Ice, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau pretty much just lies there and takes it, bringing no urgency to what should be a life-and-death struggle. This scene is symptomatic of Against the Ice, which is no less a collection of clichés than The Revenant, but whereas the latter amounts to much more than the sum of its parts thanks to superb execution, the former is too conventional to ever transcend its chosen genre. Consider the way it tracks the passage of time beginning with “Day 1”, which is of course a logical starting point, but also a very obvious one; from there it skips all the way to “Day 26” – my question is, since apparently nothing of note happened in the first 25 days, why not just start with the 26th day and go from there? All things considered, no one will be surprised to learn that Ejnar Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) – on whose book (or, presumably, a translation of the same, seeing as how the Danish characters all speak English as a first language) the movie is based – and Iver Iverson (Joe Cole) “remained friends for life”, but don’t they always? Just like Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in the King’s Speech, or Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in Green Book. All movies “based on a true story” take extreme liberties with their source material, and I usually hate it when they do, but Against the Ice would have been considerably less trite if the makers had gone the opposite route with the characters’ relationship; after all, in the words of Mr. Burns following a similar but by no means as protracted ordeal, “once you've been through something like that with a person, you never want to see that person again.”

Three Months is such a sweet, touching little film that it makes me wish the script didn’t force the protagonist, Caleb, to ride around solo on a tandem bike. Sure, Caleb has an emotional attachment to the thing (it belonged to his dead father), it comes in handy to the plot now and then – in a ‘hey, I have an extra seat in case you need a lift’, or ‘oops sorry, there’s three of us and only two seats’ sort of way –, and it doesn’t even look like it’s that much harder than riding a normal bike – but still, the whole idea smacks of a desperate cry for attention; writer/director Jared Frieder’s way of making sure we know how quirky his main character is supposed to be. A movie can be, and this one otherwise is, original and spontaneous without making its main character look dumb or crazy, neither of which Caleb is; as a matter of fact, he more often than not comes across as a very intelligent young man – so much so, indeed, that it’s hard to justify his preferred mode of transportation. He certainly makes other questionable choices, but these stem more from a careful observation of human nature than from the plot’s requirements. Fortunately, Three Months is, more so than the destination, about the journey – even if the journey partly takes place on “a gay two-man bike” (by the way, the film contains a nicely understated sense of humor) –, which seemingly starts out as a **** version of Clerks, but will eventually distinguish itself through a knack for the unexpected. There is romance in it – and some of the most moving moments involve Caleb’s tentative, puppy-love relationship with the popcorn-loving Estha (the popcorn thing is also gimmicky, though nowhere near as much as the tandem) – but it’s not a romantic comedy; similarly, the action revolves around Caleb’s wait for a future revelation, but by the time the titular three months are up, the nature of the knowledge he has been expecting is rendered moot, superseded by the wisdom he has gained along the way.

Tessa goes to a movie house to watch a foreign film only to find out there are no subtitles. She complains to the projectionist and gets no answer (no surprise there since she couldn’t even be bothered to stand up from her seat). Skylar, the only other member of the audience, decides to get up from his and sit next to Tessa. “You watch. I'll translate”, he says. (Supposedly) three hours later (at the end of which his voice isn’t the least bit hoarse), she is bawling and clutching his hand (later on she will say that “I remember every word that he said to me”, which presumably means she has committed to memory the entire dialogue of a three-hour long French movie). It's like, how much more contrived could this meet cute be? And the answer is none. None more contrived. But then this is a very contrived movie; it opens with “a very bad car accident” involving Tessa, who is informed by a doctor that “You ruptured your heart due to trauma”. In other words, her heart literally broke. Awww. Well, what can you expect of a movie so unsubtle that it includes a scene of the leads kissing while fireworks go off in the sky above them? The film has an annoying habit of showing us know how many days before the accident everytime it flashbacks. This information is as arbitrary as it is useless – except for letting us know that there have elapsed, give or take, 80 days between Tessa’s and Skylar’s first encounter and the second. This second meeting, mind you, is pure happenstance, and yet she takes advantage of the opportunity to return Skylar’s cap which he had left at the theater. Soooo, are we meant to believe that she’s been carrying this particular item of headwear around with her everywhere she goes for almost three months? Contrived, I tells ya. It’s no spoiler to say that Skylar dies in the accidente because that’s the whole point of the movie – yes, this is yet another entry in the interminable list of films which, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, assume that even after death we devote most of our attention to unfinished business here on Earth, and a loved one left behind is more important to a ghost than the infinity it now inhabits. In this case, Skylar is spending his after hours “in the in-between. But he won't be there for long, a few weeks at most. And when he moves on... he's gone for good.” First of all, good to know time is still measured in weeks – and by extension in days, hours, etc. – in the great beyond. Second, Tessa is revealed these insights by Doris, who writes books on the afterlife; how she, never having been there, knows all this, is a matter left to speculation.