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  1. #1
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    Feb 2007
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    The Snowman (stay away review!!)

    So I saw Michael Fassbender's new flick last night and I just wanted to warn everyone to STAY AWAY from this film. It is a mess with a confusing plot full of holes and truly bizarre storytelling.

    It is set in Norway and based on a book series by a Norwegian author. As a result I kept on wanting it to be a twisty and clever as Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sweden and Norway are sorta similar). Well, it was not. It had none of the charm or humor of the GWTDT... and if you are thinking, "Wait, there was no charm or humor in Dragon Tattoo?!?!" then I think you now understand how dour and depressing The Snowman is.

    The story makes no sense. Stuff happens and we have no idea why. Much of it is the movie intentionally giving us misdirection, which is a cheap trick use by films that are not clever enough to actually have their twisty tales move in a logical direction. When the big bad guy is revealed at the end, it carries no impact because we have not really been able to keep track of how he is connected to the other parts of the story throughout the tale.

    So, I was wondering how this confusing and meandering story got filmed so poorly and then I found out... it turns out the director says the whole production was rushed and when they got into edit they realized that they had forgotten to film about 10-15% of the script. Whaaat?!?!?! Are you kidding me?

    Another bizarre thing about this film is the casting. Val Kilmer has a small role in it. He looks just awful. His face is all puffy and it seems like he cannot really move his lips. Well, it turns out he has tongue cancer or something like that and apparently all his lines were dubbed. The first time he opened his mouth (a little bit) I thought it wasn't him because the words just did not sound right. I feel terrible for the guy as he is clearly suffering from some health problem, but this was just strange casting (he has a small role and I could barely tell you how he impacts the plot).

    There are a bunch of other strange casting decisions. Toby Jones is in it in a role that has barely 5 or 6 lines. JK Simmons has a part that isn't much bigger than when he used to play J Jonah Jamison in the early Spiderman films (before he won an Oscar and became a bit of a star). Chloe Sevingy has 1 scene as a woman on a farm who gets killed and then she shows up again for 1 scene as the identical twin of the dead woman but the identical twin never shows up again... what?!?!? I think they paid her for a full day of work and after killing her off they had a few more hours of her time left so they just threw her back into the film again as the identical twin. Yup, that is the kind of stuff that passes for logic in this movie.

    The film is a mess, a huge mess. In fact, I almost expect it to achieve some kind of cult status as one of those flicks that is so bad you need to see it to laugh at it. But, my advice to you is that even if you are still interested in seeing this $35 mil mistake (paltry budget for a film with some decent stars and a strong book pedigree) is to at least make sure you see it as a matinee... please waste as few dollars as possible on this wretch.

    --Jason "currently at 26% on Rotten Tomatoes... which is stunningly high considering Vox says it is the worst film of the year" Evans

    it is the most transcendently awful movie I expect to see in 2017, and this is the year I saw The Emoji Movie.
    Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
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    Oh, one more thing. I am sure we have all seen the marketing that plays off the notion that the killer is taunting the police.



    Except the killer doesn't leave hints or clues at all (other than building a snow man at some of the crime scenes). And at no point do the police have any way of figuring out who the next victim will be. There is no discernible pattern to the attacks except for the fact that the killer targets women who seem to be in troubled relationships. Well, that certainly narrows things down a lot!

    Also, the killer seems to do his crimes on nights when it is snowing... in Norway! It is not like we are talking about a crime spree connected to the snow in someplace where it rarely snows. We are talking about snow in Norway, a nation that gets snowfall roughly 99.9% of the time during the months of October - March. The film treats the snowfall revelation as if it actually matters. It is like saying the killer only attacks when it rains in Seattle or when it is sunny in Miami. Idiotic.

    -Jason "I'm starting to think watching this mess and dissecting all the stupid stuff in it is going to become a fun game... sigh" Evans
    Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    New Bern, NC unless it's a home football game then I'm grilling on Devil's Alley
    Did they ever just follow his snow tracks home?

    Sounds like the perfect setup for a Python skit.

    "Those aren't my footprints."
    "Yes they are, they lead right to this door."
    "No they aren't. Never left the house."
    "You still have snow on your shoes."
    "That's not snow."
    Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."

  4. #4
    It's a shame, it's a pretty good book series (I haven't actually gotten to this one yet, but I've heard it's very good). The author does have another book (not part of this series) turned film called Headhunters which I recommend.
    Demented and sad, but social, right?

  5. #5
    Just read the book instead. The Harry Hole novels are terrific but I've never thought they would translate especially well to film.

  6. #6
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    Feb 2007
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    Atlanta, GA
    Quote Originally Posted by Matches View Post
    Just read the book instead. The Harry Hole novels are terrific but I've never thought they would translate especially well to film.
    Hey you, this is a family joint.

  7. #7
    Shoot. Michael Fassbender is so handsome but ends up in too many stinker movies. Bummer.
    Nothing incites bodily violence quicker than a Duke fan turning in your direction and saying 'scoreboard.'

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
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    Manhattan
    Apparently the director has admitted that the shooting schedule was thrown out of whack due to financing issues. Rumor has it that 10 to 15 percent of the original screenplay wasn't shot during principal photography.

  9. #9
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    Feb 2007
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    Chesapeake, VA.
    Quote Originally Posted by Native View Post
    Apparently the director has admitted that the shooting schedule was thrown out of whack due to financing issues. Rumor has it that 10 to 15 percent of the original screenplay wasn't shot during principal photography.
    No offense, but Jason mentioned this in the OP.
    "We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust

  10. #10
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    Feb 2008
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    New Bern, NC unless it's a home football game then I'm grilling on Devil's Alley
    It banked a whopping 3.4M on its opening weekend.
    Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
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    Ashburn, VA
    Wouldn't spending a little more $$ in production to finish it properly and making a good movie instead of a terrible one* more than paid for itself many times over?

    * I haven't seen it, just reading this thread and other reviews
    A text without a context is a pretext.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by Native View Post
    Apparently the director has admitted that the shooting schedule was thrown out of whack due to financing issues. Rumor has it that 10 to 15 percent of the original screenplay wasn't shot during principal photography.
    Yup, I mentioned that in graph 4 of my first post in the thread. It is a pretty remarkable admission and comes from a director who is generally regarded as a good director for films like "Let the Right One In" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

    It appears most of you listened to me (and to every other critic around) as The Snowman only did $3.4 mil of boxoffice over the weekend, a terrible number. It got a D Cinemascore, which is just awful. A piece of me wonders if it is so bad that it will become a cult film with folks who like to watch it to laugh at it, but it is so dull and confusing I'm not sure it even rises to that level of suckitude.

    -Jason "I still can't believe the main character is named Harry Hole... that's like a bad SNL skit" Evans
    Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by snowdenscold View Post
    Wouldn't spending a little more $$ in production to finish it properly and making a good movie instead of a terrible one* more than paid for itself many times over?

    * I haven't seen it, just reading this thread and other reviews
    Well, a couple problems with that.

    1) Did the backers of the film have unlimited funds? Did the studio insist that the film not go a penny over budget? There simply may not have been the money to go back and shoot more scenes.

    2) By the time the director realized he was missing key elements, perhaps Fassbender's schedule or other actor schedules made it impossible to go back and shoot more stuff.

    3) There is no guarantee that shooting new material would have made the movie a winner. Sure, it may have made it better, but those extra parts may not have been the only thing wrong with the film. The premise didn't seem to work, the acting was largely flat and uninteresting, and lots of other stuff was wrong with this film. Adding 15% more plot might have saved the film, but if it had not then you just sunk more good money into a bad film. There are plenty of examples of reshoots not fixing a doomed film.

    Lastly, it is worth noting that this was just a $35 mil production. The financing came from Universal and a couple of their partners (Working Title and Perfect World Productions). These folks have bigger fish to fry than this middling production that was primarily done to appeal to a Northern European market. The reality is that these folks lost big bucks this year on The Mummy but have been reaping in the moolah from Despicable Me 3, Get Out, Split, and Fate of the Furious. Universal is mostly having a really good year (this will be Universal's second biggest year in their history, behind 2015 when they had Jurassic World, Furious 7, and Minions) and my bet is that they sunk $35 mil into this film and didn't care whether an extra $5 or $10 mil would make it better or not.

    -Jason "studios typically just write it off when a movie is bad... it takes a special project that is really worth a lot for them to bother with reshoots and the such" Evans
    Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?

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