Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Unknownian Positives: The acting was very good. The locations feel real to the story. It does draw your interest, if not just for the performances.Negatives: Terribly photographed, to the point of being dizzy from the shaky cam operator, that must have been hired in the parking lot of a Wal*Mart, somewhere, USA.Terribly directed. You have a waitress mom separated from her husband who works with one of her best friends, whose husband she is sleeping with. Even after the cat is out of the bag, the adulterer is staying at the waitress mom's house, and her friend and the mom are either in scenes where they hate each other, or love each other. I think the friendship may have been over at that point....Ya think?? The mom's daughter goes missing because mom falls asleep on the couch when she is supposed to be attending to her daughter. Instead of combing the woods, the distraught mom is sitting in her house with a Police woman, while the entire town is out looking for her daughter. So dumb, I almost threw something at the screen. What physically fit, young loving mom wouldn't be out there looking for her child? That is just two examples of the illogical path this film goes down, unfortunately there are many more of them. There is no logic at all to many of the well acted scenes. That's what this movie is: A depressing well acted stupid movie, that could have worked, if the director would have read the novel objectively, before he wrote this mess of a script.Bottom line: If you like the actors, enjoy depressing films with few likable characters, and you want to see them do really nice scenes that make no sense.......Watch this movie, however, don't expect any satisfaction from the ending.

daveydyall This movie seems like the kind of thing someone would write who doesn't have a clear picture of where they want to go with things. Predictably it never arrives. The amount of raving reviews I read on IMDb is really stunning, to the degree that I seriously paused to wonder if the director or writer hasn't payed off a few of his friends to come on here and pump up his dud. In truth, the various loosely associated story lines never really coalesce. There are characters with mildly interesting personalities all over, but there are too many and nobody ever comes to the fore and carries things. The result is a continuous sense of anticipation that slowly settles into the awareness that time has run out for substance, though this comes too late for us to turn it off with time to watch something better before nodding off for the night. The most promising character, and certainly the one we want to like most (the boy), never seems to have more than an observer role in the events on display throughout the film, and so our sympathy for him is never channeled into any direction of note. The "bad guy" crazy husband is absolutely unbelievable as a character, and is made more ridiculous by the caricature of religiosity which he is given. The director must have some personal ax to grind in that respect, but whatever it is it isn't effective. The movie literally starts where it ends, with the bulk of it being a flashback, but this is actually quite apropos of the meaningless lost-in-the-woods wandering sense of the whole piece. I like a good art film. This, friends, isn't even close. Don't waste your time. Seriously. My only guess for an explanation of the raving reviews scattered amid the much more sensible panning might be that people who have watched something else seem to have written about it here by mistake.

tieman64 David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels" stars Michael Angarano as Arthur, a middle class teenager who is still infatuated with Annie (Kate Beckinsale), the young, beautiful, lower class woman who was once also his babysitter. The film traces Arthur's growing disillusionment with Annie, who reveals herself to be caught in a rut, juggling numerous domestic problems and always at odds with her ex boyfriend, played by Sam Rockwell. Mirrored to the disintegration of Arthur's idealised ardour for Annie is the blossoming of his love for a girl called Lila (played by Olivia Thirlby). Gradually Lila supplants Annie entirely, resulting in Annie's gruesome, violent ejection from Arthur's life. Typical of independent films which pretend to be about the poor, downtrodden or impoverished, the film ends in murder. It's a tragedy, you see.If the film is wholly predictable, and fails to locate its characters' plights within any wider, social context, "Snow Angels" nevertheless possesses some fine acting by both Beckinsale and the always reliable Sam Rockwell. Like most films of its ilk, it is condescending toward a certain socio-economic class and grimly deterministic to the point of parody ("You poor! You suffer!"), but like Green's "All the Real Girls" and "The Sitter", it is also ultimately saved by its overriding message of responsibility. Green's no moralist, but these two films nevertheless advocate simple virtues: "do undo others as you'd have them do unto you", "forgive" and "always be responsible". If not, your daughter drowns in a lake and your ex boyfriend shoots you. This is class consciousness as Old Testament god. As vengeful - and justified - adjudicator. Incidentally, American independent cinema of the 1990s often featured wealthy and middle class families bemoaning their dreary, suburban lives, before their watered down Greek tragedy plots climaxed with bloodshed, typically with offspring or spouses committing suicide, murder, dying or overdosing. Since 1997 it's been the same story, only now these indies focus on lower class or "white trash" characters, watching as they struggle to make ends meet before some violent climax. This trend started with films like "George Washington", "Kids" and "Gummo", and now seems to be fizzling to a conclusion. In most of these cases, these films (and their "mumblecore" and "shotgun toting rednecks" offshoots) are all designed around their budgets: how to make cheap, dramatic films which take place in environments sufficiently alien to affluent white audiences and appealing to left leaning American critics. "Alternative film" has now become as formulaic as the stuff it pretends not to be, and ultimately serves the same purpose as such reality TV shows as "Wife Swap" or "How Clean Is Your House", the horrified bourgeois gazing at the undisciplined classes, the films fetishizing poor or hick cultures, their cameras dwelling on rust, junk, derelict vehicles, poor kids, catatonic women, grime, poverty and destitution. Every year, Sundance serves up the same freak show.But no attempt is ever made to explore the worlds or social context (or causes) of these poor characters. This is British "kitchen sink" or Italian neorealism stripped of everything but the aesthetics of grime. Critics bought this when David Gordon Green's grungy "George Washington" was released, but time has revealed the entire genre to be vapid. This is grime as an aesthetic choice and plot as nothing but a skeleton upon which to hang the filth. 7.9/10 – Worth one viewing, for Rockwell, Beckinsdale and some good ambiance.

lewiskendell "It's easy for...for us to block out the things that upset us. That's what I do. That's what most people do. But it's important that you feel through this." Hmmm. Ah...well. Where to begin with this one?I had high hopes for Snow Angels. I'm a fan of Sam Rockwell, Olivia Thirlby, and Kate Beckinsale, and was looking forward to seeing them all in an indie drama that seemed promising from all the reviews I've read. Needless to say, my expectations were not met.Snow Angels had an odd way of becoming less interesting and more muddled as it went along. It's like the writer became less certain of what he wanted to do and the story's message as the movie progressed. The beginning was promising, but by the the time the film meandered to its close, I was thoroughly confused about what the point was of all the interconnected characters and their actions.I quite enjoy "different" movies, as a rule, but Snow Angels did little for me. None of the performances were noteworthy enough to overcome a story that seemed to lack a central theme after it reaches an emotional highpoint near the middle of the movie. This one left me scratching my head, and not in a good way.