Word: frozenly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Your heart sinks when you see the grim and unwelcoming opening shots of Frozen River, a first film by writer-director Courtney Hunt, shot digitally and featuring a cast that is off the thermometer when it comes to name recognition. More indie earnestness and uplift, you guess - the kind of picture only Sundance could possibly love. (And Sundance did love it; it won the 2008 Grand Jury Prize for best drama...
...miracles do happen. And Frozen River is one of them. That's largely - but not entirely - because Ray is played by Melissa Leo, who's at least a little bit known for her television appearances on Homicide: Life on the Streets. She contrives to look as weather-beaten as her front door and to act tough-minded without being closed-minded. She'd do anything to give her two kids a better, or at least a more hopeful, life. That, as it happens, includes smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada across the eponymous river...
Possibly the best thing about Frozen River is that the mechanics of its busy plot do not intrude awkwardly on the portrait it offers of harsh, pinched lives. There's an easy reciprocity between Ray's struggles to evade the law and her attempts, say, to give her sons some sort of Christmas - a spindly tree, a present or two beneath...
...feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention...
Instead, I know the specific number I ate because I am keeping a food diary. I write down everything I consume, with great detail. I had a single packet of ketchup with my eggs the other morning and 4 oz. (113 g) of green-tea-flavored frozen yogurt with my daughter two days before that. I started the diary because I wanted to test the striking new results of a paper published in the August issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Scientists at several clinical-research centers in the U.S. found that dieters who kept a food diary lost...