Word: townes
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...Snow Angels is built on the same yearnings and desperation, the same threat of eventual violence; but, happily, it has an emotional density that trumps its familiarity. Winter is approaching in a small town where the high school band teacher (a brief role played with curt comic brio by Tom Noonan) shouts challenges at the students: "Do you have a sledgehammer in your heart? Are you ready to be my sledgehammer?" The hammers of hell beat in the hearts of these frosty folk; for Snow Angels, like a bunch of other films set in cold climates (The Ice Storm...
...Here's the town's topography of restlessness. Annie (Kate Beckinsale) has split from her husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell) after a stormy marriage that spawned four-year-old Tara (Grace Hudson) and a judge's ruling of Glenn's spousal abuse. She works in a diner with Barb (Amy Sedaris) and is having an affair with Barb's husband Nate (Nicky Katt). Also at the diner is teenage Arthur (Michael Angarano), whose parents have split and who has had a crush on Annie since she was his baby sitter. Most of the denizens of this working-class town are searching...
...Roosevelt's "Yesterday is history, tomorrow's a mystery, today's a gift. That's why they call it the present" - as eternal wisdom. The men in Snow Angels have the appetites of the philanderers they see in movies but not the suave patter; a cheating husband in this town is unprepared for the inevitable lies or evasions he'll need when his wife finds out. When confronted with his indiscretions, Nate can only sputter, "Wh- why would I do that?" or the even more pathetic "Huh?" It's as if, in real life, the screenwriters are always on strike...
...keep you watching. Rockwell mostly plays down the spiraling anxiety of his character (though it would be nice if some movie, any movie, had a devout Christian who was not a psycho killer). Beckinsale, the dark lady of the Underworld films, does her sharpest work yet as the town beauty who's spoiling from abuse and ill use. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life taking care of people," Annie says. "I want to take care of myself." After a decade or two of tangling with weak or dangerous men, she has had it with married...
People tell themselves stories to survive, and politicians probably more than most. They weave mythologies to keep them going in the face of ridiculous conditions: sleepless weeks of unending town hall meetings, airplane flights, conference calls and attacks on their character, not to mention the microscopic glare of the carnivorous press always predicting their coming demise. For Huckabee, the tale that keeps him going has its roots before puberty, in that student council election. He still sees himself as he was then, the outsider with the skill and determination to out-hustle the world's popular kids...