Saturday was the night, but when I rocked up to Amazon, I realized the Jack Frost on there was the horror Jack Frost from a year earlier. At the time I didn't realize, I suppose, that there were actually two different movies, though I have certainly seen their different posters at different times in my life. Anyway, if you asked me, I definitely would not have told you that I thought Michael Keaton starred in this movie, whose poster would have been the one I saw on Amazon:
So no Michael Keaton Jack Frost for me.
Except then I realized: "I'm an adult. I don't have to only watch movies I can stream for free. If I need to pay a couple bucks to watch the Michael Keaton Jack Frost, I will."
And sure enough, it was available for rental on iTunes for $2.99.
So the movie, which I marginally liked, was a disappointment in the following way: It wasn't worse. I really expected the idea of a magic harmonica that breathed life into a snowman, when it was wearing the clothes of a boy's deceased father, and that father was the one who started inhabiting the body of this snowman, to be a lot more ridiculous. Within the parameters of what sounds like a pretty absurd setup, it's a pretty conventionally heartwarming story.
I didn't actually know about the magical harmonica beforehand, and that might point to the only sort of absurd part of the movie. Before he dies in a car accident during a blizzard -- spoiler alert -- Keaton's title character is the leader of a kind of honky tonk band, where they wear unironic bowler hats. It's the kind of music Bruce Willis was into for a while there. And apparently it did not seem as ridiculous in 1998 as it undoubtedly was. (That music has its roots in something good, but transformed into a very poor facsimile thereof.)
It's because he's so focused on his music career that Keaton can't be there for things like his son's big hockey game. You get the idea.
In fact, on its own terms, the movie is probably not sufficiently good to earn my slight recommendation, but I'll tell you why I'm giving it:
I really enjoyed the look and feel of the snowman.
"Look and feel" is a term we often use in my regular line of work for the usibility of a piece of software -- its "look" and its "feel." When a new version of something is released, someone might say "The look and feel won't be changing."
But it's appropriate in this case as well because with the practical effects used here, something really does have a "feel."
At first I thought the snowman might be digital. Jack Frost was a year after Starship Troopers, which I continue to hold up as the shining example of a film that defies its time period in terms of visual effects. Twenty-three years later, those arachnids still look good. Titanic was 1997 also.
A digital snowman would be a piece of cake compared to those two movies. But Jack Frost also didn't have the budget of those two movies, so it hardly seems like they'd be at the front of the queue for the best in digital animation.
I went so far as to google it, which of course revealed that the snowman was a creation of Jim Henson Creature Shop.
I love this for a couple reasons.
The first is that it really does excuse the mild affection I have for this movie, which is pretty out of sync with the film's 19% Rotten Tomatoes score. If you've got Jim Henson puppets in your movie, it means you are part of a smallish fraternity of films that share the DNA of Henson's more obviously wonderful creations. (Never mind that the execrable The Happytime Murders is also in that fraternity.)
The second is that it reminded me of something where I shouldn't have needed any reminding, especially since I rewatched Labyrinth during the aforementioned hotel trip with the projector. It reminded me that puppets can be capable of great expressiveness.
This snowman was designed in such a way that the individual parts of his face can move independently of each other, and that the puppeteers have to learn how to make these movements. There are four puppeteers credited to this snowman, and since puppeteers don't usually get much credit, let's name them here. Bruce Lanoil and Denise Cheshire are credited as in-suit performers, while Denise Cheshire Pearlman is listed as "head operator" -- which either means she operates Jack's head, or she is the head of all the operators. Interestingly, Denise Cheshire and Denise Cheshire Pearlman appear to be two different people as evidenced by their separate IMDB pages, though surely there is a relationship. Allan Trautman is also credited as "additional puppeteer."
Whatever the combination of techniques and talents, they really make this snowman come alive -- alive in a way that a dead digital creation rarely comes alive, and certainly not in 1998. It's one thing to use a computer to create an arachnid whose face you can't see, who has no personality, and a sinking cruise ship. An actual creature with a soul wouldn't have been up to digital's abilities at the time.
And Jack really is tactile. That's a word that gets thrown around all the time in the debate between practical effects and digital effects, but there's a reason for it, as it perfectly expresses the three-dimensional physicality of a character on screen -- the kind we also see throughout Labyrinth. I suppose there isn't really a "debate" on which would be better, if the possiblity existed to use either technique for the same amount of money, and achieve the same result. Every filmmaker whould use practical effects if he or she could. But practical effects just aren't ... well, practical.
But I'm glad they still have a place in the movies, either because those movies were long enough ago that digital was not yet viable, or because some movies today will repudiate digital in order to create something with a more definitive physical presence.
And the truth is, when that tactile, practial snowman moved its stick eyebrows, its coal eyes or its cork nose, I felt the emotion behind it.
And so yes, I did believe that a harmonica-playing Bruce Willis wannabe had, for a few magical weeks, returned to this earth in snow form.
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