JACK FROST (1998) ** This film coulda been a contendah...for worst film in the history of mankind. I mean, it's all there-pretentious and stupid plot, objectionable casting, bad weather, aspirations to levels so far beyond its grasp as to be ludicrous. I'm not entirely sure why it didn't work, by which I mean to say I don't have any idea how it could have worked at all. I mean, Michael Keaton, with a way worse dye-job (but not as stringy) as Kelly Preston (have you ever seen an actress more hopelessly ineffective in every situation?)...how do you feel any sympathy for that? And then the kid actors aren't even appealing, and then they turn Keaton into a snowman, in which state he pontificates upon all things metaphysical...he used to be a musician, within one of the looser definitions of the word, and now he's all slapshot...well, judging from the sound of it he might have considered being all slapshot earlier, so it's difficult to take any offense there. The thing is...that...despite the film's myriad abject failures...despite the horrendous differential between its reach and grasp...Stevie Nicks records a special version of "Landslide" that they play at the appropriate time. Well, not just that, obviously, I mean, you know, it's all representative that the film's heart is in the right place. Which it is. And once in awhile there are even hints of what kind of grand statement they're trying to make and...was it Samuel Beckett who said, in a short story about losing his virginity to a crone, "it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." Something like that, and some variation thereof can be applied to this film, more diplomatically than I've tried to.
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