Let It Snow Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)June 1st, 2001
LET IT SNOW
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Artistic License Films
Director: Adam Marcus
Writer: Kipp Marcus
Cast: Kipp Marcus, Alice Dylan, Henry Simmons, Kristopher Scott Feidel, Bernadette Peters, Henry Simmons, Judith
Malina
Since "Let It Snow" is a Sundance-type film and not a Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, you won't find lines like "I'll give all my heart to Danny, but I'll always think of you when I see a sunset." "Let It Snow," despite its stylization, is realistic. The performers say real things albeit in weird situations. What comes across most strongly is the concept that if you want to be lovers, it's best to be friends first. The problem the romantic leads, James Ellis (Kipp Marcus) and Sarah Milson (Alice Dylan), must overcome is their tendency to go overboard on the aphorism and remain just friends far too long. If the principal convention of a romantic comedy is that the lovers must be kept apart until the conclusion, what keeps James and Sarah distant, paradoxically, is their wonderful friendship.
Director Adam Marcus, aided by some shrewd camerawork
by photographer Ben Weinstein and by Kipp Marcus's tight script packs an awful lot of exposition into the story even before the credits roll. After just seven or eight minutes, we know all we have to know about James, whose grandmother (Judith Malina) screws him up when he's just four years old. Spooning pudding into his mouth, she repeats like a mantra, "Stay away from love." Grammy's experience with love
comes vicariously from watching her own daughter, Elise Ellis (Bernadette Peters), run through a husband (who needs
space and takes off for New Mexico) and a bevy of suitors from every ethnic group in the UN, leading the now high- school senior James into dubbing his residence The International House of Boyfriends.
Grammy's curse on the House of Boyfriends is sorely tested when on a series of snowy days that cancels school, James meets his bubbly new next-door-neighbor Sarah
Milson (Alice Dylan)--who flirts aggressively with him as he shovels snow up and down the sidewalk. In love with each other without knowing it, James, an absolute klutz in the art of conversation, misses out, losing his favorite girl to college. She attends Oxford 3000 miles away while he signs onto a chef's school in New York.
With Adam Marcus at the helm, the picture races ahead at a frantic pace, not stopping for a second to give the audience a chance to rest and absorb--but in a movie like this, that's not a bad thing. Though anyone who sees Sundance Festival entries with any regularity will soon see that originality is not the strong point, the ensemble wins the audience over. The picture is spirited, with nary a hostile bone in its body as the Marcus brothers trip lightly over the lead couple and all the folks who bring their influence to bear on their courtship. As James's best friend and mentor, Henry Simmons is perfectly cast in the role of an MBA stockbroker who habitually tries to guide his pal back to the world of reality. What a pleasure, moreover, to see Broadway musical-comedy star Bernadette Peters in a smashing movie role as a madcap mom, the sort I think a lot of us wish we'd have grown up with.
"Let It Snow" is a screwball comedy in the style of Preston Sturges with an captivating couple--particularly Alice Dylan in her first movie role. "Let It Snow" features as its best line one said ruefully by James as he sees the love of his life about to marry a strikingly handsome and rich English fellow: "I can't believe I'm losing out to a Merchant-Ivory Film."
Not Rated. Running time: 90 minutes. (C)2001,
Harvey Karten, [email protected]
--
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
