The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: The Films of 2017

#1 Post by The Narrator Returns » Wed Oct 18, 2017 9:14 pm

Tomas Alfredson's The Snowman is looking to be a surprise contender for worst of the year. The reviews have been scathing so far, and Alfredson is already apologizing for it and explaining that he didn't get to film the whole script.

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willoneill
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The Snowman (Tomas Alfredson, 2017)

#2 Post by willoneill » Fri Oct 20, 2017 3:35 pm

The Narrator Returns wrote:Tomas Alfredson's The Snowman is looking to be a surprise contender for worst of the year. The reviews have been scathing so far, and Alfredson is already apologizing for it and explaining that he didn't get to film the whole script.
I decided to see The Snowman last night because I like Alfredson's last two films, and Michael Fassbender, and I have a morbid fascination with trainwreck films. And yes, this is a trainwreck. The problem with Alfredson's excuse about not getting to film 15% of the script is that it doesn't explain away the problems in the 85% he did film. It has characters who do villain things but aren't the villain, yet their villain things aren't ever explained, e.g.
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J.K. Simmons' character takes a cellphone picture of every attractive woman he meets, as if he's collecting future victims. He is not.
Some reviews have mentioned Val Kilmer's weird performance (or maybe just Val Kilmer is weird now), but I even felt that Fassbender was a bit off. It has weird plot moments that negate the event that just happened previously, like
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Fassbender abruptly ends a night out with his ex-girlfriend's teenage son, because his partner tells him it's an emergency, but then Fassbender just says, "we'll go there in the morning."
The movie is just weird in a bad way, and poorly constructed, and frustrating, and ties up its solution way too simply.

But it does have, and I swear this is true, a snowman disguised within another snowman. I don't know why that sticks out to me, but I feel like it's emblematic of something.

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joshua
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Re: The Films of 2017

#3 Post by joshua » Fri Oct 20, 2017 4:45 pm

willoneill wrote:But it does have, and I swear this is true, a snowman disguised within another snowman.
Image

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hearthesilence
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Re: The Films of 2017

#4 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Oct 20, 2017 5:51 pm

The trailer looked like a joke, the sort a sitcom would make if they were purposely trying to come up with a bad film. When we first see the actual snowman, it's just absolutely ridiculous.

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Re: The Films of 2017

#5 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:08 pm

Look at it this way, with how the weather is going, there's almost no chance there will be an American reboot.

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Big Ben
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Re: The Films of 2017

#6 Post by Big Ben » Fri Oct 20, 2017 7:32 pm

The parody posters have been great though. I wouldn't say this is NSFW per se but I would still look at it at home or outside the work place as it involves a crude drawing. Juvenile yes but apparently fitting for the film.

Also Fassbender's character's name is Harry Hole. Harry. Hole.

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hearthesilence
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Re: The Films of 2017

#7 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Oct 20, 2017 7:55 pm

Jesus. I wonder if they could have "saved" the film in the editing stage by turning it into a deadpan comedy?

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lacritfan
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Re: The Films of 2017

#8 Post by lacritfan » Fri Oct 20, 2017 8:43 pm

Damn, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Claire Simpson, even they couldn't save it.

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#9 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:15 pm

willoneill wrote:The problem with Alfredson's excuse about not getting to film 15% of the script is that it doesn't explain away the problems in the 85% he did film.
I thought about this line throughout the film. Despite everything I heard from the reviews, nothing prepared me for how jarringly unintelligible and incompetent this film was. It's rough, man. The problems announce themselves from scene 1 with some rapid editing that includes a woman getting slapped in the face, except they forgot to foley in the sound effect. It wasn't until the second slap that I knew for sure she was slapped. Meanwhile Val Kilmer shows up in baffling flashbacks looking like modern day Jan-Michael Vincent with an alarmingly deep voice-over that clearly isn't him speaking. Characters appear and disappear like in dreams. Actions and storylines make no sense. An important part of the plot involves Rebecca Ferguson carrying around this monster computer that looks like future-tech from the early 1980s but is supposedly state of the art police gear.
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I still haven't figured out what happened to the main victim of the film (are they dead or not), and it didn't even occur to me until about 2 hours after the film ended because I was so busy wrapping my mind around everything else.
It's not the sort of trainwreck like The Book of Henry that's entertaining in its awfulness. It's a total waste of time for all but the morbidly curious. I just hope we don't have to wait long for a detailed explanation as to what went wrong with this production.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#10 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Oct 26, 2017 2:52 am

This film is a shining example of why MoviePass has been such a blessing.

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#11 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Thu Oct 26, 2017 11:50 am

Absolutely. I don't think I would have ventured out to see this if I didn't have my MoviePass.

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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#12 Post by McCrutchy » Fri Oct 27, 2017 1:46 am

I wonder if The Snowman is the Collateral Beauty of 2017? I haven't seen either film, but in terms of talent wasted on the final product, surely the two are similar. Has anyone been unfortunate enough to see both?

On a related note, if Universal actually releases the UHD/BD combo, and doesn't bin the Ultra HD Blu-ray, I'll buy it, as I'm very curious to see it, if it really is such a complete mess...

black&huge
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#13 Post by black&huge » Mon Jan 08, 2018 4:55 am

I actually enjoyed this movie because to me...
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It was very much like a late era Argento giallo like Sleepless, The Card Player and even Stendhal Syndrome. Argento always has some suspension of disbelief mechanism in all his movies not just for the kill scenes but for the logistics of using red herrings and such to keep the audience in the dark pretty much going to almost laughable tactics to do so. The Snowman is just a very nice looking late Argento movie in these senses. However it did have it's weaknesses and so here are some that stood out:

- I had to do some reading afterwards but apparently Kilmer's character in the movie, those were flashbacks he was in? this was pretty off putting since it didn't seem there was any delineation that his scenes were taking place in another time or was there ay indication or maybe I missed something. He really came and went and we forget about him.

- Second, the most jarring thing is that weird edit. I think we all know which one. It's about in the middle of the movie where we see the establishing shot of that little house in the middle of nowhere. we hear some screaming coming from inside then for less than a second there's some cut to what I assume what was going on inside that house of someone tied up and struggling then someone's hand in the foreground unfolds some weapon... what in the hell was that all about? I do not understand why that was even shown or why it was such a short shot. It might actually be one of the worst editing decisions I've seen and I've seen countless movies with poor editing decisions.

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Never Cursed
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#14 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:16 am

Last edited by Never Cursed on Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

black&huge
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#15 Post by black&huge » Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:19 am

I'm surprised he didn't mention that one jarring edit that if I recall is a fraction of a second shot of someone's bloody hand struggling inside that empty cabin or whatever it was.

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How rude!
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#16 Post by How rude! » Tue Mar 10, 2020 7:04 am

Thanks so much for introducing this site to me. I will now watch the Snowman again.

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Never Cursed
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#17 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:38 am

Wow, I knew this was unfinished to some extent going in, but it is rare that you get to see a major studio film in as dire a state as this one is. It's a... interesting-looking film for being incomplete, and one can tell that the director had A Grand Vision for the tone and aesthetics of the hypothetical completed product (as indicated by, say, how almost every shot in the fucking movie has windows or reflective surfaces taking up a majority of the frame), but precious little of whatever those ideas were filters through to the end result. The above comparisons to late-period giallos certainly make sense, given how the clueless lack of direction or purpose present in all narrative aspects of the film kind of resembles a deliberate fast-and-loose approach to causality. If your favorite thing about The Big Sleep is how you don't understand anyone's motivations past the half-hour mark, this is just the film for you.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#18 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Oct 29, 2020 9:57 am

I know that the film reportedly suffered from issues compromising Alfredson's vision, but your description aptly reflects what I believe are his flaws as a filmmaker. The le Carré adaptation was competent filmmaking from an aesthetics and tonal arch, but incompetent as a narrative construction that aimlessly flubbed the incredibly significant cultivation and mechanics of character motivation, integral to the story being told. I'm going off a small sample size, but have little confidence that this film would have been great with him behind the camera no matter how much had gone 'right' from his point of view.

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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#19 Post by JabbaTheSlut » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:04 am

One must keep in mind that Hoyte van Hoytema was DoP on Alfredson's two successess Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor. Hoytema is now shooting the films of Christopher Nolan, whose choppy visual narrative became much more coherent after starting his collaboration with Hoytema.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#20 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:08 am

I don't see how that affects what appear to be the biggest qualms against this movie in terms of narrative and characterization, not aesthetics, which as others have said are mostly fine.

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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#21 Post by JabbaTheSlut » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:12 am

Film narrative is images and sound. Images are not just aesthetics. Images are language, how information, emotion, athmosphere is communicated. And based on evidence, seems that Hoytema has had a considerable influence on least on two filmmaker's visual narration.
therewillbeblus wrote:
Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:08 am
I don't see how that affects what appear to be the biggest qualms against this movie in terms of narrative and characterization, not aesthetics, which as others have said are mostly fine.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#22 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:53 am

I am aware of that. I also missed your use of "choppy visual narrative" in your post, which clears up your point since I initially read it as the digestibility of the visuals on an aesthetic plain, so my bad there. However, I completely disagree on Nolan's films becoming more coherent with Interstellar, let alone HvH's specific influences there, and since I also clearly disagree about Tinker Tailor's narrative coherence, I'm struggling to see his "considerable influence" on these two filmmakers' approaches to narrative as marked "evidence" rather than a subjective opinion you're vaguely throwing out there.

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Mr Sausage
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The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#23 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Oct 29, 2020 12:13 pm

He’s making a correlation = causation mistake, isn’t he? Two good films have the same DP, a bad one doesn’t. Bingo, we know the cause! Nevermind that production problems resulted in a film that wasn’t even finished, it must all be down to the DP. Not the director, who organizes what’s being filmed; not the editor, the person who actually assembles the narrative; not the 20% of the story yet to be shot. The DP.

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knives
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#24 Post by knives » Thu Oct 29, 2020 12:20 pm

That may be true in this case, but I do think that it’s fair to say that for Nolan the switch has caused a different visual style with lighting in particular changing as well as shot distance and amount of handheld used.

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Never Cursed
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Re: The Snowman (Thomas Alfredson, 2017)

#25 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Oct 29, 2020 12:35 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Thu Oct 29, 2020 9:57 am
The le Carré adaptation was competent filmmaking from an aesthetics and tonal arch, but incompetent as a narrative construction that aimlessly flubbed the incredibly significant cultivation and mechanics of character motivation, integral to the story being told. I'm going off a small sample size, but have little confidence that this film would have been great with him behind the camera no matter how much had gone 'right' from his point of view.
I was wondering how Tinker Tailor fared on these levels given that there wasn't widespread revulsion over the film as a whole, but it sure doesn't surprise me to hear that even his more successful films have big narrative issues.

Also, regarding the DP thing, this film could have been shot by any great cinematographer and it would still be incoherent for reasons extending far beyond the relative skill of the DP. I'm 99% sure Rodrigo Prieto was going to shoot this when Scorsese was attached to direct, but this still would have had really, really big issues if Scorsese had only 30 days to shoot the whole thing and simply could not get 15% or more of the film in the can. (Furthermore, and this is really subjective, but I feel like any questions of Nolan's visual/narrative coherence depending on the presence of a specific DP are made irrelevant by the Pfister-shot Inception, which would surely be even more incoherent than The Snowman if made by a director with a poor grasp of visual methods of narrative).

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