Hot Frosty
First screened in November 2024
Director: Peter Ciccoritti. Cast: Lacey Chabert, Dustin Milligan, Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Katy Mixon Greer, Sherry Miller, Dan Lett, Bobby Daniels, Lauren Holly, Shiloh Obasi, Sarah DeSouza-Coelho. Screenplay: Russell Hainline.
In Brief:
Choppy assembly, with odd notions of sex, grief, relationships, and...most things, but at least has a certain geniality.
VOR:
①
True, even tip-toeing toward physical arousal feels rare for this kind of flick. But these are the tippiest of toes. Sweet but tepid Frosty.
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| Photo © 2024 Netflix |
First comes the should-be-self-evident disclaimer that I didn't pull up Hot Frosty on Netflix for a single one of the same reasons I watched Ugetsu a couple hours prior. So, it'd be a little dumb to "review" them on similar terms. I'm also thinking of Rudolf Arnheim's killjoy but perfectly correct reminder 90ish years ago that the main job of commercial filmmaking is to churn out products as similar and predictable as the loaves coming down the belt at a bread factory. What's the point of asking which loaf is "best," or even what "good" means in such a context? The makers of Hot Frosty, commissioned to produce a flotilla of iced ginger snaps that suit precisely what the customer ordered, with little pretense at nuance or surprise, can hardly be arraigned for quote-unquote failing to make art.
There's a solid argument to make that Hot Frosty is a ★★★★ movie by either set of criteria most reasonably applied to it: that of the audience looking for unrippled, blandly comforting, zealously "pleasant" entertainment, like an Ultra Soft Kleenex to blow your brain into; or the audience eager to chortle with but mostly at such a brazenly ridiculous prospect, a romance between a barely-there woman and the dopey sweetheart who emerges full-grown from a town-square snowman, with elephantiasis of the abs and a mind like a hanging chad. You'll have guessed I was in Boarding Group 2, and it's not as if I didn't get what I asked for. I'd no sooner take serious issue with Hot Frosty than send back to the kitchen one of the lesser McChickens I've gobbled in my day, especially when they were still on the Dollar Menu.
All of that is true. I gladly grant it. But equally true is that Hot Frosty features the following free-verse couplet as a paragon declaration of love—notarized proof, even, that our benign himbo with the worrisome body temperature might just be The One whom this still-grieving widow has been waiting for. Quoth the snowman: "You know, I've got to think that Paul saw the same amazing person that I see. And I've got to think that he wouldn't want this amazing person to think that she's anything less than amazing."
That's a lot of "think"-ing and a lot of "amazing" and, at the same time, zero of either. After ten years, Imitation Game, you've at long last met your marble-mouthed match!
I don't wanna come in too hard on the simple hunk of Wonder Bread that I purposely came to the Kwik Mart to buy. (And I do mean Wonder: there's nothing multigrain, not even anything Sara Lee Delightful 100% Whole Wheat Honey Bread about it.) But as basically genial as Hot Frosty is, with a few moments of lightly well-played comedy and a sprinkling of inspired baby-deer reaction shots by Dustin Milligan as Simple Jack, December Edition, I do think we can pose some fair questions about the bread factory itself and its projected customers. Such as:
* What is with the merciless over-bright lighting of these movies? Does nobody notice the diabolical Leopold-and-Loeb alliance between the billion-kilowatt bulbs and the inch-thick sarcophagus of cracked foundation, Caligari eyeliner, and mortician's lipstick sported by our central lovers? Why does Netflix want Kathy and Jack to look so comely and yet, at the same time, like the spackled test-runs of a supermodel taxidermist?
* What happened with the sequence where Snowman Jack decides he needs to ask what cancer is? I get that "Hope Springs" is a placeless fairy-tale town, and we don't need to over-sweat prop design, but why does the physician's report that inspires this curiosity use a Mattel-inspired twist on Comic Sans as the font for phrases like "Surgery to be scheduled" and "Chemotherapy will start immediately"? When pressed, why does recent widow Kathy encapsulate cancer as "not a nice thing that happens to some people"? Isn't this how you talk to a three-year-old?
* No, let's keep pausing there. What exactly is the fantasy that Hot Frosty embodies? Because, once you get past the eye-catching veneer of Planet Fitness muscle-toning (which I find a bit much), I think this movie is telling us that its protagonist's marital-romantic-erotic dream is of a nearly hairless quasi-adolescent quasi-toddler who can help make dinner, finishes household chores without being asked, and can be left alone during work hours without need of expensive day care, but who on the odd evening will skirt her off to a chaste middle-school prom, after effusively complimenting her off-the-rack Ann Taylor dress? I'd hate to melt Snowman Jack, but are we getting warmer? And what does it mean? Does Kathy want to be his wife or his mom or his landlady or his valentine or his not-too-hot fling? What do Netflix women want? And do they stand for anyone else's wants? (If they do... I'm so sorry. That sounds hard. And also yikes!)
* I mean, bless its heart and whatever, but I'm surprised Hot Frosty takes such a prolonged and pointed stand against overly vociferous policing. Also, cryogenic Jack is kind of soft-peddled to us as the type of immigrant around whom small-town America (read: Brockville, Ontario) can really rally, in a spirit of beatific instrumentalizing: "Ever since he got here, he's been working to make our lives better!" I get the sense Hot Frosty wants to do some Politics, and by all means, screenwriter Russell Hainline, do your thing. Hit your viewers with moral education when, where, and how they least expect it. But I'm not positive this is all translating as fully or as clearly as you want. Sometimes, it's okay to just be the movie where Magic Mike is so magical, he has two eyes made out of coal.
* That said, I kind of like that Hot Frosty's surprising feints at themes or desires or politics are incoherent, because Christmas is often the enemy of all these things. Not just the holiday but the word itself has taken on a creepy life as a bastion of homogeneous, almost content-less cheer and pervasive, nostalgic coherence. Hey, wanna hear from literary critic and queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, who used the holiday as a metaphor for the boring but bullying mandate of vanilla, unexamined, one-size-fits-all straightness? Here you go:
The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn't it?—is that it's the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more-narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans' "holiday mood." The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question: Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families' Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing 'families/Christmas' becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.
The thing hasn't, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren't the ones where everything means the same thing?
In that spirit, I kind of like that Hot Frosty is demonstrably insane, because the whole Christmas Thing rarely acknowledges its own insanity. Fuck it up, Netflix! Plant your freak flag in the twiggy hand of a child's snow (read: Styrofoam) sculpture! Even if plenty of Hot Frosty characters, on several occasions where the demented plot backs them into a corner, do bark, "But it's CHRISTMAS!!!" as though this explains everything and appeals equally to everyone. "Christmas" is a safe word to get us out of all sorts of double-binds, not least when Jack winds up in jail... though "Christmas," as Sedgwick teaches us, is also the name for all that tinsely bondage.
* Did that all get too highfalutin? Then how about this: why does Lacey Chabert say almost all her lines through her front teeth, locked down like a pearly drawbridge on her lower lip? A few times, my partner and I had to replay a scene to discern what she was saying. A couple of those times, we just gave up. What if Enunciation replaced Christmas or even pecs as the thing we could all get excited about?
* Whatever, Hot Frosty is stupid, but fun because it's stupid, and not at all bothered that you probably think/know it's stupid, as long as you're having fun. Which I did, while also worrying and wondering about the state of a culture that produces it. But at least this quart of homogenized eggnog, lightly encrusted with back-of-the-fridge ice crystals, knows exactly what it is. That's not as easy to say about its current Netflix stable-mate Emilia Pérez, which has its own problems with iffy photography and design; an equally nonspecific yet demonstrably implausible sense of place; an equally bonkers but much more self-serious preoccupation with bodily "transition," broadly construed; and a bevy of comparably maladroit musical numbers, none of which have the alibi of being a semi-impromptu line dance in a middle-school gym. But apparently one of these films is kitschy trash and one of them is Art.
Are we sure about that? I'll give both these half-baked loaves some benefit of the doubt for standing out on the mass-industrial conveyor belt. I wish more movies did that. They also both fulfilled other missions for which they were tactically designed: Hot Frosty is a weird but warm blanket of inanities, some cheerily flagged as such and others not, in which its viewers can snuggle up. Emilia Pérez wows and flatters some of its audience with auteurist daring and a fireworks show of entertainment, while allowing its inevitable detractors to feel haughty about their (read: our) sense of seeing right through it. "Debates" ensue, but everyone clicked the link or bought a ticket, and both sides secretly know they've won. Does that mean both these movies are successful, by the makers' standards and/or by other ones? Even if I can't help thinking of both as block-headed misfires—though I find that much easier to forgive in the fable that finds a heart of gold inside a humanoid plaything than the one that finds a corazón de oro in a lethal cartel head who melds together an impressive array of smelly caricatures, yet still holds out her hands, the better to accept your trophies?
I don't really have an answer to that question. I don't even have a credible conclusion to offer you—and in that way, I feel absolute kinship with Hot Frosty and Emilia Pérez. I think all I'm saying is that sometimes you wrap your scarf or hang your evening around a piece of trash and you wake up to find they have sprouted an idea, or a whole lotta questions, or an unexpected association between two seeming opposites. Or you gaze at a piece of heavily-marketed art, watching as its alleged artfulness melts away, revealing itself as trash. Or you bask in your usual certainties about what's art and what's trash, positive that you'd know either one on sight if you crossed them in the wild (or at Cannes, or at Christmas), and that you'd be able to communicate what's wrong with this thing, or what's interesting about it, and why it depresses and delights you in fluid proportions, until you notice your erstwhile critical certainties have dripped into a puddle on the floor. Or on Letterboxd.
But here's what I guess I'm saying: Hot Frosty is clearly bad. I've got to think that, if you tune in, you'd see the same amazingly bad movie that I see. But I've got to think that this movie, which I did knowingly cue up right after, and which knows full well it's "bad," isn't necessarily worse than, say, a seemingly opposite, ostensibly amazing movie that it swiftly called to mind. I disdain both movies for their technical incompetence and their bedraggled loose ends. Then again, I've saved a big place in my heart in this increasingly mean and ever more cookie-cutter world for anything with loose ends, especially when served up with a Hot Frosty smile. I might even prefer a Christmas party where all the stockings are stuffed with loose ends to other putative festivities, replete with the usual cubic packages and perfectly tied bows. So I'm laughing my ass off at the perfectly harmless Hot Frosty while also thinking it's exactly what its makers meant to make, and more or less exactly what I expected to watch, so what on earth is there to be mad about? Grade: D