What Is the Bleakest Winter Movie?
Before we get into our weekend comment diversion, let’s take a quick look back at the week. In our TV section, we kicked off with the fantastic return of David Tennant in Doctor Who and got really creepy with the end of HBO’s Love Has Won docuseries. I took a look at the three worst human beings on Squid Game: The Challenge, and Petr covered a show that few have seen but everyone who has both loves and hates. Also, if you missed it, check out Timothy Olyphant’s fantastic Deadwood story.
In film, Kayleigh looked back at two of the year’s weirdest sex scenes, both involving Joaquin Phoenix, and also wondered why trailers give away the whole movie. We assigned Petr the Paw Patrol movie as a joke, but hell if he wasn’t a good sport about it and reviewed it anyway. Finally, Melanie reviewed The Holdovers, genuinely one of my favorite movies of the year. The whole time I was watching it, I thought, “This is one of those movies that’s going to have Cat Stevens on the soundtrack, isn’t it?” and when the Cat Stevens song rolled around, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I also wrote about Netflix’s phenomenal American Symphony.
Elsewhere, the bad news is, we wrote a lot about Elon Musk this week. The good news is, we may not have to write about him as much in the future because the man has tanked X.
The real action this week, however, was on the celebrity side, where Julianna Marguiles said some heinous things on a podcast, and where Matt Rife — the new It Boy of Shitty Comedy — completed his red-pill journey by appearing on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. It was also a big week for The Golden Bachelor, who — as it turns out — is just a weird old dude. Finally, for fun, Emily looked at a few of the most random celebrity couples.
This week kicks off the month of December, which is the meteorological beginning of winter. I love the beginning of winter because when the snow comes, it’s beautiful and clean, and the kids lose their minds. But here in New England, things turn bleak by February when all the snow is muddy and pushed into grey, 10-foot piles in parking lots, the roads are covered in black ice, and no one has been out of their house in two months, and if they cancel school one more day, I’m going to divorce my kids!
It’s that misery, however, that is often the setting for great movies. So today’s very specific question is this: What is your favorite bleak winter movie? My first thought was Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a fantastic, dark, and shocking film that left me with my mouth wide open for hours! Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bridget Fonda. It’s like Danny Boyle crossed with the Coen Brothers. Terrific film.
What’s your favorite?
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