banhei

Better than most Tarantino movies I've seen. I start off with the preceding sentence because so many of these trashing-it reviews here say it's a wannabe Tarantino film. I walked out of RESERVOIR DOGS I thought it was so bad, but stuck with this movie to the end. Truman Capote wrote a brilliant short story titled "Shut a Final Door" that's a study of the sociopathic (although not homicidal) personality partly from the sociopath's perspective, and this film has a similar aspect I found intriguing. I thought the acting was quite good and that much of the mordant dialogue worked. Counterintuitively, the movie actually reminded me in a way of WATERWORLD, most of which I quite liked up until it fell apart at the end (you can tell where its main director quit/was fired). P. S. The string of 1-star reviews that start these reviews is soooo consistent, the mega-negativity almost seriously makes me wonder if they were written by actors who failed auditions for this movie...or some such...almost.

A well-written, well-acted ensemble that I didn't guess until the closing credits (that include photos of the characters' prototypes) to be an obvious roman à clef, that added a little depth to what I'd just seen. The only flaw was the direction was a little clunky at times so that the pace flagged here and there. But overall it's a charming film. Last week I watched a documentary on the highly-regarded hit sitcom "Cheers", and A SNOWY DAY IN OAKLAND is not unlike "Cheers," with a cast of characters who all have their flaws, but you like almost all of them anyway, partly because of those flaws. SNOWY, like "Cheers", even has a head-butting couple who seem to still love each other despite their acting otherwise (Sam and Diane in "Cheers") and a chatterbox postal worker who grows on you despite the chatterbox eccentricity (Jeanette in SNOWY, Cliff Clavin in "Cheers").