What's that sound outside? Is it those damn neighbor kids splashing around in their pool? That idiot neighbor of yours who blasts obnoxiously cheerful music during his backyard barbecues? Your misguided friends and relations, pounding on your door and trying to coax you outdoors into the blistering heat? Well, to heck with all of them! Thanks to the miracle of video, summer-hating grumps like you and I need suffer not the ravages of this most bothersome of seasons. We can pull down the shades and wait out the next three months watching wonderfully wintry movies:
QuintetThe ShiningBatman N RobinGroundhog DayDoctor ZhivagoIt's a Wonderful Life. Yeah, so, it's a Christmas movie, and that hardly gels with the lovely misanthropic mood we've been working here. But it's also a really good movie, and after all those days locked away by yourself in a darkened room, you could probably do with a little Capra sentimentality to get you out there associating with your fellow humans again. It's the kind of film that will make you glad you didn't off yourself during that rough patch in June when the AC went on the fritz.. In addition to being a not-bad David Lean epic boasting plenty of scenes of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie emoting breathlessly as the snow tumbles down upon their furry communist hats, some prints of this film clock in at 200 minutes . . . so that's a good chunk of your summer gone right there.. This classic Harold Ramis comedy finds Bill Murray as a snarky weatherman who is trapped, via some unexplained, Twilight Zone-esque phenomenon, reliving the same February day over and over again. Sure, spending eternity sloshing around in galoshes in Punxsutawney is nobody's idea of heaven, but it beats the hell out of spending May through August sweating your butt off in SoCal!. Insecure fanboys will never forgive Joel Schumacher for queering up the caped-crusader franchise with the rubber nipples and all that, but Mr. Freeze is a hero of sorts to my kind. Come on, sing along with him! “I'm Mr. Coldmiser, whatever I touch/Turns to ice in my clutch/I'm too much.” Besides, it's always a kick to see Arnold in his drag-queen-villain getups in this movie and remember that this is our governor.. The Shining is also marvelously frigid from first frame to last—you can practically see your breath while watching this thing. Sure, the Overlook Hotel was full of evil ghosts who made Jack Nicholson go completely apeshit and try to bash in Shelly Duvall's brains. But that aside, the situation looks ideal to summer-haters. I mean, come on; a palatial hotel, with its own seriously cool topiary maze, where we'd spend months at a time snowed in in absolute isolation . . . and we'd get paid for it? Hell, sign us up already! We promise to stay away from Room 217!. Robert Altman's 1979 sci-fi oddity stars Paul Newman in a nicely unconventional post-apocalyptic tale: for once, the world is freezing to death. Normally the end of the world is all deserts or cities clogged with jungle vines, but here we wintry types get to see humanity perish our way! The plot's a complex affair that has Newman trying to solve a couple of murders while he's caught up in a strange sport that people play to distract themselves from their plummeting body temperatures. It's not Altman's finest, but it's just about the frostiest damn movie there ever was.
