{"id":1476,"date":"2010-12-12T14:46:24","date_gmt":"2010-12-12T19:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2021-08-26T10:29:39","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T15:29:39","slug":"cold-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/12\/cold-weather\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold Weather"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Katz\u2019s Dance Party USA<\/em><\/a> (2006) and Quiet City<\/em><\/a> (2007) established his career as one of the best young independent American directors. Quiet<\/em> City<\/em> abandoned a written screenplay in favor of structured improvisation, allowing his actors \u2013 Cris Lankenau and Jamie Fisher \u2013 to improvise their scenes to the point where they shared screenwriting credit with the director. What serves to distinguish Katz\u2019s films from those of his peers who employ similar strategies are strong formal concerns \u2013 his films are visually striking in ways that the work of certain other filmmakers simply aren\u2019t. Memphis-based filmmaker Kentucker Audley, who made Team Picture<\/em> (2007) and Open Five <\/em>(2010), for instance, recently told an interviewer<\/a>: \u201cI try to be visually tame . . .\u00a0 But I’m basically of the opinion that style is the easy part, and I always resist doing the easy thing.\u201d Yet Katz\u2019s films benefit precisely from the tension that arises between a casual approach to structure and working with actors and a more rigorous visual style. This holds true for his absorbing new film Cold Weather<\/em>, a mystery set in his home town of Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n

Expectations ran high when, working on a larger budget (reportedly low six figures) after micro-budgets, Katz turned his attention to genre. We all remember what happened when David Gordon Green, who, like Katz, also graduated from the film program at North Carolina School of the Arts, tried to be more commercial by making Undertow <\/em>(2004). <\/em>After the brilliance of the character-based George Washington<\/em> (2000) and All the Real Girls<\/em> (2003), the genre elements in Undertow<\/em> wound up seeming fairly contrived. Katz\u2019s Cold <\/em>Weather, on the other hand, manages to have fun with genre without getting too wrapped up in audience expectations of what needs to happen. Rather than an Agatha Christie-type mystery, Cold Weather <\/em>might better be described as a slacker mystery, as epitomized by a stakeout scene in which the film\u2019s protagonist, Doug, his co-worker, and then his sister sit in a car and eat \u201cSwedish Fish\u201d for several minutes. Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope<\/em><\/a> talks about the film having \u201ca crackling plot,\u201d but, for me, Cold Weather<\/em> uses plot merely as an opportunity to delve deeper into his characters.<\/p>\n

Cold Weather <\/em>begins with a shot of a rain splattered windowpane with the background out of focus, followed by a buoyant original score by Keegan DeWitt. The focus changes to reveal the courtyard of an apartment building, as a light rain falls. Doug (Cris Lankenau) enters carrying a large package. The shot cuts to Doug, a forensic science dropout, and his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), preparing a meal. There appears to be an awkward tension during dinner with their parents. Lankenau, looking scruffy and in need of a shave, proves that his endearing performance in Quiet<\/em> City<\/em> wasn\u2019t a fluke. His self-deprecating demeanor once again gives him a certain charm. Lankenau has a way of breaking up his thoughts into discrete units, as if they comprise pieces of a puzzle. In response to his stepfather\u2019s question how long he worked at an internship at a restaurant, he responds: \u201cTwo months. Like twenty hours a week . . . I mean I could have kept going, but I kind of quit . . . because . . . I didn\u2019t get paid. And I started getting bored.\u201d Doug discusses buying a coffee table \u2013 the large package we initially see him carrying. He tells his parents: \u201cI\u2019m assembling it. It\u2019s coming right along . . . and by coming right along, I mean, not at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dialogue in Cold Weather<\/em> involves excess verbiage; assertions end in negations. In the next scene, the camera focuses on a door that changes from yellow to cream color as Gail turns off the light and addresses Doug, who\u2019s reading a book.<\/p>\n

GAIL: All right. I\u2019m going to go to bed now.
\nDOUG: Okay.
\nGAIL: Good night.
\nDOUG (sing song): Good night.
\nGAIL: You gonna go to bed soon?
\nDOUG: I don\u2019t know. I\u2019m not really tired.
\nGAIL: It weird you\u2019re never tired.
\nDOUG: I\u2019m tired in the morning.
\nGAIL: Yeah . . . me too. (After a very long pause) All right, I\u2019m going to bed.
\nDOUG: Okay.
\nGAIL: Good night.
\nDOUG: Good night.<\/p>\n

Screenwriting professors no doubt would flag the above dialogue as \u201cchitchat,\u201d but, as the scene indicates, we\u2019re in the realm of naturalism. Between Gail\u2019s first line and Doug\u2019s last, the redundancy of their sentences merely attempts to fill up empty space between them, in a similar manner to Katz\u2019s pans back and forth between the two characters. Gail\u2019s pregnant pause indicates her concern for Doug, who is crashing with her. The next day he persuades her to skip out of work to go \u201cwhale watching\u201d with him. The trip up the coast serves no narrative function other than to provide a sense of the Oregon landscape.<\/p>\n

Doug\u2019s takes a job at the ice factory, which provides Katz and his talented cinematographer Andrew Reed (using a RED camera) with an opportunity to explore an assembly line where bags of ice are produced. Doug meets a DJ co-worker, Carlos (Ra\u00fal Castillo), with whom he becomes fast friends, and at roughly fifteen minutes, he meets his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), at a coffee shop after she turns up unexpectedly from Chicago. She asks, \u201cHow\u2019s living with your sister?\u201d Rachel presses, \u201cYou like it more than living with me?\u201d Surprisingly, he equivocates: \u201cI don\u2019t know, maybe not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two guys and two women get together to play cards, which is followed by a montage that includes a spectacular shot: the camera slowly zooms in on Doug and Rachel as they stand on a bridge that overlooks a breathtaking waterfall. Carlos and Rachel attend a Star Trek<\/em> convention together. Soon afterward, Carlos shows up at Doug\u2019s apartment, informing him that Rachel never turned up at a club where she was supposed to meet him and is now missing. Carlos implores Doug to accompany him in investigating because he knows about \u201cmysteries.\u201d That may be true, but it\u2019s Carlos who functions as the catalyst, while the more apathetic Doug gets dragged into getting involved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gone into the film\u2019s setup at some length, but I\u2019ll not divulge the details of the mystery even though, on some level, the intricacies involving Rachel\u2019s disappearance serve other purposes. As Doug attempts to solve the mystery, he and Gail grow closer together. Katz doesn\u2019t poke fun at genre conventions; he takes them seriously despite having another agenda. There\u2019s a hilarious cameo by Brendan McFadden (one of Katz\u2019s collaborators) as Gail\u2019s date, Swen. Katz\u2019s other major collaborator, Ben Stambler, plays the hotel clerk, who gives knowing glances when Doug and Carlos rent a room together at Rachel\u2019s motel. Another humorous exchange occurs later when Doug helps Gail navigate a porn site. She remarks, \u201cYou seem pretty familiar with how this kind of site works.\u201d Doug’s response is\u00a0a cold stare.<\/p>\n

A Sherlock Holmes fan, Doug buys a cheap pipe to help him \u201cthink,\u201d but we suspect the prop allows him to play the role better \u2013 even though he\u2019s more like Frank or Joe Hardy than Holmes. The camera tracks through aisles of a grocery store and then the stacks of books in a library, creating a playful connection. Baseball figures prominently in the mystery, even though Doug obviously can\u2019t hit a ball when he visits a batting cage, and Gail butchers the pronunciation of the name of ex-Yankee Clete Boyer. Late in the film, Doug follows a suspect into a building, where Reed\u2019s slow zoom down a corridor is reminiscent of Ernie Gehr\u2019s Serene Velocity<\/em>. Earlier, the exterior of the motel has a lime-colored cast, while one of the occupied rooms is lit with a yellow filter. There\u2019s also a memorable shot of Doug climbing stairs of a train overpass as the sun flares directly into the lens, illuminating both Doug and the structure with an intense reddish orange glow. One of the major strengths of Cold Weather<\/em> is its extraordinary attention to visual details (which, I\u2019d argue, is hardly the \u201ceasy part\u201d of making a film).<\/p>\n

As Katz points out, there are other films about brother and sister relationships, namely You Can Count on Me <\/em>(2000) and The Savages <\/em>(2007), but the relationships in those films are far more contentious. Cold Weather<\/em> on the other hand, explores the subtle yet powerful impact that siblings, such as Gail and Doug, can have one another. Katz told Nayman: \u201cI\u2019m interested in the idea of siblinghood as a kind of co-dependency, at once very intimate and oddly removed \u2013 like when she tells him she had a boyfriend for six months and he has no idea.\u201d Katz is exploring that odd sense of comfort that siblings often share from having grown up together, even though he adeptly buries the motivation of his characters. We never learn anything about Doug\u2019s past relationship with Rachel or why they broke up. Doug seems unfazed by Rachel\u2019s return, yet his dropping out of school and lack of direction might stem from the end of their relationship. Doug and Gail appear at ease with each other, but that\u2019s not necessarily true of their own love relationships, which they each have greater difficulty navigating.<\/p>\n

With Cold Weather<\/em>, Aaron Katz has managed to achieve something very difficult, namely he\u2019s made three terrific low-budget films in the past four years. Some months ago, I wrote a blog about the overemphasis on social networkin<\/a>g as marketing tools for indie films. Katz weighed in on this subject in an interview in Filmmaker<\/em><\/a>. He told Scott Macaulay: \u201cThe best thing, I think, is to make a film you feel proud of and then find an audience. But I\u2019m for anything that can get people to see a movie. It\u2019s when [these tools] become the dominant things, it sometimes feels they are not in service of the movies.\u201d In this sense, Katz has his priorities straight.<\/p>\n

Cold Weather<\/em> is being distributed by IFC. The film premiered at South by Southwest and has been playing the festival circuit, but I\u2019ve been waiting for it to surface theatrically. Cold Weather<\/em> is now expected to open in February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaron Katz\u2019s Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) established his career as one of the best young independent American directors. Quiet City abandoned a written screenplay in favor of structured improvisation, allowing his actors \u2013 Cris Lankenau andRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1316,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,8,19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4341,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions\/4341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}