Whiteout

• Condition: New
• Format: DVD
• Color; Dolby; DVD; Widescreen; Dubbed; Subtitled; NTSC

A story of love lost and found in a small town, Snow Angels is a heartrending portrayal of three couples in various stages of life orbiting around each other in search of connection and meaning. An unexpected act of violence disrupts the lives of these intertwined couples revealing the profound moments in which they each realize how precarious and remarkable life can be.Since 2000’s George Washington, his disarming debut, David Gordon Green has thrown in his lot with an assortment of down-on-their-luck characters. That empathetic tendency comes to fruition in Snow Angels, his most carefully-calibrated feature. Like a marginally more upbeat Ice Storm, solemnity never gives way to cynicism. The narrative revolves around a circle of small-town individuals (filmed in snow-cover! ed Halifax, the action takes place somewhere on the East Coast). Restaurant worker Annie (Kate Beckinsale, in a career peak performance) is estranged from sporadically-employed high school sweetheart Glenn (Joshua's Sam Rockwell). The two have their own child, but in her younger days, Annie took care of co-worker Arthur (Lords of Dogtown's Michael Angarano), now a teenager himself. Arthur still carries a torch for his former babysitter, while artsy classmate Lila (Juno's Olivia Thirlby) finds him equally appealing. With the adult relationships around him crumbling--including that of his own parents (Jeanetta Arnette and Griffin Dunne)--Lila’s flirtatious behavior leaves Arthur flummoxed. When Glenn finds out about his wife's affair with the married Nate (Grindhouse's Nicky Katt), pent-up tensions give way to full-blown tragedy. In adapting Stewart O'Nan's novel, Green sets his film in the present rather than 1970s Pennsylvania, but the story is! universal enough to work in any time or place. In the film's ! press no tes, Rockwell says: "I believe the film is about second chances. Some of the people in the film get them, some don't." Fortunately, Green doesn't short-change a single one. --Kathleen C. FennessyLone u.S. Marshal the only one assigned to antarctica must investigate a murder and track down a serial killer on the frozen continent within three days before the dark winter begins. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 01/19/2010 Starring: Kate BeckinsaleBaby, it's cold outside: that's the problem for U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), the only law-enforcement officer assigned to Antarctica. On the verge of shipping out before the really bad weather hits, Carrie is confronted with a mysterious murder that sounds like a riddle: how'd a lone corpse find its way to the middle of an ice field, as though dropped from a great height? And what's this have to do with the prologue about a Soviet fighter jet crashing some decades earlier? Whiteout, based on the! graphic novel by Greg Rucka, solves these questions in a brisk if mostly preposterous manner, and it moves swiftly enough so you don't have to spend too much time on the plausibility of it all. Among the other snowbound stragglers are a U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht, of The Spirit), some cocky pilots (Alex O'Laughlin, Columbus Short), and a grizzled doctor (Tom Skerritt). If the presence of Skerritt conjures up memories of Alien, with its ten-little-Indians structure and female warrior, hold on--Whiteout doesn't actually have a supernatural twist to it, and Beckinsale is no Sigourney Weaver. But director Dominic Sena (undistinguished by his cheesy film Swordfish) puts the screws to the material in a relentless way, and the vast exteriors (shot in Canada) are impressive. And when it comes to one particular wow-you're-really-going-there instance of potential amputation for a main character, the film doesn't back down. In fact it sort of revels ! in the moment. --Robert Horton