Winter of Frozen Dreams (2009)
Barbara Hoffman is a University of Wisconsin science student. She is a part-time employee at a local massage parlor. She is also a killer. Now all Detective Lulling has to do is prove it.
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A different way of telling a story
it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
Stiff film that's confusing at times. Thora Birch portrays a college drop-out with an IQ of 145 who drops out to become a prostitute.She meets up with an ugly older man who she will kill after getting him to sign everything over to her. The film deals with her continuous suspicion of her boyfriend, the latter helping her in disposing of the body. She uses two names which is never fully explained and has an assortment of hoodlum like guys on the side.Keith Carradine portrays the older detective on the case. At the beginning he announces that he will not retire as he wouldn't know what to do with himself. By the middle of the film, without explanation, he talks that this will be his last case as he is retiring. With a poor script like this, he shouldn't have ventured into this production to begin with.Actress Thora Birch displays a cold veneer as the sadistic killer. By the way, why did she really use 2 names?
Thora Birch made a vivid impression with her talent, her carefully flat affect and her poetic appearance in "American Beauty". Now, in "Winter of Frozen Dreams", all three qualities are back on display. Her ghostly complexion haunts the film, in which she is the centerpiece femme fatale.The film, set in a small town in mid-winter, has an unusually strong sense of colour and a very successful handling of visuals overall. Both the anti-heroine and the landscape from which she emerges are carefully pictured and scorchingly cold.Keith Carradine wins out with dialogue, as the jaded detective about to retire. His character follows the trail of Thora Birch with one wry remark, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, after another.As a portrait of a brilliant psychopath, the film kept me rooted to the spot as I studied Birch's careful depiction.
Having read the book on which film was based, I was initially unsure as to how the film makers would be able to piece this story into a mere hour and an half. After all, it is very difficult to meld all of the details of this intricate story into a concise, yet still intriguing film. In my opinion this film pulled it off brilliantly.I particularly liked the casting. Thora Birch was great and has really come into her own as an actress. Why she is not a bigger star, baffles me. Keith Carradine was fun to watch, as he has been in so many of the roles he has had in his long career, and Brendan Sexton is certainly a young actor to keep our eye on. What impressed me most was the fact that this film looks like it was shot in the time period it is portraying. It does not look like some glossy Hollywood piece trying to represent a period in which most of those involved probably barely remember. I did however find the use of heavy color saturation to represent the flash backs difficult to follow at first. All in all, I really enjoyed this film. It is not your average Hollywood fare and that is just the type of movie I want to see.
This thoroughly mediocre movie was a lot less fun than I thought it would be, and it left me with a bad aftertaste. Telling the unbelievable but apparently true story of a Black Widow/Lolita (Thora Birch) who seduces men, then murders them for their insurance money, it played like a bush-league rip-off of "Fargo." "Winter of Frozen Dreams" is memorable, if at all, for Keith Carradine's eccentric detective, a cross between Columbo and McCloud, and for Thora Birch's performance. The former child star and indie princess of such films as "American Beauty" and "Ghost World" has blossomed into a woman of devastating beauty, sensuality, and intelligence, and she dominated every frame she was in. Her character, Barbara Hoffmann, still languishes in prison serving a life sentence for murder. She supposedly had an IQ of 145--genius level--but you couldn't tell from this movie. All the characters seemed pretty stupid, her included. The film left some doubt as to her guilt. Was the aging detective just looking to make one spectacular bust before riding off into the sunset? That was just one of many questions this provocative but ultimately unsatisfying film left unanswered.