(2010) ***1/2The fatal flaw in "predicament" stories, as JPX calls them, is always that we have an overabundance of trust in the networks we've set up. There are obvious ones, like, if my house is on fire, the fire trucks will put it out. This movie is about one of the not obvious ones. It's a chair lift. It takes us from the bottom of a good time back up to the top of a good time, and in between there's just waiting. But in that waiting time, there's all kinds of people we've put our trust in. There's the guy that clamped the chair to the cable. There's the guy that made the cable so it won't snap. There are the guys running the lift, stopping it if something goes wrong, starting it up again when everything's fine.
If any one of these things just stopped working the way it's supposed to, we'd be screwed, and we'd be totally surprised in our get-screwedness. If we're on a plane we're worried about our plane crashing because it's the most obvious thing that can go wrong. On a ski lift, we're mostly just worried we'll fall off. We never think about the other stuff.
Parker, Dan, and Joe get stuck on a chair lift after the ski resort shuts down for the night (and for the week) because of all kinds of things that are out of their control. Their situation becomes even more perilous because of even more things that are out of their control, like snowstorms and wolves. But the most frustrating parts of the predicament come because of decisions characters make under pressure that just go south.
And it's not even straight stupid shit like, Forgot to Load the Gun, or Didn't Refill the Gas Tank When We Had the Chance. A lot of the times, it's a choice that make sense in the moment, that creates an opening for something bad to happen later. Most of these wind up happening to Parker. She's scarfless, but it's because she was trying to toss it to someone to use as a splint and missed -- amazingly, this isn't even close the biggest fuckup I've seen someone make in a movie during 'Thon this year (I've already made reference to it in the review for that movie. Won't say which, but people who've seen it are thinking, "yeah, that's the biggest fuckup in history."), but it's bad.
She's also missing her right glove, one of many things the characters try to throw at a passing SnowCat to get the driver's attention. You might sensibly ask (as I was, watching it) why nobody had thought to take off their skis or boards until that moment -- having stuff ready to throw would have minimized the likelihood of panicking and throwing something as useful as a glove. But at that point, in Parker's mind, getting the attention of the SnowCat (and now) superseded everything else. And it's a real bummer for her, because having both gloves on would have prevented this from happening the next morning:
Predicament movies aren't everyone's cup of tea, and I get why. I've complained before about movies about characters I don't like. In this case, the complaint would be more like, "why am I stuck here with characters with such shitty luck?" Perfectly valid criticism. But seriously, what horror movie isn't about someone's shitty luck?
