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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Shot for less dough than The Tourist probably spent on Angelina Jolie's lip gloss, Aaron Katz's Portland, Oregon-set Cold Weather is a shaggy-dog comic thriller that leaves Hollywood's lumbering versions looking like dinosaurs. Upping the clever-twist stakes, the opening scenes plunk us down in all too familiar post-millenial slacker territory. Doug (Cris Lankenau) is a fuzzy-faced college dropout living with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn) after giving up on studying forensic science. The guy's too aimless about pretty much everything except his passion for Sherlock Holmes to even feel especially sheepish about his circumstances.\n\n Soon Doug takes a job \"moving ice\" at a factory spewing out those nifty bags of the stuff whose provenance nobody ever thinks about when grabbing 'em at a convenience store. If you've suffered through enough movies like the one it seems Cold Weather is toying with becoming, what do you hope? You hope the hero's ice-factory gig won't turn out to be a metaphor, that's what. And it doesn't, at least not in the dreary way of too many anomie-riddled films about sensitively blighted lives.\n\n Katz doesn't make a big deal of messing with viewers' expectations. But even so, he's not shy about using Generation Z's new set of \"If everybody's alienated, who's left to be alienated from?\" movie conventions to take us someplace more interesting. You only realize how astute and deliberately misleading the setup has been when Doug's ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), shows up on a visit from Chicago and his ice-factory co-worker, a part-time DJ named Carlos (Raul Castillo), is drawn to her. Then she goes missing from her motel room, triggering a hunt for clues that leads to her double life as an exotic model, a telephone code based on baseball stats and a briefcase stuffed with cash. Since Doug has infected Carlos with his Sherlock Holmes bug, they're both energized by playing crime-scene gumshoes. Less predictably, so is superficially \"responsible\" sister Gail once they get her involved.\n\n The mystery doesn't add up to much, but that's part of Katz's point. Cold Weather is about the way people can be jazzed by a situation that gets them out of their sad-sack routine\u2014solving the puzzle turns out to be a great excuse to skip work\u2014and feeling like they can take the initiative for a change. Whether Rachel is a patsy or a crook hardly matters to them; they don't even worry whether their interference might be putting her at risk. At one level, they're all play-acting roles they've learned from Hollywood and TV, not to mention Conan Doyle. But they're also discovering they can be decisive and quick-witted in ways their day-to-day lives don't have much room for, and they blossom even as they can hardly repress their glee at their good luck.\n\n What makes the movie the same kind of small classic that Noel Black's Pretty Poison was 40-odd years ago is that the material's rich undercurrents\u2014from post-millenial frustration with dead ends to renewed sibling intimacy and the pleasures of rotisserie pop-cult gone real\u2014are so lucidly present without being blatant. Katz doesn't lampoon his characters, whose doings stay drolly but affectingly suspended in a no-man's land between suspense and absurdity. It typifies his skill that he dramatizes his theme most by omission, since the big test of Gail's resolve\u2014swiping that red-herring briefcase in a restaurant\u2014occurs off-screen as we watch Doug brace himself to play none too nimble getaway driver. Better still is the finale, skipping conventional narrative wrap-ups to let us know that we've been watching a study of modern psychologies and relationships and Katz's work is now done.\n\n He gets a big assist from not only his top-notch cinematographer, Andrew Reed\u2014who makes rain-soaked Portland look like Willard Scott's idea of Kafka\u2014but a fine cast of unknowns. While Lankenau and Dunn are both ideal, the breakout actor here is Castillo, who's got such paradoxically unobtrusive magnetism that his absence from the movie's second half is Cold Weather's only major letdown. Maybe it's only February, but if Indieland coughs up another flick as good as this one all year, we'll be lucky."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-cold-weather>