Just the Ticket #48: Do You Have the Time?

Before I get into today's reviews, I thought I'd share some Piece Offerings with you. While I was going through my old posts looking for reviews to link to for The Skeleton Key and The Station Agent in the last issue of Just the Ticket, I came across a couple of posts that were blocked for inappropriate content based on their titles, and I'm going to link to them here to give you a laugh or two:

1. A throwback to my college days with SW@ Ticket Archive #37, titled "Incredibly Long": Blogger automatically thinks it has something to do with Viagra or Ron Jeremy, but it's really a review of Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles, regarding the film's excessive running time.
2. Now we go from long to short with SW@ Ticket Archive #29, titled "A Critical Quickie", which has absolutely nothing to do with sex. Rather, it is a pair of movie reviews too brief and simple to be fledged out into full-length rants.

There may be more out there, since I have yet to check all of my nearly 200 Blogger posts for instances of computerized Puritanism, but that's the long and short of it.

Since I'm skating on thin ice with those "inappropriate" post titles, let's keep skating on to today's review: a movie that critics say has "a crime tale with twists worthy of Hitchcock and dialogue worthy of the Coen Brothers."

I don't place much stock in anything produced by the minds of the above-surname'd Joel and Ethan, as their output usually has a mish-mosh of famous people doing a lot of weird, inexplicable, unexplained, stupid things for nigh on two hours of dialogue-heavy film that end with nothing particularly resolute having come of their efforts. At least with No Country For Old Men, they had the decency to shell out a villain with personality and a respectable amount of mass murder before boring me to death.

Thin Ice, not a Coen brainchild, provides closure while still living up to the truth of the critical statement on its cover.

Greg Kinnear, successful insurance salesman and native bullshit artist, is the picture of irony, so focused on exploiting the better natures of his clients that he assumes the marks in question are as honest as the day is long (which is funny because the day is actually shorter in Wisconsin than in places farther south).

On a chance encounter with an elderly client (played by Kinnear's Little Miss Sunshine co-star Alan Arkin), the unlikeable lout hatches a plan to save his failed marriage and pay his way out of the Cheesehead State by stealing and selling the old man's $30,000 antique violin.

Enter Billy Crudup's (Public Enemies) corrupt security consultant, looking and acting like a young Christian Bale on too much cocaine, competently filling the role of the intrusive, unstable sidekick who wants an increasingly bigger piece of the score in exchange for his silence, and turning Thin Ice into a child of Fargo gone too far and A Simple Plan gone horribly awry (but ultimately in a good way).

Wait, did I just write "increasingly bigger?" I guess I deviated from the review for a second to describe the recent growth of the Department of Redundancy Department. If we cooperate together in pairs of two to make sure it never happens again, it'll be a win-win for both of us.

Thin Ice isn't anything you haven't seen before, or can't see coming for that matter, if you watch a lot of heist- or long-con-based movies, but no less engaging thanks to the huge, abrasive personalities set forth by Kinnear and Crudup.

B

Last issue explored all the wrong uses of God in cinema, but next issue looks to make amends with a review of the true story, Machine Gun Preacher. Stay tuned as always, and beware of rich men without wristwatches.

All's well that ends well,

and good intentions pave the road to Hell.

Bury him now before he starts to smell,

but a death kept secret still spoils the well.
You can't quench your thirst on the road to Hell.

Ooh, that smell!

Is that sulfur that I smell?

You can't cool your heels on the road to Hell.
                       -Sean Wilkinson (June 14, 2012)