Of Ice and Hot Snowmen

Hot Frosty is an unexpected DEElight!

My friend Andy and I were recently commiserating about the election over soup at Panera Bread. Roll your eyes if you must, but I know grown men who still aren’t over their team losing the 1986 Super Bowl. And right now, a bunch of people are fixing to take a blowtorch to our democracy. I’m going to need a minute, okay? Our talk turned to the holidays. We agreed this season had to be bright as Burning Man and merry as a Snoop Dogg dinner party.

“We have all of our favorite movies we’ll watch, Elf, Christmas Vacation,” he said. Then he leaned forward like he was about to slide me the slip of paper with the nuclear codes. “But, I really just want to watch all the Hallmark movies. I don’t care. I just…need it.” I nodded. Heard, chef. For the last few weeks I had been squirreling away info on all kinds of seasonal things like holiday strolls, craft fairs and festive markets, and even tree lightings. Did I really think I was going to drive 40 minutes to some other town just to stand around in the common and watch a Douglas Fir get the glam treatment? No. Or I don’t know. Is there going to be free hot chocolate from the cute Gilmore Girls’ style cafe? Okay, definitely maybe. All I know is that within a week after the election I found myself building out a kind of digital HOLIDAY CHEER board like Carrie Mathison hopped up on spiked ‘nog.

In other years I’ve been more discriminating (read: lazy) about my holiday traditions. Back to tree lightings. Did you know these things happen when it gets dark, which is around 2:30 in the afternoon and is also when the temperature has plummeted to a balmy -3? Who leaves the house under those conditions? Vampires and those hoping to get bitten by vampires. Pass. But as Andy and I were remarking, this season is landing differently. I’m sure it’s a kind of psychic triage for the reality that things are about to get really gross for a long time. And so it was that when something called Hot Frosty appeared on my radar, I cracked open a fresh roll of gingerbread dough and said, “Now this looks promising.”

SNOWMAN HOTNESS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER! (Image via Entertainment Weekly)

My friend and savvy pop culture writer, Eric Pierce name checked this Netflix confection in one of his recent weekly round-ups, The High Five. It piqued my interest. I love romcoms, but I’ve never been able to get on board with the seasonal subgenre of these movies dominated by the Hallmark Holiday-verse that crop up like celluloid versions of those Spirit Halloween stores. It is hard to get behind flicks with titles like Sugarplummed, A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe, and Hanukkah on the Rocks. The job of titling these movies might just rival the gig of coming up with new paint color names (Related: I am available; reasonable rates).

The Hot Frosty elevator pitch: The setting: small town USA named Hope Springs (ahem). Kathy, a sweet, young widow (Lacey Chabert) brings “Jack,” a ripped snowman sculpture, (Dustin Milligan, Ted from Schitt’s Creek) to life when she places a “magic” red scarf around his neck. Cue the hijinx. Jack streaks through the town common and breaks into a thrift store to get clothes. This puts Sheriff Hunter, (played with such comic delight by Craig Robinson, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), a very principled law man (note the name pun), hot on his trail. Jack learns how to be human-ish by watching TV—mostly home improvement and cooking shows (talk about building the perfect man). He ends up playing Mr. Fix-It to a bunch of the mature, single women in the town who are happy to ogle him cleaning gutters with his shirt off in the middle of December. You know, because he’s actually a snowman and in constant danger of melting. Duh. Keep up. And yes, sure, love happens because HOLIDAY ROMCOM RULEZZZZ.

But that’s not what won me over. It was the way the movie gamely lopes along and doesn’t pretend to be about anything, really. Which is not to say it’s stupid. The charm of Hot Frosty is in the same plucky, “yes and” attitude that drives improv comedy and other kinds of inventive world building. “Yes and” is a foundation principle that teaches players in a scene to affirm and add something:

Bob: Oh no! I grew a tail last night!

Jen: Yeah, and it looks a little….small.

Bob: Hey! It’s not the size of the tail, it’s how you wag it, right?

Groan. Uggh. Get the hook

Kathy asks her friend, the town physician, Dottie, to examine Jack. She tells Dottie what happened with the scarf, but there must be some other explanation. Science, yes? Dottie shrugs. It’s Christmas. There’s magic in the air. Snowmen come to life. It happens. Does he have an equally hot, single snow friend?

Jack is eventually caught and brought to justice. Sheriff Hunter tosses him in jail where Jack almost immediately begins to melt. The entire town comes to his defense. No one cares that he’s not quite human or broke any laws. He brought a lot of happiness to people and helped others and, by golly, that’s good enough for them. They corner the Sheriff on the steps of his own house. It doesn’t even take a very moving or convincing speech to change Sheriff Hunter’s mind and let him out of jail. He just sort of says “Okay!” and does the right thing.

It’s as if a bunch of smart, talented people got together and said “Let’s put on a play!” The flick is infused with that kind of beautiful, funny, childlike propensity to imagine without limits and see what happens next. How can you not want to go along for the ride? And that’s how Hot Frosty comes to life. The magic isn’t in a scarf or a romance. It’s in the act of making something (anything, really) for the sheer pleasure of it, for the joy it brings.