Hey everyone! How're you all doing today? I'm doing quite well. It's Friday, which means I'm here to do a movie review. This week I'm going to be taking a look at a movie from the year 2000 called Snow Day starring a Who's Who of actors from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. So let's get into it.
Snow Day is about just that. A snow day. For those of you who are too young to know what these are, snow days were when we got a day off of school because there was too much snow on the ground for people to be able to leave their homes. On these magical days we did whatever we wanted because we didn't have the communications technology that we do now, so our teachers had no way of sending us our schoolwork. When I was in high school we had computers and the internet was a thing, but trying to send anything by e-mail was slow and it just wasn't feasible to send documents that way the way we were able to only seven years after this movie came out when I was starting college. School servers were also fickle things as well since oftentimes the technology couldn't support such a system.
There are four storylines running parallel to each other. The first has to do with Tom Brandston (Chevy Chase) who is a weather reporter, struggling to outwit rival weather reporter Chad Symmonz (John Schneider). The second is about Tom's son, Hal (Mark Webber) who is trying to get his crush, Claire Bonner (Emmanuelle Chriqui) to notice him with the help of his best friend, Lane Leonard (Schuyler Fisk) while avoiding Claire's ex-boyfriend, Chuck Wheeler (David Paetkau) only to discover that Lane has feelings for him and that his love for Claire is actually for Lane instead (high school romances are weird). The third plot has to do with Tom's daughter, Natalie (Zena Grey) trying to stop the snow plow driver, Roger (Chris Elliot) from plowing the streets so that they'll have two snow days in a row with the help of her friends, Wayne (Josh Peck) and Chet (Jade Yorker). The final plot, being the smallest plot in the entire film, has to do with Tom's overworked wife, Laura (Jean Smart) attempting to work from home while taking care of the youngest member of the Brandston family, Randy (Connor Matheus).
I'll start with Laura's storyline because, like I said, it's the shortest of the four of them. It's fine. I don't really have much to say about it since it doesn't take up much time within the film and it ends before the other three storylines do. One thing I noticed about this storyline is that Laura keeps in touch with her office via video chatting the way people use Zoom for meetings nowadays. I know we had webcams back then, but being early 1999 when this movie was filmed (it has a release date of February 11th, 2000), the internet capabilities we had back then were not conducive to having long video calls the way we do now. I mean my family was on dial-up until sometime in 2006 or 2007, just before I started college. She also had a cell phone that could connect to other countries. Was that possible back in 1999 and 2000? Like I said, it was a decent storyline.
Tom's storyline is kind of the same in a way. While it goes longer than Laura's does, it's clearly not the central focus of the film, since this is a movie aimed at kids. It is fun to see Chevy Chase go up against John Schneider though. At this point Schneider had gone up against Boss Hogg and Rosco on The Dukes of Hazzard and would take on the Luthors and Jor-El on Smallville only a year and a half later. But he couldn't beat Chevy Chase. Not that he actually tried, but it was still fun to watch.
Natalie's story is the weakest of the four. The characters are fine and the actors are pretty great but kids trying to prevent a snow plow driver from doing his job, just so they can have an extra snow day is kind of weak. It's funny at moments, but a touch unbelievable as a snow plow driver doesn't make for a very good villain. This is produced by Nickelodeon though, so they have this kind of "villain" in many of their shows and movies especially around this era.
My favourite of the four storylines is Hal's. I think it's because I can relate to both him and Lane in a weird way. While I was a teenage boy who wanted to go out with a certain type of girl when I was in middle school and high school, and that type of girl didn't reciprocate those feelings, I was also a person who had a crush on a friend, but they'd be trying to date someone else without even realizing that I wanted to go out with them. I also feel bad for Claire as well, because she's being chased by all these guys who think she's pretty, but don't know anything about her, has to deal with her ex-boyfriend who is a jerk, AND has this stalker dude (Hal) who creepily knows more about her than Chuck does, even though she and Chuck had been together for three years. I'm actually kind of surprised that Chuck doesn't terrorize the younger kids on snow days.
The cast in this movie is insane. Every few minutes it felt like I saying "I recognize that person!" much like I was doing when Katie and I watched Freaky Friday (1976) on Disney+ a few months ago. I mean you have veteran actors with Chevy Chase, John Schneider, Jean Smart, and Chris Elliot, the teen actors who were starting to transition into adult and college age roles, and then the younger up and coming cast members who would be in various movies and TV show roles throughout the 2000s. Obviously I know Chevy Chase from the Vacation movies, as well as Community and a cameo in Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird!, I know John Schneider from The Dukes of Hazzard and Smallville, I remember seeing Jean Smart in a later season of Frasier as well as the 2004 film Garden State, and Chris Elliot played Lilly's dad on How I Met Your Mother in several episodes. After this movie I'd end up seeing Mark Webber as Stephen Stills in the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and Emmanuelle Chriqui is currently playing Lana Lang on Superman & Lois.
Other cast members that show up in this movie I recognize more from other people talking about them. Like Josh Peck I'm not overly familiar with as I've never seen Max Keeble's Big Move or the TV show Drake & Josh. Zena Gray is also in Max Keeble's Big Move. Then there are two actors that I only know from things after this movie, aside from Mark Webber and Emmanuelle Chriqui. They are David Paetkau, who I know from the Canadian police drama, Flashpoint where he played Sam Braddock, who was with Amy Jo Johnson's character, Jules, as well as the ghost of Beck McKaye on the Canadian teen drama Whistler alongside Amanda Crew. The other cast member that I know from other things first is Carly Pope, who played Susan Williams, a reporter that Oliver ends up dating on Arrow during season 5.
Schuyler Fisk, who plays Lane in this movie, isn't in anything else that I've seen. She's in the 2002 teen film Orange County but I've never seen it. I've just heard about it because Jack Black is in it. And I think it's the reason The O.C. couldn't've been called Orange County or it inspired Josh Schwartz to call the show The O.C.? I don't actually know, I just remember that movie having some sort of connection to The O.C. that Josh Schwartz mentioned in one of the bonus features on the DVDs or in an interview somewhere. Either way I've heard of Orange County but I haven't seen it. Apparently Carly Pope is also in that movie oddly enough.
This movie is very much a late 90s or early 2000s kids film. The kind my siblings I watched alot when we were kids. 2000 is a weird year because there's still tons of 90s stuff still around, but it doesn't quite start the advancements in technology that we'd see in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. So it's sort of a best of both worlds sort of thing. Which I like alot.
Before last night's viewing I'd seen Snow Day only twice. Both in the 2000s. My parents rented it for me on VHS back in like late 2000 or sometime in 2001, not long after the movie had been released on home video. I don't remember why they rented it for me or if my siblings watched it with me, but there must've been something going on that I couldn't participate in for whatever reason, so my parents rented it for me as a special personal movie night. I remember enjoying it. Then, a few years later, once I had the TV/VCR combo set in my bedroom, so sometime between 2002 and 2006, I actually saw the movie on TV one weekend and watched it again.
It's not the greatest movie ever, but it's fun. At only an hour and twenty-nine minutes, this movie went by pretty quickly. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to you, especially if it's not a movie you're even vaguely familiar with being that you didn't grow up during that era or had kids during that era. Overall I had a great time revisiting this film. It was cheesy and stupid but I like those kinds of movies and the characters were fun. It also serves as a time capsule, because kids today don't get snow days the way I used to get them when I was a kid.
And that is going to be it for me for this week. I'll be back next week with another comic book review where I'll be talking about the first six issues of The Amazing Spider-Girl and then for next week's movie review I'll be reviewing the 1993 film Matinee starring John Goodman. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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