When you tune into a cozy Christmas rom-com, you can expect a few things. Lots of snow. A quaint small town that seems unstuck from time. A plucky heroine who owns a small business but, for whatever reason, is alone this holiday season. And a hunky man who is the magical answer to her loneliness. The new Netflix film “Hot Frosty,” starring Lacey Chabert and Dustin Milligan, has all of the above and a much deeper understanding of how mutual respect and personal growth can be just as hot as lusty love at first sight. 

Set in the impossibly small town of Hope Springs, the film begins with a narrator letting us know from the start that we are in a “Christmas Fairytale” as a magical burgundy scarf blows across the snowy town square. We then meet Kathy (Chabert), who lives alone in a slightly dilapidated Victorian home. A photo of a couple on the mantle and Kathy’s sad demeanor indicate she has recently loved and lost. Kathy owns a diner, Kathy’s Kafe, which serves as a social hub for the community. She seems to feed everyone in town, including Mel (Sherry Miller) and Theo (Dan Lett), who own the vintage store across the square. Mel bequeaths the magical scarf to Kathy, telling her it’s time to go back out into the cold in order to find some warmth. 

What Kathy finds instead is a chiseled snowman amongst the snow sculpture competition on the square. The wistful Kathy takes in this snowman Adonis, the only Christmas creation without a scarf around its neck. Always one to give to others, Kathy places the scarf around its neck. After she leaves a flurry of snow and CGI brings the sculpted snowman, fully nude aside from the tastefully large scarf, to life. That night Jack (Milligan) names himself after the name tag on a pair of coveralls he steals from the vintage store. The next morning he is taken in by Kathy, who hides him from the town Sheriff (Craig Robinson) and his Deputy (Joe Lo Truglio), who are looking for the streaker who broke the store’s window. You might think you can guess where the film goes from here. 

And you’d be partially right. While two form a bond as Jack attempts to lay low from the law, none of their interactions feel forced for the sake of shoehorned romance, instead the film largely focuses on the strength that can be found in a meaningful friendship. Milligan plays Jack with the same wide-eyed, big-hearted puppy dog energy that he brought to Ted, the vet with a heart of gold on “Schitt’s Creek.” While he could have gone big with this magical character in the vein of Will Ferrell in “Elf,” Milligan chooses a more laid-back sweetness, reminiscent of Brendan Fraser in “George of the Jungle” or Jeff Goldblum in “Earth Girls Are Easy.” Although his ridiculous good looks become a sort of joke as the town’s older women, Lauren Holly amongst them, lust over his physique, they aren’t really a factor in the burgeoning relationship between Jack and Kathy. 

When Jack first comes to life, it seems the only word he knows is ‘love.’ He loves the snow. He loves soup. He loves her. Kathy pushes back, insisting that when you say you love someone, it means something much more. Jack listens intently, taking it all in. As he slowly learns how Kathy lost her husband, the gravity of what she said sinks in, and he learns truly what it means to love someone. For her part, Chabert plays Kathy understated, a woman with a big heart heavy with grief—someone who keeps going for the sake of others but has practically given up on herself. Meeting someone like Jack, whose whole existence is to fill the world with joy and lend a helping hand where he can, gives her a ray of hope once again. Together, they grow as people first and a couple second. 

That’s because romantic love is not the only kind of love on this film’s mind. It knows that love of one’s community, of one’s neighbors, and most importantly of oneself, is important and fulfilling. As Jack learns more about the world, he begins using his skills to help others. Cooking dinner for Kathy escalates to learning how to fix her leaking roof to slowly becoming the town’s handyman. Inspired by Kathy’s own altruism, Jack decides helping others is worth the risk of being caught by the Sheriff. Despite his mysterious origins the town itself just accepts him, snowman or not, rallying to keep him safe. As one woman puts it, “A man that sweet must be magical.”

A top tier holiday film in its own right, the film has the requisite nods to previous films in the Netflix Holiday Movie Universe, including a mention of Aldovia from the “Christmas Prince” movies and a tongue-in-cheek moment where Kathy watches “Falling For Christmas” and notes that the star (Lindsay Lohan) looks “just like a girl she went to high school with.” In terms of its themes and overall quality, it reminded me of the excellent and underrated time travel romance “The Knight Before Christmas.”

Like that earlier film, “Hot Frosty” is goofy and sweet and magical. It knows exactly who its audience is and gifts them with a perfectly cozy Capra-esque fantasy where romance is founded in friendship and respect, communities rally around their most vulnerable, people are willing to call cops out on their abuse of power, and mutual aid is just a way of life. Sounds like bliss to me. 

Arts & Leisure

“The Teachers’ Lounge” was one of this year’s Best Foreign Film nominees — though its closely observed drama set inside a contemporary seventh-grade German classroom could have easily been American.  The film’s protagonist, idealistic young teacher Carla Novak, is new to the school, but she soon finds herself pressured by other teachers to identify which of her students might be responsible for a series of thefts from the teachers’ lounge.

Nine months after U2 wrapped its 40-date residency at Sphere, the veteran Irish rock band is back at the dome-shaped venue just off the Las Vegas Strip.

Well, sort of.

“V-U2” is a new concert movie that documents the group’s high-tech “U2:UV” show, in which singer Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Bram van den Berg (filling in for Larry Mullen Jr.) revisited U2’s media-obsessed 1991 album “Achtung Baby” as they inaugurated the $2-billion building outfitted with the world’s highest-resolution LED screen. U2’s stay at Sphere was a critical and commercial success, blanketing social media with eye-popping video clips and raking in nearly $250 million, according to the trade journal Pollstar — and at a moment when the show’s stiff competition included Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour.

So it’s no wonder that U2 followed Swift and Beyoncé in bringing its show to the screen. Unlike those pop superstars’ films, though, this one you can see only at the place where the band filmed it — at Sphere, that is, where “V-U2” plays on that massive wraparound screen on nights when the Eagles aren’t there for their residency. (Between U2 and the Eagles came gigs at Sphere by Phish and Dead & Company.) Directed by the Edge and his wife, Morleigh Steinberg, “V-U2” opened in September and was just extended through the end of February; tickets to see the movie are pricey, starting at around 100 bucks a pop.

Looking back at “U2:UV,” the Edge, 63, says a Sphere production is “its own distinct kind of art form — a new art form, I think, not just for music but for narrative film, for documentary, for all kinds of presentations. It’s the ability to translocate the audience to a new place, be it real or imaginary.” (Among the vignettes in U2’s show were ones that put the crowd in a pre-Strip desert landscape and amid a menagerie of endangered wildlife species.) “You can’t divorce the scale of the imagery from what you might want to do with it,” the Edge adds. As inspirations, the guitarist cites Christo and Jean-Claude’s 2021 wrapping of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe as well as Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which he calls one of his favorite places in Los Angeles.

“All those tiny miniatures that fit on the head of a needle — I think it’s so beautiful,” he says in a Zoom call from his place in Malibu. “Again, it’s the scale that makes it unique.”

I get the desire to preserve an ambitious live show for posterity. And I get the impulse to sell tickets to folks who didn’t pay to catch the show in person. What was the creative opportunity you saw in making this movie?
You’ve got to understand that there was a huge amount of risk associated with signing on to be the first band [to play Sphere]. It’s all untried and untested technology, and the building — when we first went to see it, it was half-built, OK? So opening night arrives and we literally walk onstage, no idea if it’s going to work. It’s kind of a white-knuckle ride. Coming out of the first few shows, we realized that not only is it working, it’s like all our ideas have landed. That was such a relief.

Then we pivot quite quickly to the thought of filming it, and what does that mean? We go through a process of consideration and elimination as we realize the show is so bespoke to this venue that to try and capture it for a small screen just wouldn’t make any sense. So then we start thinking, Well, what about capturing it for the screen it happens to be on right now? What was here in potential was an immersive experience — maybe the first of its kind — where you can faithfully represent your live performance so that there’s only a few giveaways that it’s not actually happening live in front of you. That was the thrilling proposition.

The goal was to get an audience member to buy the illusion that U2 is onstage.
Yes. The combination of visuals and the audio and the haptics of the seats — all of those things were brought to bear to try and basically turn on its head the whole idea of suspension of disbelief, so that you’re having to remind yourself that it’s not real, as opposed to pretending that it is.

There’s something very U2 about a concert film that you can see only in the place where the concert happened.
I’d love if [media theorist] Marshall McLuhan could see it. What would he think? Since the beginning of touring “Achtung Baby,” we were riffing on this idea of “even better than the real thing.” That wasn’t lost on us. And I have to say: Finally getting to see U2 live was genuinely shocking. It gave me goosebumps. We’re not half-bad.

The first few songs are shot from a steady position in the audience. Then the camera starts moving around.
You don’t want to give that up too soon. You want people to enjoy the show as it was first designed and imagined. Then you give them a tab of acid and it goes in a completely different direction. We wait until “One,” our fifth song [in the set] — that was a good moment to start deconstructing the show to some extent.

A good moment in an emotional sense?
I think that’s always the leading metric for us — the emotional connection. We had [director] Mark Pellington come in, and he was the one who suggested the close-up of Bono in “One,” which was a great call. It breaks the movie out of the conceit of it actually being a live show, and suddenly you shatter the fourth wall.

That close-up of Bono is startling to behold.
I haven’t actually had it measured, but it must be the size of a building.

Did Bono get to approve such a revealing shot of his own face?
Oh, yeah [laughs]. His word to us was: “It can’t be just spectacle — you’ve got to capture the humanity of what’s happening.” So, like, mistakes: Bono stumbled over some of his banter in the introductions, and he wanted to keep that in. This is not overly polished.

U2’s concert movie is scheduled to play at Sphere through the end of February.

(Sphere Entertainment)

My instinct is to scoff at that idea. The whole point of Sphere is polish! But there actually is something kind of raw about the movie.
Part of that is practical. With modern post-production, it’s super simple to alter 35-mill format. But since this is such a massive amount of data, to really do anything too fancy would take months and an eye-watering amount of computer processing to achieve. I’m sure future projects will be able to make that possible. But for us, it was kind of straightforward. We knew there wasn’t an awful lot we could do beyond just make cuts and showcase the moments that we thought were the best representations of the show.

Does this movie pose a threat to live music in any way? You think about this or you think about ABBA’s hologram show in London — both enable bands to offer fans a concert-like experience without having to be there in person.
I don’t see it as a threat — no more of a threat than any concert film. The ABBA thing, which I’ve seen, was really fun, given the fact that no one’s seen ABBA perform in the flesh for generations. But I don’t think any of this negates what exists in live concerts — it’s in addition to those offerings.

How did the Sphere experience shape U2’s live ambitions going forward?
I wouldn’t rule out doing something for the Sphere in the future. But we’re itching to get back to regular concerts. Next thing we have to do is a new record, of course. This project was a celebration of “Achtung Baby,” so we’re anxious to do something that’s about new work. We’re already actively developing new material for what will become a U2 album in the future, and we’ll be back to touring. As much as we loved being able to rely on the sound being great every night, there’s a great momentum to being on the road. And seeing local fans, as opposed to relying on them coming to us — it’s different. We miss it.