In 2014, a Swedish/French/Norwegian/Danish film called Force Majeure won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It proceeded to win the hearts of festival-goers over the next several months, and was selected as Sweden’s submission to the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language Film category. It didn’t make it as a nominee, but it did score a similar nomination at the Golden Globes. These accolades prompted a bidding war for the rights to remake the film in English, and Fox Searchlight snatched those rights up less than a year after Force Majeure premiered.
At the latest, Fox Searchlight’s acquisition happened sometime in late 2015. Fox would remain silent about its progress for just over four years, and frankly, I wasn’t even aware that a remake was happening. When looking at the lineup for Sundance 2020, I noticed that Downhill was one of the big “premiere” films at the festival. It should be noted that Sundance has a special non-competition category for films made by larger studios, and from what I can tell, it exists primarily to generate revenue for the festival. Studios will pay a high price for the label, “premiered at Sundance,” and often use this as an advertising gimmick. It all feels quite antithetical to the spirit of film festivals, but I suppose it isn’t possible for Robert Redford to subsidize Sundance’s expenses forever. Still, these are often the films to avoid at a festival, because it’s blatantly obvious that they weren’t “selected” in the same way as other submissions.
In the case of Downhill, the decision to premiere at Sundance made sense. Force Majeure was a huge success at the festival in 2014, so there’s already a built-in audience due to the notorious brand loyalty of Sundancers. Unfortunately, and rather unsurprisingly, Downhill is a train wreck. Aside from a lengthy production period, our first tip that something was amiss came in the form of casting – the male and female leads are played by Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, respectively.
I’m aware that, by now, it’s essentially standard practice to heavily criticize the American remake of a foreign film, and it’s important to understand that this practice isn’t necessarily positive. There are plenty of examples of successful remakes out there – some rivaling their source material or simply being great films in their own right, and others finding more success with a larger budget and a different cultural context. The Austrian film Funny Games, for example, was remade shot-for-shot in English with American actors by its own director, largely because its message was aimed at the American film industry and its consumers. The decision to set the original film in Austria was entirely motivated by a lack of finances, so it makes sense for its American remake to exist. In the case of Force Majeure, however, it’s exceedingly obvious that its remake is the product of studio exploitation and laziness.
If that’s the case, why should I even bother talking about Downhill? Won’t this inevitably result in yet another unfair analysis of both films as they relate to each other, rather than a look at the quality of either film?
At this point in my life, I don’t possess the time or energy to take a steaming dump on every English-language remake. Most of them are terrible, some even notably so. I could devote an entirely separate website to this practice (or deriding it), but at some point, remake-bashing becomes a rather whiny, lazy, and pedestrian practice. When you set out to read a review of the recent Pet Sematary remake, you fully expect the author to trash the film and ignore its own merits (assuming there are any) in favor of comparison. The “how” is the only surprise left in critiques of this nature, because the “why” is blatantly obvious.
The aforementioned perspective is the reason I hesitate to go down this rabbit hole. Downhill is a terrible, shitty film, and that’s not very surprising. The contrast between the film and its original is even of a similar nature to that of most European-to-American remakes, so I’m not entirely treading new ground. Ultimately, my eagerness to talk about both of these films stems from the experience of watching them back-to-back, and the shockingly obvious reasons why one film works and the other does not. Just as Battlefield Earth is a great introduction to how and why shoddy camerawork can unintentionally make you feel physically uncomfortable, Downhill is a paragon of how and why European-to-American adaptations tend to fail.
The experience of viewing both films side-by-side left me simultaneously mortified and impressed. I quite often found my mouth agape in awe, first in admiration of Force Majeure’s subtle yet offbeat take on its subject matter, and eventually in disgust at Downhill’s utter obliviousness to what made the previous film special. It is not the failure of Downhill that compels me to bring this up, but rather the incredible magnitude of that failure.
As is probably obvious by now, I loved Force Majeure. It’s a film I was aware of after its initial release, but it seemed to disappear quickly. Two incidents prompted me to pay a little more attention. The director’s subsequent film, The Square, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017, and I thoroughly enjoyed its style. Also, Force Majeure had a very modest presence in several of the “best of the decade” lists that cropped up in early 2020. For whatever reason, even after so much praise from critics that I respect, I continued to put off actually watching the film.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine made what was, in his mind, a shameful admission – he had recently seen the latest Will Ferrell movie. I would normally agree with his sentiment of shame, but he was fascinated by how awkwardly terrible the film was. He responded in disbelief when I told him that Downhill was a remake of an art-house film, so of course, we had to watch Force Majeure together. His reaction was one of shock and giddy confusion, and I knew I would end up writing about one or both of these films, in some capacity.
I’d love to tread very lightly here regarding spoilers, but unfortunately it’s the subtle parallels and differences between the two films that make them worth mentioning at all. To make matters worse, about half of the very brief plot synopses you’ll read will contain spoilers, debatably. On the other hand, I really don’t feel that spoilers (beyond the most obvious one) will ruin the viewing experience for either of these films too much. As such, use your own judgment.
Force Majeure
The film concerns itself with a traditional family of four: a father, mother, daughter, and son. They’re vacationing in the French Alps, primarily for skiing purposes. It’s important to note that, while this is a Swedish family, the mother is Norwegian. The original Swedish title of the movie was “Turist,” which means exactly what you think it means in English. Throughout the film, characters speak Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, French, and English, because the family are staying at an popular ski resort. I don’t necessarily have a perfect ear for discerning languages, but especially from the portions in English, I’m fairly certain that the languages spoken are used to display examples of miscommunication, a running theme throughout. Some of this is played for understated humor, but that artistic choice serves to create an environment where the barrier of language is an isolating factor.
The earliest portion of the film is cut with lingering footage of skiers and snow-covered mountains. It begins very slowly, as we’re introduced to each member of the family and their characteristics through some mostly-uneventful naturalistic dialog. The first ten minutes, in spite of feeling a bit glacial, are still able to set up the events that follow through perfectly normal familial interactions, and not much discernible dialog.
After the family’s first day at the resort, they decide to have lunch on the patio of a restaurant situated next to a mountain. As they eat, they begin to notice the beginnings of a large avalanche rolling down the mountain, seemingly headed straight toward them. For a brief moment, many of the guests begin to panic, believing that they may perish in the resulting damage. When the snow hits the patio, no one is hurt, but it creates white-out conditions, obscuring the action of the scene as the snow slowly dissipates. The restaurant’s patrons work to ensure everyone is alright once the panic dies down. This all occurs in a single take.
How the characters react to this event is the centerpiece of the entire film. At first, the father (Tomas) consoles his wife Ebba and their two children by telling them that it’s likely a controlled avalanche. As the snow approaches more rapidly, Tomas attempts to prompt his children to flee. When it finally hits, he turns tail and runs without his family, falling over the other guests in a mad rush to survive, but he only makes it a short distance. He leaves his family behind for a brief period, and returns to check on them. Immediately after this, they go skiing.
When Ebba confronts Tomas about his momentary abandonment, he denies his actions, painting a slightly different picture of what happened. This leads to tension among the entire family. Tomas and Ebba spend much of the film in conversation with various guests at the resort, usually couples, sparring back and forth regarding whether or not Tomas’ actions were excusable. Brady Corbet is the male portion of one of these couples, which was a welcome surprise, because he’s fucking brilliant in everything he touches and you can never convince me otherwise.
Following the day of the incident, Ebba announces that she’d like to go skiing by herself, leading the children to believe that there may be enough marital strife to merit a divorce, which alarms them greatly. Tomas wanders off by himself, feeling shut off by his family, and heads to a bar where he engages in some pretty odd drunken antics with a handful of shirtless men guzzling beer on a dimly-lit dance floor. The sequence is filmed with artistic excess to avoid the potential for that lame, frat-boy-party style that we often see when a character decides to break away from the plot for a “wild” diversion. Force Majeure not only subverts this trope, but adequately conveys both the beauty and emptiness that inevitably come along with such endeavors.
Tomas eventually begins to unravel, and breaks down sobbing in front of his entire family, who proceed to mostly forgive him. During their final ski session, they run into white-out conditions. Ebba becomes separated from the family for a while, and Tomas is naturally concerned. He tells his children to wait right where they are while he retrieves her. As the camera lingers on the children, we hear the rescue – Ebba fell and hurt herself only a little, and Tomas leads her back to the family. They finish out their run, and leave the resort.
Throughout, characters have mused endlessly about whether or not Tomas’ reaction to the controlled avalanche was a sign of his inadequacy as a father, or an involuntary reaction to perceived mortal danger. While no concrete answer to that question is found, what Tomas apologizes to his family for IS for being an inadequate father. The apology is ultimately accepted out of pity for Tomas’ guilt.
With that in mind, the final sequence is the grand thematic punch-line to the entire film. While on a bus heading down a mountain trail, their driver begins to steer erratically. There’s a bit of a language barrier, so it takes him quite a while to understand why his passengers are yelling at him. Tomas tries to keep everyone calm and get through to the driver, who’s getting a little too close to the edge of the road for everyone’s comfort. Eventually, Ebba can stand no more. She screams for him to stop the bus, and while the other passengers are still figuring out the best course of action, she bolts out of the bus before anyone else – leaving her family inside. All of the passengers slowly exit the vehicle, everyone calms down, and the film ends on a shot that pans across the entire group as they walk down the mountain, each one reacting a bit differently. You can see the contemplative shame on Ebba’s face, the confusion and fatigue of the children, and the smug, self-satisfied intermittent grin of Tomas as he realizes that he’s definitely off the hook now that his wife has had a similar experience to his own. It’s fantastic.
9/10
One of the primary qualities of Force Majeure is expert subtlety, and there are a number of less-noticeable quirks that make the film unique. The director clearly has some strange affinity for YouTube and internet culture.
The score is fairly sparse, and it’s not often present. However, when it is, it’s comprised of ripped audio from a YouTube video of a 12-year-old boy playing Vivaldi’s Summer Sonata on a Bayan (type of accordion.) The inciting incident in which a controlled avalanche goes awry and douses a bunch of restaurant patrons is loosely inspired by another viral video. The way the bus scene unfolds is nearly identical to the tastelessly-named viral video, “Idiot Spanish bus driver almost kills students”. Tomas’ cries as he begs his family for forgiveness one final time are inspired by the “Best cry ever” meme. The premise of whether or not one is a bad parent if they flee from mortal danger without first rescuing their children is loosely inspired by a Seinfeld episode called, “The Fire”. I’m unsure if these examples (and their sources) have any thematic significance, but they’re definitely noteworthy. There are other strange bits of trivia around Force Majeure, but we’d be here all day if I continued.
The primary theme of Force Majeure is one that doesn’t really require a critical analysis, because the film spends much of its time exploring the ethics around Tomas’ actions. However, there are several more subtle themes at play that I could pick apart and muse over. Unfortunately, that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because Downhill exists.
Downhill
Force Majeure, while sometimes darkly humorous, is a dramatic film. I’ve seen some rather disparate opinions regarding which genre it truly belongs to, but I really don’t believe it was intended to be a laugh-out-loud comedy. Someone from Fox Searchlight must have thought otherwise, and somewhere along the journey to remake the film, it became a comedy. A Will Ferrell comedy. At the same time, Downhill does try to preserve some of the dramatic weight of the original, and in doing so clips its own comedic wings. This is definitely a comedy, but it’s definitely not funny.
When there’s a large time gap between a studio acquiring the rights to remake a film and the availability of the final product, one might suspect that it had a troubled production. The writer/directors attached to the film weren’t announced until 2018, so I’m guessing they weren’t exactly the studio’s first choice – Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Faxon has been playing lame side-characters in bad comedies for decades, and he’s been writing and producing off-and-on for just as long. Jim Rash might be a slightly more recognizable name, because he played the dean in Community, and his distinct image and voice are hard to miss.
This duo first collaborated with Alexander Payne on the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Descendants, the George Clooney film you aren’t sure if you’ve seen before, but definitely have. A few years later, they both wrote and directed The Way, Way Back, a mediocre coming-of-age indie-rock-laden dramedy that was released about six years too late. All indicators point to Searchlight Pictures dropping this project in their laps simply to throw them a bone, or perhaps fulfill a contract. This likely contributes to the lifeless feel of Downhill.
Almost immediately, Downhill makes some piss-poor attempts to pay homage to its source material. The opening scene is shot-for-shot the same, with a man awkwardly trying to take a picture of the family. For the next 27 seconds, the film recreates at least five shots from Force Majeure (sometimes painstakingly), each of which lasted 30-60 seconds individually in their original incarnation. Much of what makes the slow build-up of the original film so interesting is the way all of this gorgeous footage of snowy mountains is juxtaposed with each scene. There is nothing deliberately slow about the cinematography in Downhill.
This becomes a problem throughout (there are plenty of “let’s insert three seconds of Force Majeure here” moments), and it highlights just one of the many failings of this remake. Downhill wants to include all the pretty snow scenes, but it has absolutely no concept of why they existed in Force Majeure, and it has no respect for its audience’s attention span. They go by so quickly that their usefulness to the flow of the film is stunted, and they become disruptive. I imagine it’s even more jarring if you haven’t seen the original, and it never stops.
The family walk to their resort to check in, and have a brief, inconsequential conversation. The moment the parents enter the hotel, the children disappear. During check-in and settling in, the children are never in the shot. In fact, they just fuck off entirely until the plot needs them to do something. In this scenario, they are gone for at least six minutes before reappearing during a skiing sequence. It seems like a shameful editing choice, but really, the entire film focuses on the parents, leaving the children as accessories.
Instead of the quick scene where the family checks into the resort in the original, Downhill uses this plot point as an attempt at cheap laughs. The couple meet Miranda Otto’s character, who has an exaggerated Scandinavian-esque accent that only passes as “not racist” because it’s so obviously the result of ineptitude and carelessness, like everything else in this god-forsaken movie. She outs herself as a sexual libertine in her third or fourth line of dialog, and the gag goes on entirely too long. This is as close as we get to exploring cultural alienation in the way Force Majeure did.
When the family arrive at their room, Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus make themselves at home and have dinner in bed. (That’s Ferrell and JLD from here on out, because their characters are the same ones they’ve both been playing for years.) This highlights one of the worst aspects of Downhill – it’s so unfunny that I have trouble identifying when the film is even ATTEMPTING to be funny. For example, Ferrell and JLD have a conversation in bed while eating, and JLD goes to the bathroom. For no discernible reason, Ferrell begins rapidly shoving fries into his mouth. It looks like the lead-up to a joke, or perhaps a punch line, but instead Ferrell follows JLD into the bathroom as they have a completely unrelated conversation. At some point in all this mess, it’s revealed that Ferrell has recently lost his father and is grieving. That too is treated as a joke at various points in the film, and it also serves to over-explain his actions.
This leads us to Downhill’s interpretation of its source’s inciting incident (which was a single shot that lasted about 90 seconds.) The family sit down for their meal as they plan their day. The avalanche takes its sweet time coming down the mountain, because we need time to cut to each character’s face to see how they’re feeling. While there was at least a half-hearted attempt by Tomas in the original to pull his kids out of the way, Ferrell instead gets this incredibly dumb look on his face and then runs away like every other scared man-child he’s played in his career, phone in hand. That’s when the camera goes full-on disaster movie. Afterward, Ferrell walks back as if nothing happened (his family has only ducked, and not moved from their original positions in the slightest.) He makes every attempt to divert their attention from the situation, and even goes as far as to order a bowl of soup while his family is still recovering. This response is far more brazenly shitty than it needed to be, and it feels a lot like JLD spends the rest of the film salty that Ferrell ordered soup. I’m generally not one to call out little changes like that, but this is a change so integral to the subtlety of the inciting incident that it makes the rest of the film rather confusing.
While preparing to ski once more, Ferrell notices that his son is about to be crushed between two shelving units. He runs to his rescue, even though it’s fairly obvious that his son was never in any real danger in the first place. The child is fine, and JLD is confused as to why Ferrell behaved so protectively.
This is representative of a small character change that has a significant impact on the story’s arc. Force Majeure lets the tension among the family build very, very slowly, and for a while doesn’t really give us too many hints of any tension at all. Downhill has Ferrell immediately becoming overprotective and defensive in an absurd way, which immediately destroys any chance of subtlety regarding the film’s direction. It’s also confusing, because Ferrell displays his protective instincts BEFORE his family berates his actions.
Ferrell and JLD go to dinner with oversexed Miranda Otto and her current lover, who she berates outright. This is where JLD reveals her feelings about the avalanche incident, and embarrasses Ferrell publicly, and it highlights the differences between Force Majeure’s couple and these terrible actors. The conversation plays out like a comedy of errors that happens to feature JLD and Ferrell. They’re basically doing a really terrible unaired SNL sketch where Ferrell consistently attempts to talk over JLD, which passes for comedy in some circles. Miranda Otto introduces the idea that they may want to complain about the avalanche to “the manager,” and JLD is all about that.
As the family await the arrival of the manager in his office the next morning, he arrives via snowmobile. The vehicle splashes some snow against the window behind the family, which startles them, and the manager dismounts his snowmobile and stops for a moment as the camera lingers on him…probably so we all notice that this man is Kristofer Hivju, who had a major role as Tomas’ work friend in Force Majeure. I get the impression that they’re trying to play this off as a joke, but I’m not entirely sure.
During the encounter with the manager, we discover that JLD is a bit of a Karen. She may not have a Karen haircut, but she’s out for blood in the most passive-aggressive way imaginable, and some vague concept of “the manager” is her natural enemy. She complains as Ferrell tries to be the good guy, pointing out the positives in the situation (nobody’s dead) and attempting to divert his wife’s attention from the potential damage she’s about to do. She threatens legal action of course, and JLD does her “I’m so angry that I’m awkward” thing. Again.
Once JLD sets out on the war path, she’s actively cruel to Ferrell for most of the film. Ferrell is in an idiot, but I can’t really say his character in this particular film deserved such a horrible partner. As the couple separate and have their own adventures, JLD nearly cheats on Ferrell while he’s out being an asshole to his children on what he refers to as, “the slide.” It’s a toboggan on rails, I guess, but that word was likely too difficult for Ferrell to pronounce.
At the end of JLD’s journey of near-infidelity, Ferrell heads to the bar just as Tomas did in Force Majeure. I fully expected this scene to turn into a shitty Old School callback, rehashing old Ferrell material, but instead Ferrell drinks for all of a few seconds and begins to get dizzy. His friend escorts him out of the bar.
The couple eat dinner with the kids, and then argue in the hallway in a scene that’s supposed to replace Tomas’ grand apology. It’s acted very poorly, as Ferrell apologizes for being a coward, and JLD essentially tells him it’s too little too late. The emotional impact is minimal, and instead of being the starting point for some serious healing, it’s the setup for a pathetic and formulaic third-act breakup. The couple attempt to hide their contempt for each other in front of the children as they go for their final ski run.
This portion begins much like Force Majeure’s penultimate scene, with JLD getting separated from the family. Ferrell looks for her as the children stand at the bottom of the mountain, and when he finds her, she’s sitting down in the snow, unharmed. JLD fake-cries through a speech about how her husband needs to buck up and be a man, and Ferrell delivers an incredibly half-hearted apology. Finally, JLD proclaims, “This is for our boys, for how they see you,” and prompts Ferrell to pick her up and carry her down the mountain to the boys, in order to fake a rescue. The children, who up until now have been of the overtly-precocious variety, actually buy this fake rescue, which doesn’t mesh with their established character traits in any way.
As they leave the resort, once again forgetting that their children exist, they run into one of the couples they had a few conversations with. All four go in for a hug, I guess, and some snow crashes down on all of them. Each one jumps back a foot or two in surprise, and they look at each other in shock, as if that meant something.
The End.
2/10
No really, that’s it. The entire bus sequence is gone, and instead we get an incredibly trite and random ending that does nothing to address the film’s themes. The finale is one of the strongest parts of Force Majeure. You could even argue that, thematically, it’s the most important moment in the film, and they decided to omit it entirely, replacing it with this flaccid non-ending. I would have been completely okay with the choice to change things up and go with a new ending, if it did something for the plot in any way. It doesn’t, and its intentions are excruciatingly vague.
I’ve gone through a number of potential explanations as to why Downhill exists, and why it’s so fucking terrible, but there’s more to this story than egregious plot differences with no purpose. Issue #1, without a doubt, is that the film is American, and Force Majeure’s strong points rely tremendously on its distinctly European style.
American films are more straightforward and in-your-face in nearly all regards except frontal male nudity. The average shot length of, say, a film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky could be as long as three or more minutes. This is certainly on the long end of the spectrum, but even in 1930, the average shot length for an American production was around 12 seconds. A study conducted in 2010 showed that this number is now at 2.5 seconds. Some of this can be attributed to advances in technology that have allowed cinema to explore a wider breadth of styles, but most of it comes from the evolving notion of what an audience expects from a film and what they’re able to tolerate.
This same study talks about the mind’s natural tendency to wander, and in some ways makes the claim that cinema has caught up to humanity’s attention span. It also argues that a shorter shot length and a wider variety of shot compositions and camera movements are what allow audiences to stay engaged with a film. This interpretation of such a study is part of the problem.
Because the world of film is a capitalist machine like any other American pop-culture industries, priority number one for any studio will always be to make films that pander to as many different audiences as often as possible, because profit. What the industry itself will never take into account is that providing a space for your mind to wander is a cinematic technique used to great effect in both classic and modern cinema. It’s used in a very wide variety of ways for an even wider variety of reasons, and while allowing an audience’s mind to wander may create a more polarizing film, I generally find that it’s the films with a very love/hate reaction that end up meaning the most to the audiences that love them, and to cinema itself. Throughout film history, there are an abundance of examples of negative reactions to works we now see as the pinnacle of the medium. This is an easy one to call on, but Citizen Kane received mixed to negative reactions upon its release, and it’s now practically worshiped as the movie that birthed many modern cinematic techniques. It’s still polarizing, but among audiences rather than critics.
I’m often guilty of trying to attribute the decline in average shot length within American cinema to the decline in the attention span of Americans in general, specifically young people, and yes, I understand that this makes me sound like a whiny boomer complaining about those damn kids with their damn cell phones. Whether or not this correlation (or the claim that attention spans are indeed on the decline) is actually correct doesn’t affect the prevalence of this perspective among film critics, but it does affect the practices of studios and what they decide to green light.
This trend SHOULD act as a deterrent to major studios when deciding whether or not to remake foreign films – especially ones like Force Majeure that thrive heavily on the norms of European film-making. Just about everyone who saw the film before Downhill was announced had a similar reaction – surprise at the casting choices, and concern at the fact that it was marketed as a comedy (with Will Ferrell no less). That concern manifested itself, and as a result, the film did poorly with general audiences.
The movie that Downhill purports to be in its marketing is a laugh-a-minute family comedy, so it’s no wonder general audiences cried bait-and-switch. It tries so hard to be that movie half the time, but for the rest of its runtime, it’s trying to please fans of the original by keeping most of its ideas intact, if slightly altered. There seems to have been no time spent on how the sensibilities of American film could be used to tell the story in a manner more congruent with American film culture. This is Downhill’s second-greatest failing.
The ultimate nail in its coffin is that the Will Ferrell comedy at the forefront is heinously unfunny, even to those who would otherwise enjoy THAT movie. It’s a one-two punch of subjecting your audience to precisely what they never wanted: the painful humor of a failed American comedy, and the potentially-overbearing excesses of an art-house film. And really, without some incredibly clever writers, that’s all Downhill was ever going to be. It was D.O.A. from the moment someone purchased the rights to remake Force Majeure. While there’s a small part of me that admires the effort put in to ensuring that Downhill wasn’t the kind of remake to sweep its original under the rug completely, thus potentially prompting audiences to give Force Majeure a chance, it’s still a film that’s constantly at odds with its own identity.
There’s one last point of note regarding Downhill, and that’s its relationship with the acquisition of Fox Searchlight Pictures by the film industry’s own public enemy #1 – Disney. This is (sort of) the first film from the newly renamed “Searchlight Pictures”, or rather it’s the first to conspicuously omit the word “Fox” from its opening title cards. I really can’t imagine that the transition any company goes through when purchased by Disney is a smooth one, and if this film is any indicator, we will likely continue to see further growing pains as Walt’s successors pursue their media monopoly and impose their own brand of censorship and tendency toward bland, audience-pandering, feel-good pseudo-art on as much of the film industry as they can get their hands on. Many of the issues I’ve addressed regarding Downhill absolutely reek of studio meddling, so while I can’t directly blame Disney with total confidence…it’s probably their fault.
Now, go do your country a favor by burning an effigy of Mickey Mouse, filming it, and posting it on social media. Then watch Force Majeure and try your hardest to forget that some asshole remade it with Will Ferrell.