`Aspen Extreme': Skiing Is Believing

XX 1/2 "Aspen Extreme," with Paul Gross, Peter Berg, Fionla Hughes, Teri Polo, William Russ, Trevor Eve, Martin Kemp, William McNamara. Directed and written by Patrick Hasburgh. Aurora, Crossroads, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Kent, Metro, Newmark, Parkway Plaza, Seatac Mall Cinemas. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised, due to language, nudity. ----------------------------

A male-bonding tearjerker that sometimes resembles "Top Gun" on the Colorado ski slopes, "Aspen Extreme" is a more watchable movie than you might expect from a former ski instructor who's making his feature-film debut as a writer-director.

Patrick Hasburgh, who left his skiing job years ago to become a writer, ended up writing and producing several television shows, including the Fox network hit, "21 Jump Street." This script apparently borrows from his own experiences in Aspen in the early 1970s, and enough of it rings true to make the formulaic plot developments of the second half seem especially unfortunate.

Paul Gross, a Canadian actor who has an easy Tom Cruise manner, plays a would-be writer from Michigan who persuades his best friend (Peter Berg) to drop everything, leave his dead-end Detroit job and join him in Aspen. Berg is afraid they'll look like the Beverly Hillbillies when they reach the land of celebrities who can afford to pay $400 a day for skiing lessons, and in a sense he's right.

"You're the fantasy," says the snobbish ski-school head who hires Gross but is less enthusiastic about Berg. "Your friend is not."

While Berg is handed a Santa Claus suit and told to baby-sit beginning skiers, Gross is assigned the prime celebrities. A wealthy spider woman (Fionla Hughes) who always gets "the pick of the litter" beds him, although Gross is more interested in the local disc jockey (Teri Polo), an Aspen native who brushes him off with the news that she stopped dating ski instructors when she was 16.

Meanwhile, Berg gets into trouble with a drug deal, Gross gets serious about his writing career, and each saves the other's life before having a falling-out over Hughes and Polo.

"We're not married," says Berg when he's trying not to seem possessive, yet theirs is the only substantial relationship in the movie. While Hughes, Polo, William Russ, Trevor Eve and several other capable actors are handed types to play, there's a George-and-Lennie pathos about these friends, and Berg is especially fine in the Lennie role.

It's just too bad Hasburgh can't come up with a sharper, less contrived ending, or deal in depth with the one aspect of the film that has some resonance.