The Snow Queen: Thoughts on Frozen

About Disney's Frozen:

1. Frozen is a musical! After all the complaints I've made about faux musicals like Brother Bear where the characters' feelings are expressed through music but the characters don't actually sing, Frozen has its characters belting. The movie's story is told through song. The plot advances through song. It's wonderful.

2. And they cast singers. No Hollywood community-theatre version of a musical here: Frozen stars Idina Menzel (Wicked), Jonathan Groff (Spring Awakening), Josh Gad (Book of Mormon), Santino Fontana (Cinderella), and Maia Nkenge Wilson (Book of Mormon). The only Hollywood star is Kristen Bell, who, incidentally sings beautifully.

3. The only bad part about this is that the film eventually stops being a musical. There is room for an awesome eleven-o'clock number like "The Mob Song" (that "Kill the Beast" tune) in Beauty and the Beast, but Frozen is done with songs by the time we get to the final section of the movie. It's a pity. Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez's songs are great; giving us more of them would have made the film even better.

4. Frozen is a kind of spoof on the traditional princess story. In a good way. It has the same kind of silly Disney-princess in-jokes as Tangled (the film looks like Tangled, too). Love at first sight, the true love's kiss, and "the one" all come in for criticism in Frozen, and the filmmakers gentle poking at these ideas is good fun and quite funny.

5. The film also looks really cool. The snow is beautiful and the art direction looks great.

6. The script is a bit of a mess, though. There are plot holes galore: Why didn't the trolls help Elsa deal with her powers? How does love solve everyone's problems? Why couldn't Elsa at least talk to Anna, you know, through the door? (Surely, they could've played twenty questions at the very least.) What does Elsa eat up there on North Mountain? Why did Elsa need to take off her gloves to hold the scepter? Why didn't Professor Xavier come and take her to his mutant school?

7. There is an adorable baby reindeer. Seriously, he is the cutest thing.

8. There is also a snowman (played by Josh Gad), who has a totally different look than the other characters. It was cool that he looked like this, and he was way less annoying in the film than he was in that teaser trailer where he's falling apart all over the ice. But the trolls, too, have a different, less realistic look than the rest of the Frozen's characters, and that didn't really make much sense.

9. I think the music is the showcase here. The first real song, "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", is heartbreaking and funny by turns, and also tells a beautiful story in a very short amount of time. It is a perfect use of a song in a movie: on the level of Aladdin's "One Jump Ahead". Okay, I overstate. "One Jump Ahead" is a brilliant song and "Snowman" is not nearly as perfect as that, but look at the sparkle of these lyrics:

Do you wanna build a snowman?
Come on, let's go and play.
I never see you anymore,
Come out the door;
It's like you've gone away.
We used to be best buddies,
And now we're not;
I wish you would tell me why.
Do you wanna build a snowman?
(It doesn't have to be a snowman.)
Okay, bye.

10. I loved that the movie was about true love being love between sisters. This is a movie about young women coming into their own. This is not a movie about true love or any of that nonsense. Instead, two sisters learn to deal with something that has torn them apart. The most important relationship in Frozen is a sororal one. And unlike Brave, Frozen doesn't propose to instruct young women about correct modes of behavior, focusing instead on the love between sisters as a priority. This is extraordinary for a Princess movie.

2011's Nominees: Part 11 of 12

HEREAFTER

1 Nomination:

  · Best Visual Effects

Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Matt Damon, Cécile de France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, Thierry Neuvic, Jessica Griffiths, Jay Mohr

 
Haven't seen this one (this is the last of these, so I can stop having shame about it.) But let's talk about Clint Eastwood for a second. It is odd how the Academy is really into him sometimes and then other times they just sort of ignore him. I mean, he makes a picture that everyone is head-over-heels about like Mystic River or Million Dollar Baby or Letters from Iwo Jima but then his film Gran Torino gets virtually no buzz, while a film like Changeling can grab a couple of nominations but no real traction. It is odd to me that his films don't really pick up much steam any more, or rather that they are so critically hit or miss. No one really paid attention to Hereafter when it came out, despite the presence of Matt Damon, whereas last year's Eastwood movie Invictus (which I thought was mostly a load of sentimental nonsense) got Damon his second Oscar nomination. I don't understand any of this, I have to admit. 

Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: Not Yet Rated

TANGLED

1 Nomination:

  · Best Original Song: Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid x2, Beauty and the Beast x3, Aladdin x2, Pocahontas, Hercules, Enchanted x3), Glenn Slater

Director: Nathan Greno, Byron Howard
Cast: Donna Murphy, Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi

 
This movie was cute but really odd. First of all, there are really only these three voices in the film. Everyone else is kind of silent. This is not exactly true, but for the most part no one speaks in the movie. Even the king and queen who are Rapunzel's parents have basically no lines. And I found the songs kind of strange, as well. The movie has some really cool moments – the sequence in the poster with the floating lights being its high point – but it is overall rather uneven. I don't think the song has much of a chance of winning here. Menken is a multiple winner and this is hardly his best work. You will also have noted that Tangled is conspicuously absent from the Best Animated Feature nominees. The translation of that is that the Academy didn't care for the movie very much.


Will Win: N/A
Might Win: N/A
My Rating: #29 out of 48

COUNTRY STRONG

1 Nomination:

  · Best Original Song: Troy Verges, Hillary Lindsey, Tom Douglas

Director: Shana Feste
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim McGraw, Leighton Meester

 
Okay, I am going to take this moment to defend this movie a little bit. Not that the movie is good or that it works, but I think Shana Feste was really trying to tell a story here that doesn't get told very frequently. The story of the film is actually the story of a depressive woman – a woman is not going to get back on her feet, who is too depressed, for whom life is literally too much to deal with. The film is billed as a kind of triumph-over-your-problems drama, but it cannot deliver on this because director Feste is actually interested in telling this important story. So she avoids cliché when it comes to Gwyneth Paltrow's character. The trouble is, that the film isn't about Paltrow's character. The film is about the main male character, played (smolderingly) by Garrett Hedlund. And every part of the Garrett Hedlund plot is ridden with clichés. So I think Country Strong is an honest film trapped inside a dishonest one. It doesn't work; that much is true, but I think it is rather an honorable failure. As for the music, I loved it. There are more than a few (i.e. seven or more) really good songs on the soundtrack, and while I don't particularly like country music, I have found myself listening to the cd on my way into work in the mornings belting "I get a little bit stronger / I'm done hopin' we can work it out / I'm done with how it feels / Spinnin' my wheels / And lettin' you drag my heart around" with a country twang. Judge away.
 
Will Win: N/A
Might Win: Original Song
My Rating: #33 out of 48