Disney's 'Frozen' Warm to the Touch

After nearly a decade of being left in distant third by Pixar and Dreamworks and seeing other rival animation studios surface worldwide, the once legendary Disney Animation has finally regained a serious foothold in today's crowded market. In Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, they have created two of the absolute best family features in recent years (as I've pointed out, Wreck-It Ralph should have won the Best Animated Feature Oscar last year), and while they seem to be returning to a familiar formula with Frozen, directors Chris Buck (Surfs Up and Tarzan) and Jennifer Lee (who also penned the screenplay) show that Disney can still put on a kick-ass song and dance when given the opportunity.

Loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson tale "The Snow Queen", Frozen is about sisters Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel), princesses in the glorious kingdom of Arendelle. For a long time they've been cooped up in their castle, separated not just from the world, but for the most part from one another. This is particularly hard on the lonely Anna, who remembers sharing joyous relationship with her sibling in the past. On the evening of her coronation as Queen, Elsa accidentally reveals to the world a power to control the elements, and when this incident results in her running away and the kingdom being awash in snow (in July), it's up to Anna - alongside gruff mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven and Olaf, a magical, living snowman (Josh Gad) - to becalm her sister and try to get the world back to the peaceful, sunny way things used to be.

Just your typical bubbly, overly-friendly, smart Disney princess... maybe...

For the first act, we are introduced to this land in the best possible way: a combination of lovely ice and snow and Broadway-quality song and dance. We're introduced to the sisters, the reason they drifted apart, and family tragedy, all to the enthusiastic harmonics of "DoYou Want to Build a Snowman" and "For the First Time in Forever". The musical score was assembled by Christophe Beck (whose impressive resume includes Pitch Perfect, The Muppets, and last year's Academy Award-winning short film Paperman) and written by Tony Award-winning songwriter Robert Lopez and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and their combined genius really shines in that first twenty minutes. Those amazing numbers (and to a lesser extent, Menzel's solo performance of "Let it Go") transfix the audience and combine with outstanding visuals to render the average viewer catatonic with emotion. It's the best example I can think of where a movie musical actually carries the charm of a Broadway play, without feeling like a cheap, misunderstanding castoff. It is here that Frozen is at its absolute best, as Beck and Lee make the most of their combined resources and start things off with an impassioned opening salvo of epic set pieces and glorious musical achievement.

No, you may not call him "Bumble".

But somewhere after this point, what makes Frozen truly an unique, prodigious treat is muffled a tad. It's not that the rest of the movie is without charm, or that it is not excellent in its own right; the directors do an amazing job of moving the story forward and keeping you rooting for our likable heroes. But in comparison to that astounding opening, the story just doesn't have the emotional momentum to overcome its limitations, from characters that aren't as deep as they are charming to a definite lack of story development. Besides the opening, Buck and Lee's biggest success is their treatment of the Snow Queen, which when all is said and done is nothing short of miraculous. Menzel's Elsa is not evil or even converted to evil by the fear of the other characters. She's simply misunderstood - more anti-hero than outright villain - and her character never really alters from the very good, very caring character that was established at the beginning. However, the quality of the musical numbers takes a downturn in the second act, and while they're all still quality songs delivered with spunk and dynamism, they don't get any better than those openers. There isn't even a final number - only a reprise of an earlier one - despite a relatively weak ending that would have benefited from a strong closing bit. Finally, despite subverting your expectations of the Disney Princess genre - no doubt due to Lee's work on the screenplay - the film prefers to skew uncomfortably close to that same style, and for the most part doesn't feel different from the Mouse's early, "Damsel in Distress" stories that really ought to feel old-fashioned in this day and age.

Because they have to make a billion dollars in merchandise, as well.

The dialogue is at least razor-sharp, and delivered by a surprisingly elite cast to boot. Sure, you have the unknowns, from Glee's Groff to Broadway star Santino Fontana (playing a seemingly prototypical Prince Charming) who deliver solid efforts. And the twin leads of Bell and Menzell are absolutely perfect, Bell a surprise as her career to this point isn't exactly rich with musical numbers. Nonetheless she does a great job as a charismatic heroine, fitting right in with the likes of Rapunzel, Belle and Pocahontas. Veteran Menzel has never had much of a cinematic career, her biggest effort to date coming in the adaptation of her iconic theatrical role in Rent. More known on Broadway, she takes her combined singing/acting experience and easily converts it to the big screen; some of the film's best moments feature either her understated yet powerful singing or her understated yet compelling acting. The cast is rounded out by veteran voices Ciaran Hinds and Alan Tudyk (though I wish they'd done more with both), and Gad fulfills the comedic sidekick role alongside Sven the silent reindeer. Though both provide laughs (Sven's antics are definitely inspired by Tangled's secondary hero Maximus), they're thankfully not overused, their humor providing just the right amount of levity comparable to their contributions to the plot. It's this excellent use of characters by the directors that keeps both the children and adults in the audience invested in the story through the final two acts.

Don't get in the way of her "Ice Fu".

And these strengths - alongside that stellar opening - are what make Frozen not only the best animated movie this year, but one of the best movies of 2013. There are definitely some gaffes when it comes to Disney's latest effort, and it doesn't come very close to the overall quality of Tangled or Wreck-It Ralph, let alone classics like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, or The Little Mermaid. Or almost anything from Pixar, for that matter. Even when the movie actively departs from its Princess-y roots, it never distances itself enough to morph into anything distinctive (a defect highlighted by the Mickey Mouse short Get a Horse, which runs with it), and the movie as a whole never really lives up to that outstanding first act. But demerits aside, this is a strong, fun, funny, delightfully subversive and emotionally engaging story for children of all ages and a must-see for anyone who has ever had affection for their siblings. It may not end up being long-remembered, but it certainly ought to be fondly remembered in the years to come.

Open Letters Monthly: The Internship

With The Wedding Crashers still popular after almost eight years, filmmakers decided that the Vaughn/Wilson paradigm wasn't done cranking out big money for the industry. Well, turns out they were wrong, but while Google commercial The Internship is no box office juggernaut, it's still a somewhat enjoyable comedy that makes good use not just of it's main two stars, but the bevy of supporting actors helping out.

When watch salesmen Billy and Nick lose their jobs due to the world's increasing internet literacy, it seems their hopes and dreams go with them. But they find themselves with a second chance when the pair succeed at joining an internship program at Google. Now they find themselves in an extremely competetive environment against a hundred or so college hopefuls with only a handful of guaranteed jobs available when all is said and done. Teamed up with a likely band of misfits, and possessing no computer skills whatsoever, Billy and Nick will have to work harder than they ever have before so that they can succeed in grabbing their dreams.

The Internship is directed by Shawn Levy and stars Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, Max Minghella, John Goodman, Jessica Szohr, Dylan O'Brien, Josh Brener, Tobit Raphael, Tiya Sircar, Aasif Mandvi, and Josh Gad.

Click here for the full review at Open Letters Monthly.

Drifting Away

I remember seeing the first Ice Age film back in 2002. It was a resurgent time for animated films, with the likes of Shrek and Monsters Inc. having set new, high standards for cartoon entertainment, and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was was created to finally give recognition to the artistic importance of these movies. Compared to the excellence of titles like Lilo & Stitch, Ice Age was a fine, if not particularly special, release that focused on the survival of mammals during the Paleolithic ice age. I remember LIKING Ice Age, but also thinking that there was no real reason to revisit the lives of Manny the woolly mammoth (Ray Romano), Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the smilodon (Dennis Leary). That's why I've effectively avoided the film's first two sequels over the past decade, and also why only the first Ice Age received a nomination for Best Animated Feature (it lost to Spirited Away), while the others have earned just middling reviews. Still, the series has proved popular with the kids, so Manny and company are back in Ice Age: Continental Drift, and I was just curious enough to see what the three heroes have been up to in the past ten years.

Bet he's starting to look a little tasty right now...

After starting off with the dialogue-less The Longest Daycare starring Maggie Simpson (a wry and fun short), we discover that things have certainly changed for our heroes. No longer alone in the world, Manny has found Ellie, the love of his life (Queen Latifah), and the two have a teenage daughter named Peaches (Keke Palmer), who is just beginning to discover boys. Sid is briefly reunited with the family that abandoned him, only to have them drop off his elderly grandmother Granny (Wanda Sykes) before quickly escaping again. Soon Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel (about the only reason this series has lasted as long as it has) is up to his usual antics, finding a place to bury his beloved acorn. When this action causes the breakup of Pangaea into the continents we now know, our Manny, Sid and Diego are separated from their herd on a small, uncontrollable iceberg. Soon Manny and his crew (alongside Granny, who accidentally tags along for the ride) find themselves the targets of pirates, led by the gorilla Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage) and his feline first mate Shira (Jennifer Lopez). It's a race home for our heroes, who won't let anything get between Manny and the reuniting of his family.

Look, it's the foreign box office! Start paddling!

I'll give this to the new Ice Age; the animation is much better than I expected. All the previews I have seen had led me to believe that the computer animation, especially the background art, would pale in comparison to other recent contemporary fare, even less than mediocre titles Kung Fu Panda 2 or Puss in Boots. Fortunately, what looks like bad animation on small screens actually comes to life on the big ones. It's still nothing in comparison to anything you've seen in a Pixar title, but the backgrounds are amazingly lifelike, and the character animations are fluid and spotless.

His heart, it breaks.

Sadly the story is what really lacks any depth, though this does have the benefit of making it easy for the children in the audience to follow along. Manny and company's story pits them consistently against Gutt's pirates, with apparently no other major predators residing in the middle of the ocean. Meanwhile the biggest story on the mainland is not escaping the slow moving rock wall that threatens to wipe out the herd, but Peaches' discovery that the boy she has a crush on is not all he turns out to be. Meanwhile Scrat's story is more out of favor than usual, and while he is still the film's most entertaining character, his skits are far closer in quality to the rest of the story than they used to be. Or maybe I'm just getting older. But where the story lacks depth it makes up for in honesty, as the motivations and desires of all the main characters is easy enough to follow for both adults and their kids.

Not the kind of people you want to meet in the middle of the ocean.

Directors Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier also do a great job putting together a cast that, with very few exceptions, feel at home in this ice-cold world. Still, this film wasn't a challenge for everyone. While the returning Romano, Leary, and Latifah had to just be themselves, only Leguizamo and newcomers Palmer and Josh Gad feel as though they're playing actual characters in a story. Still, the interplay between Manny, Sid and Diego more than makes up for any lack of creativity on the actors' side, and Latifah and Palmer hold their own in their storyline. The pirates are also a lively bunch, featuring the talented voices of Dinklage (the image of Tyrion Lannister playing a giant gorilla makes me smile inside), Nick Frost, Aziz Ansari and Rebel Wilson in what might be the best additions to the franchise. And Sykes has the perfect voice and comedic timing to make her character even more timeless as Scrat. But not everyone's inclusion was a slam dunk; when did Jennifer Lopez become so DRY a performer? Shira's potential romance with Diego means little when you just don't care about her, no matter how many cliched transformations the villain-turned-hero undergoes. And why did the producers bother going through the casting and promoting of musical artists Drake and Nicki Minaj when the pair would do so little, and not even all that well? These gripes are thankfully limited, and the cast on the whole does what needs to be done to make the film an entertaining experience.

I know who I'm rooting for.

In the end, Ice Age:Continental Drift ends up quite close in quality to this past June's Madagascar 3. That's not too bad a place to be, as most animated films released this year have been somewhat underwhelming, even the admittedly highly-anticipated Brave. Only time will tell how well we remember this latest Ice Age outing, but this was certainly better than some of the award-nominated fare in the last few years, and the franchise is still popular enough to churn out a few more sequels. I can actually recommend this one to adults as well as kids, and that's probably the best thing I've ever said about an animated film in 2012.

Love and Lots of Sex

I'm not sure which surprised me more: Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway) exposing her boob less than five minutes after we meet her character in a doctor's office, or that Love & Other Drugs by it's finale had became one of my favorite films of the year. The romantic comedy by director Edward Zwick had drawn me in with a strong trailer and charismatic leads, and with most of the films I REALLY wanted to see unavailable to me or forthcoming, I decided to dedicate my time and money to this film, which if nothing else looked interesting and original.

Chinese food in bed is step #22 in Dating for Wimps

Loosely based on the book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Huffington Post blogger Jamie Reidy, Love takes place in the late 1990's and introduces to us salesman Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), a college dropout working as a clerk at a small-time electronics store, where he has used his charm - especially with the ladies - to be the best salesman at the store. Fired shortly after the film's opening for engaging in sexual conquest with one of his fellow employees, Jamie gets help from his millionaire brother (Josh Gad) and is hired as a salesman for Pfizer, the commercial drug giant. Tasked with selling Zoloft and Zithromax in the Ohio River Valley, Jamie happens to meet Maggie, a free spirit who suffers from stage one Parkinson's Disease. She's the first woman who doesn't immediately fall for Jamie's charms, and what begins as a raunchy one night stand eventually changes for both of them, as both begin to experience love for the first time.

Quick! It's the 80's and you're Tom Cruise! Go!

Love & Other Drugs is only the second romantic comedy directed by Zwick, who's only other title from that genre is 1986's About Last Night. While his other efforts in the meantime have been more serious dramas such as Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond, the pacing in this film shows that he hasn't lost his touch in that area. The film flows at a good pace and never feels forced, allowing the story to be told to us at a comfortable level and never dropping things upon our heads that we wouldn't understand. As director and as one of the film's screenwriters, Zwick takes something that might not appeal to most audiences - mainly the operations of American pharmaceutical corporations - and manages to wrap a story around it that we can instantly connect with on an almost personal level. Not only that, but the film doesn't suffer from being aimed at teens or a younger audience. It's an adult romance, never overly smarmy or unbelievable in it's portrayal of a mature adult relationship.

Trying to avoid another "Brokeback" moment

Zwick is helped immensely by his leading actors. Hathaway is simply amazing, her performance subtle and emotional, a character who struggles to be independent even with the knowledge that a disease with no cure will slowly take he life and self-reliance away from her. It's easy to see why Jamie falls so easily for her, and why he would do anything for her. Don't mistake her for a damsel in distress however; she doesn't like the idea of being tied down, and falls in love on her own terms, not his. We knew Hathaway would be good, but Gyllenhaal is the surprise here. Though he tried before to cultivate a career of playing disturbed characters (Donnie Darko, Jarhead) or performing in serious drama (Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac), it was his charming role in the otherwise-repulsive Prince of Persia that I began to suspect his talents as a romantic leading man. The result is one of the best performances I've seen from him, that of the aimless guy who went for so many years simply getting by, only now learning what's important to him and how to care. The two actors have amazing chemistry, and I don't just mean in the bedroom. Every conversation we're witness to is an intellectual treat, as they all make us feel right there in the scene, intertwined in the elegance of speech and the occasional rampaging emotion. Both are so believable that you'd think the two actors were the ones in love, not just the characters.

If Anne Hathaway suddenly strips in your foyer, make sure you're the only one home

It's a shame the secondary characters aren't as enticing as the leads, but that might be asking too much. That isn't to say that the supporting cast is bad, quite the opposite in fact, simply that Hathaway and Gyllenhaal raise the bar far higher than any of the others can reach. Oliver Platt plays Jamie's veteran partner and mentor, training him in the hard art of the sell while aspiring to get the promotion to Chicago so he can be with his family again. For this, Platt puts on his usual scene chewing performance, the same one we've been privy to since forever. Gabriel Macht plays a drug representative from a rival firm with a romantic history with Maggie. There's really not much to say about him, as he loses precious screen time long before the final credits. He's solid when given the chance however. Josh Gad plays Jamie's brother, but his role is somewhat unrealistic and obviously plugged in as a cheap comedic role and a link to Jamie's family history. He works when he's used, and thankfully in small doses, but the idea that Jamie's millionaire brother ends up sleeping on his poorer sibling's couch for about two-thirds of the film does seem a bit unlikely, even if it is because Jamie is his big brother. The best of the group however might be Hank Azaria, who plays the top general practitioner in the region, Dr. Knight. Though he at first comes off as simply an asshole, Knight eventually reveals to us a side disenfranchised with the state of the medical industry, barred by red tape and constantly scrutinized by lawyers waiting for that one big mistake. It's by far the deepest character I've seen from Azaria, whose mostly comedic roles have been doubtlessly funny if a bit shallow.

Unhappy Anne makes us ALL sad...

There is a bit in the middle where we're reminded that the film has basis in real life. I had been wondering why the film used the real names of drug companies and drugs when the turning point of the film turned out to be the company's release of the sex drug Viagra. Suddenly stuff starts happening, and the impact of Viagra is obvious to anybody living today; it was the wonder drug that completely changed the industry, and to blanket that with a fake name would have reeked as obvious to anybody watching. Thankfully having this drug and it's parent company featured by name doesn't hurt the film in the slightest. Though it is portrayed that working in the drug industry is lucrative and the creation of Viagra is treated for the cultural event that it was, the film stops short of overly praising the company for being all-over wonderful. It also doesn't condemn the drug industry for its role in the highly profitable medical institution and the problems inherent there. Those things, the industry and the company and the product, simply are what they are. They don't detract from the romantic story attempting to be told, and that works out just fine.

"So... what do you want to do now?"

In the end, it really falls to the lead characters to make us feel like we're witnessing something different. Hathaway and Gyllenhaal make that happen in spades, and they are helped by a script that feels current, is funny as hell at times and emotionally gripping at others. Kudos to Zwick for successfully getting the best he could out this story, which could have simply taken the easy route and settled for middle of the road fare. Though it may alienate some audiences with its honest and intimate look at Parkinson's, I thought this was a beautiful film that had me constantly tearing up near the end and when the film came to a close, I wanted more, and in a good way. I never thought I'd do this, but I have to: Love & Other Drugs is my new #6 for the year. A romantic comedy that DOESN'T feature extensive video game references making it so high?

I must be maturing in my old age.

"Maybe next time we'll try in the bed."