Don’t have time to see “Frozen,” the new animated Disney film, at the movies? Not to worry. The beautifully animated film takes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and turns it into a blueprint for a Broadway show or maybe even an all-skating Ice Capades extravaganza that will soon be playing at a theatre or rink near you soon!
Frozen is the story of two royal sisters, the Princesses of Arendelle, Anna, a spirited adventurer (Kristen Bell) and Elsa, a cryokinetic queen (Idina Menzel) with the awesome power to manifest ice and snow. Like Carrie, but colder.
On the night of her coronation an emotional Elsa accidentally unveils her icy power, plunging her kingdom into an endless winter. Shunned by her people and called a “monster” by the haughty Duke of Weselton (Alan Tudyk) Elsa turns a cold shoulder and goes into hiding on the remote North Mountain.
To save the realm from the eternal cold snap Anna sets off with mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer and a sun-worshipping snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad). On the way the Elsa’s ice palace Anna discovers why her sister is cold-hearted, some magical trolls and the true meaning of love.
“Frozen” has all the elements of classic Disney. There are handsome princes, amusing animals, catchy songs and not one, but two princesses. All the fundamentals are in place and perhaps that’s part of the problem with the film. It feels like all these elements banged together to create one whole.
The music, by husband and wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who also wrote “The Book of Mormon” and “Avenue Q”), are plentiful with Broadway style tunes popping up every couple of minutes. But the songs don’t feel like they fit together as a whole, almost as if they are from different shows. The Celine Dion style show-stopping pop of “Let It Go” is at odds with the goofy fun of “In Summer.”
The songs themselves are top notch, as is the animation and the most of the voice work—luckily Josh Gad spices things up with his unhinged Olaf voice—but the film as a whole doesn’t have the wit or the invention of “Get a Horse,” the short that is scheduled to precede “Frozen” in theatres. In this case the opening act freezes out the lukewarm main attraction.
The new animated film Frozen features something unique — dueling Disney princesses.
“I think what was really important for this movie was to have the female perspective,” says co-director Chris Buck.
“We have two female leads and there are times that as a male director you can go to the stereotype of what a female character might do.”
That’s where co-director and writer Jennifer Lee came in. “Jen would always take it to a different place,” he says. “She would say, ‘Make her real. Make her believable.’ So I think that really helped. It was a good balance.”
Based on a Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Frozen is the story of two royal sisters, Anna, a spirited adventurer (Kristen Bell) and Elsa, a queen (Idina Menzel) with the awesome power to create ice and snow. Sibling is pitted against sibling when Elsa plunges her kingdom into an endless winter and Anna must act to save her sister and the empire. “You want to make these movies to last forever but we have to bring ourselves to it,” says Buck. “We have to bring today’s sense of entertainment and character to our characters.”
“We’re huge Disney fans and I grew up with Disney,” says Lee. “When you watch a Disney film you are constantly feeling it. It is a combination of comedy and drama but it is together in such a way that you feel you are in the world. That is something we both love more than anything because that, to me, is what makes them timeless and resonate. You feel the character and you feel the stakes. You relate to them. I think Disney does that better than anyone.”
Buck says that one of the big challenges in making Frozen was creating a movie for not “just the Disney family but also for the general audience, for everyone of all ages.
“I feel more than anything, a responsibility not to necessarily the company but to the audience,” says Buck. “To the audience who comes in expecting a Disney movie and giving them the best of that. What does that mean to them? It’s humour and emotion and beauty and all of that. For me, that’s the pressure.
“I was speaking to a live action director who does more movies in the PG-13 and R-rated realm and he said, ‘What you guys do is the hardest thing in the world because you try and reach everyone.’”
I couple of years ago I had the soul crushing bit of bad luck to have to sit through movies with names like “Just Go With It,” “Friends with Benefits,” “No Strings Attached” and “New Year’s Eve.”
Romantic comedies. Rom coms. Whatever you want to call them, it was a punishing year spent watching good looking do the same thing over and over again—meet cute, fall in love, then fall out of love before walking off into the sunset, happily ever after.
Kathryn Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Timberlake, Kate Hudson and Chris Evans not only tested my love of movies, but my love of love in that grim year.
At the time I declared the rom com dead.
I suggested it could be resurrected if someone like Quentin Tarantino came along and completely reinvented the genre, but the chances of that happening were about as great as Kristen Bell finding herself alone as the end credits roll.
Then along came Joseph Gordon-Levitt and “Don Jon.” Tarantino must be too busy reinventing the grindhouse genre to bother with rom coms, but the former “Third Rock from the Sun” star isn’t.
Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed, stars as Jon Martello, nicknamed Don Jon because he is the godfather of meeting women in bars. He and his pals (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) troll nightclubs in search of “dimes”—perfect tens—but in secret Jon prefers the company of his computer. Addicted to porn sites, he spends an inordinate amount of time surfing the net, looking for the perfect video to “lose himself in.”
He can’t even give the habit up after he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful, gum snapping Jersey girl who thinks people who watch porn are sick. She encourages him to go back to school, to better himself, which he does, all the while watching porn.
The porn addiction (SPOILER ALERT) eventually drives a wedge between them, but he soon learns about true intimacy when he meets an older woman (Julianne Moore) at night school.
“Don Jon” is a rom com is disguised as a character study. Jon’s romantic dalliances are a context for his intimacy issues, but the romance comes in unexpected places, subverting the formula that makes movies like “Sweet Home Alabama” so predictable.
The comedy comes from the characters. Imagine all the guys from “Jersey Shore” rolled into one porn-obsessed lothario and you have Gordon-Levitt’s foul mouthed but spot on portrayal of Jon.
Johansson, who swallows her words in what may go down as one of the greatest Jersey accents ever to be captured on celluloid, is the movie’s McGuffin. She appears to be the girl of his dreams, but she is simply the physical embodiment of his bombshell porn dreams come to life. It’s because he doesn’t love her that he learns what love actually is.
Cudos also go to Tony Danza as Jon’s father. He’s a carbon copy of the hot headed horn dog, and living proof that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Don Jon” is a stylish, crude look at romance with loads of laughs. It shows off Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s promise as a filmmaker, but more importantly it reinvents the rom com in a fun—although vulgar—way.
Like Crossing Over from a few weeks ago Fanboys is another film that’s been gathering dust in the Weinstein vault for the last couple of years. Originally timed to be released on the 30th anniversary of Star Wars the movie has been the subject of chatter on the internet regarding editorial interference from the Weinstein Company—they wanted an entire storyline removed—and whether or not the film would ever be released at all.
This week marks its unveiling in Canada (it has already been seen in the US) and after seeing it I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. Fanboys is a perfectly cordial little movie that probably should have gone straight to DVD but, I imagine, finally earned its big screen release because of the involvement of several of its stars who have gone from unknowns to hot properties since the film was shot.
The story is simple. Set in 1999 four childhood friends who bonded over Star Wars concoct a plan to drive from Ohio to Marin County, California to storm George Lucas’s ranch and get an advance look at Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Their plan isn’t just a lark, however. This will likely be Eric’s (Sam Huntington) last hurrah before he leaves nerddom behind to take over his father’s used car empire and Linus (Chris Marquette) has been diagnosed with cancer and may not live to see the film‘s official opening. For the other members of this group—Hutch and Windows (Dan Fogler and Jay Baruchel)—the trip is a coming of age. At the beginning of the journey they are still immature guys who meet girls in Jedi chat rooms, but by the end you just have the feeling their lives will have been transformed. Joining them is Zoe (Kristen Bell), a girl-geek who not only looks great in Princess Leia’s metal bikini but also provides some much needed grounding for the boys.
Fanboys has its moments. A battle between the Lucas hounds and their mortal enemies, Star Trek fans—the boys call them Kirk loving Spock suckers—is laugh out loud funny. It’s also lots of fun to see Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Ethan Suplee, Kristen Bell and Jay Baruchel before they were famous and even cooler to play spot the cameos—look for geek gods Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner and Kevin Smith—but the film is more uneven than Yoda’s crazy mixed up syntax. It plays more like a series of sketches than a full length movie.
If you enjoy the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons then you’ll likely find a warm spot in your heart for Fanboy’s characters, but as geekily likeable as they may be they are little more than stereotypes. Windows, of course, is “female kryptonite” and Hutch is an over-the-top Rush fan and that’s about the extent of the character development. Maybe it’s just as well because when the movie tries to stretch and introduce some poignancy into the mix it really falls flat. A clumsy metaphor comparing Eric’s car dealer dad and Darth Vader is undeveloped and unnecessary and Linus’s cancer is treated more like a plot device than a real threat to his life.
Fanboys is an occasionally funny coming-of-age story that might be best left until the DVD release.
Producer Judd Apatow has tapped into an interesting formula. His trademarked combination of raunchy humor, full frontal male nudity and rom com sentimentality has proven to be a potent elixir in past hits like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin. His latest confection, a laugh-out-loud funny break-up movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall mines similar territory with hilarious results.
When we first meet Peter Bretter (Freaks and Geeks’s Jason Segel) he’s a struggling musician, paying the bills by scoring a CSI rip-off called Crime Scene. He’s also dating the star of the show Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars) who turns his life upside down when she dumps him for an outlandish pop star named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).
To mend his broken heart he books a weekend trip to Hawaii and checks into an upmarket ocean resort. There’s only one problem— Sarah and her new flame are also staying there. Peter is saved from going over the brink by Rachael (Mila Kunis from That 70s Show) a sympathetic desk clerk also nursing a broken heart. She provides much needed emotional support and an attractive shoulder to cry on.
Will Peter’s heart heal? Will he ever finish his Dracula rock opera featuring life size vampire puppets?
I think you probably know the answers to those questions already and you haven’t even seen the movie, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t as much about the sit-comish situation as it is about the characters in the story. Bretter is completely likeable as the everyman heartsick composer. He’s equal parts vulnerability, charm and goofiness. It’s a winning combo that gets the audience on side immediately and keeps them there throughout. Kunis is warm and funny as the damaged desk clerk, British comedian Russell Brand comes very close to stealing the show as the dense rock star and Jonah Hill (Superbad) is creepily funny as the star struck hotel waiter.
Like Knocked Up and others in the Apatow cannon Forgetting Sarah Marshall serves up standard movie situations—the ex-lovers staying at the same hotel—but tweaks them with an audacious mix of outrageous vulgarity and full-on, full-Monty male nudity and sweet sentimentality that makes them a fun R-rated night out.
How long has it been since you thought to yourself, “Gee, I’m glad Tom Arnold still gets work.”? If you’re like me, it’s been a while. After seeing him bumble through “Hit and Run,” a new chase movie starring Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell, the question I asked myself was, “How does Tom Arnold still get work?”
When the movie opens Charlie and Annie (Shepard and Bell) are living a simple, quiet life in a small village. She teaches at the community college, he looks after the house. When she’s offered her dream job in Los Angeles, however, their simple life gets complicated. Turns out he had a much different life before moving to–or should we say being relocated to–their tiny town. He was moved there as part of the Witness Protection Program after testifying against some very dangerous bank robbers he used to drive get-a-way cars for. In hiding for four years, he’s changed his life, and Annie is a big part of that. If he goes to LA he’s in danger, but if he stays, he’ll lose her. Of course he hits the road, unfortunately so do his old partners and Annie’s ex boyfriend.
The main characters in “Hit and Run” are likable. Shepard and Bell are a couple in real life and the chemistry between them shows. When it’s just the two of them on screen “Hit and Run” has the makings of a fun action adventure. Unfortunately the movie is populated by peripheral characters with the combined charm of a slap (stick) to the face.
Comedy is about context and even a giggler about the rarefied event of Witness Protection has to have one foot in reality in order for the jokes to register. I can believe Charlie is in hiding, what I can’t believe, or care about, are the broadly drawn characters that clutter up the movie.
Arnold’s can’t-shoot-straight US Marshall is such a cartoon he makes Fred Flintstone seem like Orson Welles. It’s that kind of slapstick that takes you out of the story. Add to that a pill-popping school administrator and an ex-boyfriend who talks about “role playing with your corpse,” and you have a cast that is more annoying than funny.
Not to play pile-on, but for a movie that features cars in hot pursuit of one another, the chases are kind of dull. ” Bullitt ” this ain’t. Whoever had the idea of staging a chase in an abandoned airstrip, where the cars essentially drive around in circles, needs to have another look at “The French Connection” to see how a car chase is actually done. Not even Jimi Hendrix stretching the strings on the soundtrack can turn up the volume on these sequences.
At the heart of “Hit and Run,” which is also Shepard’s directorial debut, is a good old fashioned chase movie like the kind Roger Corman used to make for drive-in audiences. Too bad this movie gets a few less miles to the gallon than Corman used to.
The good part of “When in Rome,” the new Kristen Bell film, is that it doesn’t follow the usual unlikely boy-meets-unlikely-girl romantic comedy set-up. The bad part is that just because it doesn’t follow the usual rom com rules doesn’t mean it isn’t predictable.
Bell is Beth, a work obsessed curator at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. After her last boyfriend “ripped out her heart and fed it to the pigeons in Central Park” she lost faith in romance but when her sister impulsively decides to get married in Italy Beth reluctantly takes a couple of days off, where she ends up drunk in the “fountain of love” plucking coins from the water. Little does she realize that an old legend declares that when you take coins from the fountain, you take the heart of the person who tossed the coin in the fountain in the first place. Soon she is being unwillingly courted by four men—an artist, a street magician, a sausage salesman, a model and willingly courted by Nick (Josh Duhamel), an ex football star. The question is, “Is the love for real or just a magic spell?”
“When in Rome” is as frothy as it gets. It’s a romantic fantasy with no foot in reality. In fact, the only fantasy here is that anybody thought this was a strong enough idea to carry a whole movie. There are a few laughs sprinkled throughout and the audience I saw this with laughed intermittently, but the jokes—like an Italian priest mispronouncing “lawfully wedded wife” as “awfully wedded wife” not once, but twice!—are more amusing than actually funny.
The movie does earn some legit laughs—a tiny European car gag is silly fun—from the more comic savvy members of the cast like Will Arnett, Danny DeVito and Dax Shepard, (Jon “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder continues his string of more annoying than funny performances), but when the attention shifts away from them to the leads “When in Rome” flat lines.
Bell’s idea of physical comedy is to smile with spinach in her teeth and while she’s an agreeable screen presence she isn’t really suited for this kind of comedy. Ditto Don Johnson who plays her father. The years have been kind to Johnson, but he doesn’t have a natural gift for comedy. As for Anjelica Huston as Beth’s testy Guggenheim head curator… well let’s just say I choose to remember her glory days in films like “The Grifters” and “Prizzi’s Honor.”
Josh Duhamel fares slightly better. He’s the charming (but slightly goofy) single guy with the perfect bachelor pad—complete with a barber’s chair, a pinball machine and neon cocktail sign—who can deliver a joke well enough but appears to me to be a modern day Tab Hunter; more male model than an interesting actor.
“When In Rome” is further proof that romantic comedy needs a shot in the arm. A few weeks ago, on the release of “Leap Year,” I suggested that someone like Quentin Tarantino should come in and completely reboot the genre. Seeing “When in Rome” didn’t change my mind.
“Nobody gets through high school unscathed,” says Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis), consoling her daughter Marnie (Kristen Bell). Marnie, now a successful PR person in Los Angeles was once an unfortunate looking girl with the even more unfortunate initials M.O.O. She was tormented in school by the popular girls, led by Joanne (Odette Yustman) a pretty, but vicious cheerleader. Joanne would have been a long forgotten memory, if not for the fact that she is engaged to Marnie’s brother. The weekend leading up to the wedding brings up long suppressed memories for Marnie, and her mother (Curtis), who, it turns out had a high school nemesis in Joanne’s aunt Mona (Sigourney Weaver), a wealthy business woman with the annoying habit of littering her speech with tidbits of French and Italian. Did I mention this is a comedy? Better stated, an alleged comedy?
“You Again” has one of those over contrived kind of kind of plots that could really benefit from a dose of reality. I don’t need deep torment from the characters to make their predicaments plausible, but a whiff of real feelings for the audience to hang on to from time to time would elevate the whole thing from the level of a Saturday night sitcom to something that could inspire genuine laughs. Slapstick is fine, and silly humor is OK too, but this movie wants us to sympathize with its characters and unfortunately we don’t because they’re not characters but the blandest of comedy stereotypes.
Not even a sprinkling of Betty White’s now patented slightly crazy grandmother character can liven things up, although a surprise cameo near the end suggests there might have been a better, and funnier story to explore with these characters. If only they had made the prequel first.
The guys from “Swingers” have finally grown up. Thirteen years after their break out hit Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are teamed up again but this time around the zoot suits have been left in storage and the hipster lingo is a thing of the past. In “Couples Retreat” (sic) the boys are old hipsters with wives, kids, martial dysfunction and a group of friends teetering on the cusp of major mid life crisis. They’re no longer “money,” to use the “Swingers” lingo, but they’re in for some major change.
The story focuses on four couples Dave and Ronnie (Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman), Shane and Trudy (Faizon Love and Kali Hawk), Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell), and Joey and Lucy (Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis) who go to an island resort called Eden West. This isn’t Sandals or Hedonism, however, couples at Eden West are expected to follow a rigorous relationship building course, that is equal parts Tai Chi, couples therapy and Art of War, taught by Marcel (Jean Reno). Participation is not optional, and of course, each of the couples learns something new about themselves and their bond.
“Couples Retreat” annoyed me for many reasons. First off, when did it become OK for Hollywood to completely ignore the lowly apostrophe? The title should be “Couple’s Retreat,” but apparently no one at Universal (or Vaughn or Favreau) owns a copy of “The Elements of Style.” Punctuation, however, is just the beginning of the problems with “Couple Retreat.”
The movie starts promisingly. The cast is likeable enough—Vaughn, Favreau, Jason Bateman, Faison Love, Malin Ackerman and the two Kristens, Davis and Bell—and the opening half-an-hour pleases in a low-fi way. As a set up to the main action—the trip to the Bora Bora—we’re treated to a mostly well written and interesting introduction to the characters. And Vaughn and Ackerman’s youngest son is hilarious. As I say, it’s mostly good stuff that sets up the relationship comedy that is to follow, except that once they hit the island at 40ish minute mark the movie slows to a slow grind. A grating slow grind.
What is it about comedies set on islands Remember “Club Paradise”? “Club Dread”? Sunshine and sky blue water seem to be comedy killers (except for “Gilligan’s Island” of course!). It’s certainly the case here. The post island scenes are only intermittently amusing, slowed by therapy scenes that don’t deliver big laughs and predictable relationship “development” that should be heartfelt but feels forced.
High points include Carlos Ponce as the randy yoga instructor Salvadore and the scenes with the kids that bookend the film. Low points include every minute the usually reliable Jean Reno is on screen and the beyond shameless product placement for Applebee’s and Guitar Hero.
“Couples Retreat” feels like a movie of missed opportunities. It’s not funny enough to be called a comedy and when the best relationship advice on offer is about finding the right person to take to Applebee’s, it can’t be called insightful either.
