Frozen

As a young child I was really put off a lot of cartoons, especially Disney ones, by the overabundance of singing for no apparent reason that they padded them out with. I now realise that this has left me traumatised to this very day as I suffer intense flashbacks throughout a viewing of this year's Christmas offering from Disney which is entitled Frozen. It has an awful lot of singing in it, really bad head shredding singing for no reason, but my partner does like a bit of Christmas tat and it does have a cute reindeer in it, so here we are. Those of us expecting a remake of Frosty the Snowman were a tad disappointed.

The story concerns two sisters called Elsa (long hair, big chest, blonde) and Anna (long hair, big chest, brunette), who are placed under house arrest by their parents for their entire childhood when it is revealed (by trolls of course) that Elsa has hidden powers which will be set off by ‘fear’.

However when the parents die the two sisters, now more fearful that ever after being locked up for years, are expected to rule the kingdom... straight away you know that this is going to go t*ts up.

So the blonde one (Elsa) becomes Queen and at her coronation party her dippy sister the brunette (Anna) gets a huge crush on one of the guests, Prince Hans, and agrees to marry him approximately five minutes later. 

Queen Elsa isn’t terribly impressed, refuses to condone their impetuous relationship and it’s immediately handbags at dawn between the two girls. During which Elsa accidentally reveals her hidden powers, which freezes the kingdom over, shrouding it in eternal winter.

Another party guest, a meddling foreign dignitary known as the Duke of Weselton, orders Elsa’s own soldiers to arrest and kill their own queen. Perhaps the solders might like to consult with somebody more senior in their own kingdom first? No? Oh ok.

Amidst such madness Elsa legs it, leaving Anna in power until she legs it too in pursuit of her sister. Before she goes she appoints the dashing guy she'd just met, Prince whatshisname, to rule in her place. Now there's a diplomatic incident in waiting you'd think but no one disputes it, not even the meddling Duke.

Out in the frozen wilds, Anna is aided by a bloke named Kristoff, his reindeer Sven and a snowman named Olaf. Consequently, thanks to the latter two, things pick up a touch particularly when the snowman’s carrot is involved.

When they track down Elsa she has fully embraced her new bad girl image and also has a much bigger snowman than her little sister. The girls talk but things don't go well and Anna ends up with ice in her heart, although this isn’t uncommon with girls of her age. This ice can only be thawed by an act of true love, although that never worked in my day.

All the same Anna races back to Prince Hans to get one. The dutiful Kristoff takes her all the way home but then gets the door slammed in his face, not even being offered a cup of tea for his trouble.

Hans though only has eyes for the throne and locks Anna in a room to freeze to death. He then tells everyone she’s dead but that they got married first, so he’s now king. QED. You got proof of that mate? e.g. witnesses, marriage certificate etc etc. Thought not, but still the new king is welcomed with open arms.

Then it gets complicated... as the dippy brunette one belatedly realises that true love might come Kristoff shaped, Elsa reappears and Prince Hans tries to murder her. When the dippy one intervenes, Elsa is saved, her sister's assistance being an act of true love.

At this point the curse of eternal winter is somehow lifted. I’m not sure how. Just ‘love’ I suppose, the implication being that Elsa never loved either her sister or her kingdom before?

Clearly they had no clue where they were going with this one when they started making it and just winged it. So ten out of ten for nerve at least. I'd love to be fly on the wall as a host of inquisitive seven year olds ask their parents 'why did so and so do that Mummy?'

I guess the advice is don’t think about the plot, it did give me a headache, just enjoy the snowman.

The Lovely Bones

‘The Lovely Bones’ is based on the best selling book by Alice Sebold.

The year is 1973 and on her home from school a young girl, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), is approached by her neighbour, George Harvey. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has built. Once she enters, he attacks her, kills her and then dismembers her body before bundling it into an old safe. Meanwhile, Susie's spirit goes up into her own personal afterlife, an 'in-between' state between life and death, which looks shockingly like Windows XP world. You know those garish green grass/blue sky images from the default Windows XP backdrop. Either that or it's that hillside that features in the Teletubbies programme. At first, I thought L had sneaked me into ‘Alice in Wonderland’ instead. Except a Tim Burton film is sure to be darker and there's not much dark here.

From up high Susie watches down over the aftermath of her death, like an angel and she doesn’t seem to mind being dead. The Salmon family react as you would expect, at first reluctant to believe in what has happened and then consumed by grief. Meanwhile Harvey is not suspected by the police and gets away with the crime. Jack, Susie's father, isn’t so sure and continually harasses the police about Harvey.



I don’t know the book so I’m probably not in a good position to comment. Although I’ve read a synopsis of it and L has filled me in on details as well. So I was expecting an intricate story and a disturbing one, dealing with difficult issues, but we didn’t get it. In fact we didn’t get much at all. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing did, for ages. This was not edge of the seat stuff.

Perhaps Peter 'Lord of the Rings' Jackson was the wrong person to be handed the reins to this film. His liking for the visual effects side of film making has been used to full effect and to make room for all that, they’ve had to dispense with the plot, or perhaps all the computer generated stuff is to try and distract you from the fact that somewhere along the line they forgot what the plot was.



The film also has some celebrated actors in it. Rachel Weisz is the distressed mother and Susan Sarandon plays her alcoholic mother. While Mark Wahlberg plays the devastated father well and there is an excellent performance from Stanley Tucci, who is menacing as the murdering neighbour.

There are a few good scenes but not enough of them. Suzie was supposed to be trying to influence things from beyond the grave but there is little of this. It kind of got exciting when Susie's sister Lindsey grew suspicious and finally breaks into Harvey's house where she discovers information that implicates him. He discovers her there but fails to catch her. Then comes an unbelievable scene where she takes an age to hand the information over to her family, as if it wasn’t that important after all. In the meantime, Harvey, knowing the game is up, disappears. Although he eventually gets his comeuppance when he is killed by an icicle...



It’s a very empty film and an incoherent one, which perhaps thinks it’s a murder mystery but a poor one at that. The murder is after all revealed early on but we still get the suspicion that, that is what the film is all about. It has no flow at all and it’s hard to see who the finished product is aimed out. Perhaps they asked Jackson to Disney-fy the story but how can you do that to a story about a girl who has being attacked and murdered.