CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Frozen

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

this entry brought to you by norman greenbaum, "spirit in the sky"





I was watching a romantic comedy years ago, a notoriously bad one that I was watching because I was still into the idea of watching bad movies for fun and coming to the realization that I just don't have the patience for watching bad movies as an adult. It's fun as a youth when you have nothing but time, but as an adult, I just can't do it anymore-- there is an endless supply of good movies out there, and if I have time to sit down and watch a movie, it's always better spent watching something I actually will enjoy.

And as the female lead was yet another bridesmaid and not a bride, or the curse on her from that gypsy made her eternally unable to find her true love or whatever the fuck the plot came up with, I began to realize what it was about these types of stories that bugged me-- sure, this movie was bad, notoriously so, but there are a thousand stories guilty of this, and it was just this movie's blatant disregard for quality that made me be able to put it to words:

Romantic stories often treat love as if it is an object. It's a thing that can be found definitively and physically, you know it when you have it. It is a thing in and of itself. And if someone else is encroaching on this thing you own, they are trying to steal it from you-- its never the fault of the object itself, because love is a physical thing, like a ball. You can't blame a ball for being stolen by some jerk who is trying to steal it from you. The love is completely at the whim of whoever is holding it.

But this is bullshit. Love isn't a thing you find. The term "falling in love" is actually much more accurate, because while it is a thing that can happen suddenly, it implies that you weren't even looking for it-- you were minding your own business and suddenly you realized you were falling. And if someone else is falling in love too, it's not necessarily something that they did or didn't do, it just happened. You're either in it together or you're not, but either way, its a thing that just happened to you.

There's a song early in Frozen where Princess Anna meets a handsome young Prince who immediately sweeps her off her feet and seems perfect in every way. And as they sang their admittedly really fun song about love at first sight, in the back of my head I was annoyed about how much I hated the trope, but I also dismissed my annoyance; the animation was gorgeous, the plot was intriguing so far, and besides, Frozen was unfolding like a fairy tale, and it's not as if there's anything inherently wrong with a fairy tale sticking to fairy tale tropes.

But a few moments later, a handsome, lower class fellow named Christopher laughed at her naivety, telling her there was no way she could fall in love so quickly, and she was a fool for getting engaged with someone she hardly knew.

I knew where the plot was going from there. And I don't mean this as a knock against Frozen at all; to the contrary, it was a delight to watch Disney do what it does best, create these beautifully animated, gorgeous movies full of delightful characters and, in this case, give us genuinely dazzling song and dance, which they haven't done since the Aladdin days. But I took special delight in watching the story unfold while the movie explores what true love-- actual true love-- really means. It amazes me that Hollywood keeps shitting out these movies ostensibly for grown ups that treat the concept of love in the most immature, childish way possible, yet Frozen, a family movie with a talking Snowman, tries taking the concept and spinning it on its head.
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with love from CRS @ 2:20 PM 

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