Frozen

What's old feels strikingly and delightfully new with Disney's fifty-third animated feature Frozen, a fresh and engaging musical charmer that hews closely to the Mouse House's patented wheelhouse, yet nevertheless is sharply woven together with the very fabrics that established said wheelhouse.  Loosely based on Hans Christen Anderson's The Snow Queen, Frozen is yet another princess fairy tale to add to the canon, but one made with a generous supply of warmth, tenderness and visual aplomb, beckoning back to the hallowed Disney Renaissance days.  And that's the remarkable thing about a good Disney flick, the way it charms the senses back to that child-like sense of wonder, magic and possibility, one that begs you to tear down all the formulaic trappings on the wall and  marvel at something mystifying.   With its grand sense of play Frozen does that just enough to pull at the heartstrings and, in its stronger moments, make you in believe in the beautiful hokum that can only be concocted in the land of make believe.

The film takes place in the make believe village of Arendelle, a lush Nordic retreat (rendered beautifully in all its wide screen glory by the films ace technicians) that houses two princesses-- Elsa and Anna.  First seen as playful imps, Elsa and Anna frolic about in carefree bliss; Elsa has a magical secret which makes playtime even more fun-- the magical ability to turn anything and anywhere into a wintery wonderland-- Ms. Freeze if you will.  With  power comes responsibility, just as with secrets comes a consequence-- a common movie totem and plot propellent-- and a young Elsa is forced to hide her gift and even cause her charming village to be nearly hidden away out of protection.  Such to the extent that when the two girls grow older and eventually become orphaned (this is a Disney film; that's a must too!) and Elsa is set to made queen, her coronation marks the first time in many a moon in which the gates to Arendelle have even been opened.  Princess Anna, however, made magically unaware of her sister's talents finds herself developing into a ripe and cheery young woman in the very mode of her Disney princess sisters of yore; at first it reads that co-directors and screenwriters Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee are aiming for parody; Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) is so perkily come hither.  Nearly intoxicated in boy-crazy rushes, she's instantly smitten with Prince Hans (voiced by Santino Fontana) that she becomes engaged to him only hours after meeting.

The Lifeguard

"I'm not 30...I'm 29," Leigh (Kristen Bell) defensively chimes more than once in the listless and all-together dull quarter-life-crisis drama The Lifeguard.  As if a desperate cling to a youth-- one that's well beyond her-- acts for some kind of excuse for the selfish and overly entitled, bratty behavior she exhibits throughout writer/director Liz W. Garcia's wan,  irritating and smugly self-conscious debut film.   That may read as harsh, but this drippy, overly fussed and under-nourished melodrama feels akin to mediocre soap opera, a melodramatic hotbed that infuses nearly every cliché in the independent film rule book but has neither the wit nor invention to overcome its overly simplistic and familiar narrative.  The Lifeguard is a jarringly self-pitying film, one labeled as a comedy-drama, but lacking in humor or lightness of any sort and devoid of striking or original characters to maneuver through it's increasingly labored and dark twists and turns.  The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January.

Burned from her seemingly cushy Manhattan lifestyle, anguished by that strange and enigmatic only-in-the-cinema ennui that seems only to afflict pretty people in Sundance-approved movies (see also Garden State.)  The opening, obliquely scattered shots that tentatively present a fragmented young woman imply that Leigh is a lost child.  She works as a reporter for the Associated Press and clings to a man whom she will never actually have.  Her woes are externalized from the start as she relates to a story she's writing about a captive tiger chained against its will in an apartment who died from malnutrition and dehydration.  She's trapped you see, just like that tiger.