Why Frozen changed my life

 I love and hate Disney.  They have made some of the greatest movies of my life, and some of the worse.  I grew up on Disney musicals, and I blame them - and my mother - for my insatiable love of musicals I still carry today.  But Disney has dropped the ball big time in the last 20 years in their musical department.  The focus shifted to churning out as many High School Musical movies as possible, and star-studded CGI features that are as much as musical as Schindler's List.  But hopefully, Frozen is here to change that.

I know I'm way behind the curve on this, but I just recently saw Frozen, and I was just so happy.  I cannot possibly put into words how I felt watching this, but I recalled a similar thing happening to one Tom Haverford:

Crappy quality, but I'm feeling a lot like Mr. Haverford here.  No explanation, I just had an emotioanl response to a piece of art.  Totally didn't see it coming.  After finishing the movie, I watched it again to try and see exactly why I had this reaction.  For me anyways, the biggest thing was the way the movie began.

This song probably had the biggest affect on me then any other because the moment it began, I was... frozen... because it completely reminded me of another opening song from another amazing Disney musical.

What both of these songs have in common is simple:  They set the mood for the film.  Immediately I knew what I was getting from both The Little Mermaid and Frozen from these opening songs.  I still get goosebumps when I hear the Frozen Heart.

But one song does not a musical make.  If that was the case, Hercules and Anchorman would be musicals.  Both of these movies use song to drive the key points of the plot - Frozen fails on this at the end, I'll go into that more later - and keep the movie going forward.  Conversations are had in song and most normal dialogue used to advance the plot is at least sung, even if it's not a whole, proper song, as evidenced by the following:

This is an amazing change of pace from many of the more recent musicals Disney has done.  This entire sequence is based off an earlier song in the movie, yet they use it as the backdrop of their conversation.  It simply oozes of Broadway, it's just amazing.  The entire film is like this, incorporating music in seemingly random places, and it really helps keep everything about it upbeat, and really helps guide the movie.

Of course, there are missed opportunities as well.  I'm a little shocked Hans didn't have some sort of evil song outlining his plan - a staple for many classic Disney musicals - or that Kristoff didn't have any proper numbers of his own.  I'm going to guess both of those were in the works but yet wound up somehow on the cutting room floor.

And that brings me to a point about Frozen I didn't like.  I call it "Happy Feet Syndrome."  Fortunately, Frozen had a fairly minor version of this, but the problem was still there.  Something I have noticed in made for cinema musicals is their lack of music at the end of the film.  Happy Feet was horrible in this regard, near 45 minutes pass at the end of the movie between songs.  It's true.

This number is smack dab in the middle of the movie.  The next song?  THE CLOSING CREDITS.  I saw Happy Feet in the theaters and I was pissed.  I don't care about the crazy hippy environmental message sandwiched in to try and make a plot, I just wanted to see singing and dancing penguins, and the last half of the movie deprived me of that.

Frozen had this problem as well, but they managed to negate it by simply making the window smaller.  I haven't timed out the music drought in Frozen, but it was nowhere near as bad as Happy Feet.  This is a big difference between Frozen and the Little Mermaid, for why the Little Mermaid did have a drought of fully flushed out songs, they had some of the singing dialogue to break up the music drought.  This is most clearly evidenced in Ursula singing on the wedding barge.

Not a whole song by any means, but it is still sung dialogue, which Frozen was using until the end of the film.  This clip is also great because it's not a particularly upbeat or happy number because it's being used to convey an evil plan, but it doesn't derail the movie either, and that is something that musicals having a drought of music do accomplish.

Considering that is my only real negative critique of Frozen though makes me ecstatic for the future direction that Disney is taking.  I have a theory as to why they have shelved musicals for so long, or rather, what accidentally caused them to do so, but I'll go over that in my next post some more.

More importantly though, I really hope this spurns on another golden age of musicals from Disney, not just because I love them, but because I grew up on them.  They were the soundtrack of my childhood, from the Little Mermaid, Oliver and Company, Beauty and the Beast, the list goes on and on.  And now that I'm a father, I look forward to helping my son have the same background music to his childhood that I had, and hopefully, it will foster in him a love for these films like the one I have.

So sometime later this week I'll posit my theory as to what happened to the great Disney musical for twenty years, but until then, I leave you with this, which is pretty damn funny.

Holy crap! A new post!

So, I've neglected this thing for... a long time now, and I really want to try to get back in the habit of updating it regularly with my random thoughts/musings about sports and life.  There are a number of things I want to talk about here, but I think I'm going to focus on something that I personally found as a let down this year.

The men's and women's NCAA tournament.

I know right away everyone is going "How the hell were you NOT happy with the tourny this year?"  Well, the problem for me with the men's tournament was that it ended up with a UConn/Kentucky title game.  I've told many people many times before how much I simply despise John Calipari, so rooting for Kentucky was out, and I have never liked UConn, especially after all the crap that Jim Calhoun got away with at the end of his career.

That's right you dirty bastard, you made me hate UConn.

I don't care if he hasn't coached the team in two years, he really soured me on the team.  I'm not going into specifics here on why I can't stand Calhoun/Calipari, because I don't want this post to be over 10,000 words long, and it will very quickly turn into angry badness, and I'm not feeling that today.

So with these two teams in the Championship game after an otherwise awesome tournament, I really could care less.  I didn't watch the game, I found out who won the next day, I've yet to see any highlights, I really don't care, and that's REALLY rare for me.  I didn't even watch the absolutely worst song ever played over a highlight reel that is featured after every tournament.  These two teams battling it out really made me not care that much.

But all of this pales in comparison to how I feel about the Women's tournament.  Yes, like the vast majority of America, I didn't watch a single minute of it, but I feel obligated to comment on it after reading a recent article discussing why this dominant UConn team is good for women's basketball.  (I can't find the article again, though I am finding more and more that correspond with what I'm about to say.)

Yet another one

UConn is absolutely terrible for women's basketball.  Women's basketball already has a nasty stigma attached to it of being a boring game, and having one team that is absolutely worlds better then everyone else makes every game even more boring.  Why bother watching anything when you know who will eventually win?  It's not even a guessing game.  Several years ago I filled out a women's tournament bracket to test a theory I had.  I went all chalk, not a single upset, had all the one seeds in the final four.  I wound up getting over 90% of the bracket correct, including the final four and eventual champion.  It is the best I have ever done for any bracket in all of these years of filling them out.  There is simply no parity in the women's game, and it is very unfortunate.  We also are doomed to see more of this in the college ranks, as every good women's player goes to a select few schools.  UConn, Notre Dame, Stanford, Baylor, Tennessee... and that's it.  No one else stands a chance.  The overall talent level that exists outside of the few superstars in both the women's college and pro ranks is very poor as well, which makes it so one player can come in and absolutely destroy everyone singlehandedly.

Don't believe me?

Say hello to Candace Parker.

Hi Candace!

Candace Parker attended the Univeristy of Tennessee, and played under the legendary Pat Summit.  Parker is one of the few women's athletes to have left school early to pursue a professional career in her sport.  Why did she do that?

Because no one was better then her.  At any level.  She entered the WNBA draft where she was drafted #1 overall by the Los Angeles Sparks.  In her first ever professional game, she had 34 points, 12 rebounds, and 8 assists.  Lines like that that are as impressive as they are balanced don't happen in a sport where the talent level is even.  She was better then everyone.  She went on to win the rookie of the year and MVP awards.  The only other athlete I can think of in any sport to accomplish that duo is this guy:

I-CHI-RO!

In 2001 as a 27 year old rookie who had played for nearly a decade in Japan, he came into the league as a "rookie" and walked away with that crown and the MVP.  Ichiro is a unique exception to the rule, and given that he wasn't a teenager walking into the league, but rather an actual veteran who was only a rookie by the loosest of terms is why this double whammy happened.

So that's why I don't watch women's basketball.  It quickly becomes a game of 1-1 with the two best players on the court, and they play sloppy and don't dunk.

But Jake, you just talked about Candace Parker!  She dunks!  She even won the high school dunk contest!

Yes she did.  But I watched that contest.  It wasn't impressive.  And she truly only won because she's a girl.  Don't believe me?  Watch this and tell me who you think won.  She dunks the same way I do.  Barely.

So after all that bitterness, I leave you with the best story of the tournament, and I only do this because the inevitable ending happened on April 8th.  I've always liked Michigan State (I'm a Tom Izzo fan) and this just made me like them more.

Lacey passed away late Tuesday night at her St. Johns Michigan home.  She was held by her parents as she passed.