Friday, December 18, 2009

My review of The Princess and the Frog

"We need a black princess. Oh, and she'd better be a feminist, a Strong Woman, 'cause otherwise we'll be dealing with all that Cinderella crap again. And, umm, we've got our two-dimensional villain, right? OK, great. Now. What do we know about New Orleans black culture? Let's see...jazz...voodoo...and gumbo. Oh, and swamps. Make sure we get those in."


How would I rate The Princess and the Frog, as a waste of my time? Four stars!!

Granted, I wasn't really looking to be impressed, just going because I needed to get out of the effing house and there was no other movie all four of us would have wanted to sit through. Also, my husband inexplicably didn't mind it, so mine is definitely not the only perspective here. Me, I should've gone to see whatever was playing next door. I really wanted to punch this movie in the face.

I have two main complaints about this movie. The first is how vapid it was, and how it seemed to be written and animated by a bunch of pasty middle-aged white men enclosed in a stuffy room eating Hot Pockets who had never before encountered any of the things they were including in the movie (including black people, I'd guess). Everything felt second-rate and stereotyped, from the animation to the characterization to the ill-written script.

Making voodoo the main evil force was a strange choice. Actually, there was good voodoo and bad voodoo, and they sometimes called it hoodoo, but whatever. Just call it what it is: magic. Or a MacGuffin, since its existence doesn't actually matter by the end of the film.

It felt clumsy and shallow. The humor was, um, appalling and loathsome, but maybe they were targeting just the four-year-olds (I'm thinking specifically of the groan-inducing line spoken by the firefly: "Don't make me shine my butt!").

There is little emotional involvement with what's happening on the screen, except for one part near the end that managed to be forced and mystical and cynical all at once so that I wanted to jump up and shout expletives at the screen, curse the writers and animators who finally revealed their utter lack of humanity by allowing that part of the movie to make the final cut. The very young kid behind me was crying and protesting. I was very mad about it.

The second main complaint was that it was also so dull that my attention kept drifting away. Robert kept asking me, "What are you looking at?" I have no idea, but it wasn't the screen. I did watch the entire film - sadly, no napping for me - but I kept wishing I was elsewhere. It couldn't keep my interest.

Add songs written by Randy Newman, of Star Wars fame, and you've got a pretty vacuous evening ahead of you.

In fairness, I did like about five minutes of the ending. It was incredibly predictable, but I enjoyed it anyway. It just wasn't worth the dullness of the preceding 90 minutes. Definitely not a big enough payoff.

Oh, and I guess Oprah was in it somewhere, but I have no idea where.

3 comments:

SusieQ said...

Best. Movie review. Ever.

josie said...

I think you've captured it perfectly.
I haven't seen the film, but just watching the preview made me feel, well, embarrassed for the obviousness of the stereotypes. And what doesn't Oprah have her hand in?

PS:
re Randy Newman: Best.Link.Ever.

jenn said...

I think you just liked it because it has Rob Zombie in it...