Matt and Laurence review the wacky week in the film: Mic Macs and The Crazies.
Blog Page 2016
Love Music Hate Racism
The Love Music Hate Racism campaign has a simple but strong message. Without cultural diversity Britain, not to mention all countries around the world, would lose out. With the 2010 elections in front of us, the campaign is once again hoping to get as many people as possible to stand up to the BNP.
The campaign is needed to counter the increased support for the extreme right British National Party. Under threat of being taken to court for breaching equalities legislation with its membership restricted to people of “Caucasian origin”, the BNP had recently changed its membership rules so that anyone could join a group dedicated to blaming non-whites for all the ills of society.
The BNP remains a threat to multiracial harmony. The founder John Tyndall saw Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an inspirational text and there has always been a strong message of ethnic intolerance, with mixed race relationships strongly discouraged. Nick Griffin, BNP member of the European Parliament, would see me as one of “the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism”, as he described mixed race children. Not quite how I see myself as a half Chinese, half English twenty year old Brit, but then again most of the country fortunately have the brains to disagree.
The Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism set up the Love Music Hate Racism campaign in 2002, with festivals held to raise awareness, hoping to trigger people to use their vote to keep out the BNP. We only have to look to France to see how people’s wasted votes can result in unexpected and wholly unwelcome results. In 2002 France were faced with the all too real possibility that Le Pen and his far right National Front party could be elected into office due to extremely low voter turnout. Democratic elections exist so that the opinions of a nation can be heard and acted upon, not so that the bigotry of a racist minority can flourish when the majority erroneously think that their one vote won’t make a difference.
All too often I hear people grumbling about how all political parties are the same. I appreciate that it often seems as if MPs and political leaders are increasingly camouflaging their policies until it’s hard to distinguish what exactly a Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat policy is but there are some clear divisions. One need only take the time to look closely at the fundamental points that they stand by, whether it be about education, health or tax in general. But even if, after looking at their policies, you still feel no particular sway one way or another, ask yourself this. Be you right wing, left wing, in between or undecided, would you want the BNP to become a growing political force in this country? Intimidation, hatred, intolerance would spread. In place of an enriching diversity, you would have cultural anorexia.
So if it takes the wonderful medium of music to help people to realise just how important using one’s vote is in the 2010 elections, then I for one will be turning up my radio and making my voice heard.
Check out one of their previous effective campaign videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0xf4TTZOEs
Their current, 2010 campaign video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ybsEtDZDE and have a look at:
For information on how to get festival tickets, visit http://lmhrfestivals.com/
Politics and Religion
In the end, the election results were pretty much as everyone had been predicting. Kinky President, despite a fairly strong ‘outsider’ campaign from Ash, Will Chamberlain Librarian, Poppy Simister Treasurer-elect, and all the candidates elected to standing seem to have an uncanny liking for Kingston over Sangha. Odd co-incidence that.
Now more interesting stuff. Thursday’s debate was one of the best since Michaelmas’s epic No-confidence debate. The motion was about whether religion should have a place in politics, which has the potential to be incredibly dry and indeed Ash and Kinky, the first two speakers, both made it so. This was slightly disappointing, because both of them can be highly impressive speakers – Kinky’s well known for his cutting and often hilarious interjections from the floor, and Ash was an excellent schools debater in his day. But both of them were playing it safe, trying not to make any gaffes before the election, but giving the strong impression that they wanted to get the thing over with so they could get out to whatever major social event was on that night, to pick up a few last-minute votes. No-one wins votes in the chamber on the night before elections, because you can pretty much guarantee that everyone there will have made up their mind already. Still, both of them gave credible, coherent speeches. Kinky argued that letting religious values into politics led to the kind of theocratic politics practised in Iran, Saudi Arabia and even the USA. ‘We’ve thankfully escaped that in Britain,’ he continued, ‘but in voting for the opposition you would be turning back the clock.’ He was rather floored by a point of information from Henry Curr, who made the very sensible point that, given most politicians do have some kind of religious values, voters should probably know about the values a politician may hold when they cast their ballot. Kinky didn’t have much of an answer.
Ash opened with some gracious praise for Kingston, telling us what a pleasure it had been to run against him (really Ash? Really?), and how wonderful it had been to run into him at every social event in the university. This raised a good laugh. He went on to argue that religion was ineluctably intertwined with politics and that it was impossible to separate them. It was a dry schools debatery-type speech, but solid nevertheless – just not that amusing.
Tom McNally, who is something in the Lib Dems, made a good stab at arguing that politics in Britain is far too religious for the country’s good. Religious was a malign force in politics because the distinctive characteristic of the religious position was that it held that ‘the things that I do should also be imposed on other people.’ Fewer than 200 MPs chose to affirm their loyalty to the Queen rather than take the standard (religious) oath when they entered Parliament, he argued, and this suggested that politicians were far more religious than the population at large. No it doesn’t, Tom, it just suggests that most MPs are hypocrites.
Labour minister Steven Timms argued that religion actually plays a strongly positive role in public life, as shown by the great anti-poverty work done by Christian charities around the world. But he was completely upstaged by Freddie O’Morgan, a last minute stand in for a politician who cancelled. O’Morgan is, as far as I can see, some kind of comedian. This sounds slightly incongruous in the context of a high-minded philosophical debate. But O’Morgan was epic. Clad in a dinner jacket, bow tie and Converse shoes, he completely upstaged everyone who had gone before. ‘The danger is, in attempting to do God, our politicians think they are doing good,’ he thundered, wandering around the chamber and occasionally stabbing his finger in the air to emphasise a point. ‘They assume that opposition to their decisions is little different to opposition to God’s work,’ he argued, pointing out that the segregationist states in the southern US thought that they were carrying out God’s will. Henry Curr popped up to offer his twenty third Point of Information of the night. ‘Stay standing and I’ll take you in a minute,’ O’Morgan told him, and the audience fairly exploded with mirth.
There were a couple of decent politicians arguing about whether the general crappiness of Iranian politics was due to religion, the Bishop of Leicester observed that the British Humanist Society has barely more members than the British Sausage Society, and the debate wrapped up with two superb speeches from the closing speakers. Ben Woolgar, a Balliol fresher who captained the winning England team at last year’s World Schools debating championship, argued that ‘justification by faith alone is incredibly damaging. Extremists can’t be argued with, because they always reply “I did it because God told me to.” Faith destroys politicians’ humility.’ This argument relied on the slightly dubious assumption that politicians possess some degree of humility in the first place, but it was well made, and Woolgar is an excellent speaker (as, to my great frustration, he has been since he was outdebating me even before he hit puberty).
Matthew Parris, who is one of the best and most intelligent columnists at the Times, simpered (he has a rather weak and effete voice that fails to match up to that formidable mind) that, although there was plainly no God and religious people were deluding themselves to think otherwise, they had ‘as much right to delusion as a feng shui practitioner, or a Liberal Democrat.’ Indeed, religion was often a wholly positive force in politics. ‘But if God actuated their lives, they should tell us. Tony Blair’s crime was not that he heard voices, but that he didn’t tell us.’ Powerful stuff, and his joke about Tom McNally, sitting opposite, was a classic: ‘Tom McNally toyed with the idea of becoming a Baptist, but changed his mind when he realised that the process of baptism by total immersion would necessitate disappearing from the public eye for fully thirty seconds.’ Laura, bring Parris back next term please. You’ll need all the decent speakers you can get if you’re going to match the really excellent series of debates that Stuart’s put on this term.
Torpids 2010: Photo Gallery
A term’s worth of training, hours on the ergs, early mornings on the water, culminating in four days of racing.
All to decide who stays top, who goes up, and who bumps down…
College boathouses – Sonali Campion
College Flags – Gareth Langley
St Peter’s M1 – Una Kim
Crews at the bunglines – Rob Collier
Spectators – Jin Lee
Bumped under Donnington bridge – Rob Collier
In The Gut – David Grey
Univ – Rachel Chew
Crowds on Boathouse Island – Jin Lee
Throwing the cox into the river – Sonali Campion
Christ Church celebrate the headship at the boat burning – Alison Lutton
Linked article: Torpids 2010 Video Highlights
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Rahm is right
The White House is surely a stressful place to work. It’s a high-tempo environment in which disputes are inevitable and where those disputes can often become public. This administration, with its “no drama” motif carried over from the 2008 campaign, has — at least to the outsider — seemed a relatively serene place, with few serious divisions and next to no public wrangling. This administration had been in some sense exceptional in this regard; it’s rare for White House teams to appear outwardly so cohesive and so free of infighting.
Which makes the last couple of weeks interesting. The big discussion point in the beltway press has been Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s characterful Chief of Staff, and the extent to which he is responsible for the lack of progress delivered by the White House to date. First the press began to hammer Emanuel as the reason for Obama’s supposed failures since taking office. Some called for his immediate replacement. Next, a particularly sympathetic piece by Dana Milbank appeared in the Washington Post, which went out of its way to criticise the President for not listening often enough to his Chief of Staff. This led to speculation that Emanuel had orchestrated the favourable counter-commentary, which set off a new wave of gossip about apparent fractures in the administration, and renewed calls for his resignation on the grounds his very presence is deeply unhelpful.
The media is now utterly fixated on the possibility of a rift forming in the White House. This perhaps sells newspapers, but its importance is overstated. What matters more is the question relatively few are asking: has the White House failed to perform better than it has because Obama has been insufficiently pragmatic or insufficiently ideological? I think the answer is the former.
Emanuel is the type of politico journalists love, in that he makes for great column inches. The stories from the Clinton years are the best: posting a dead fish to a pollster who’d pissed him off; on the night of the midterm elections, hammering a steak knife into the table of a Washington restaurant while shouting the names of all the people he intended to destroy in the next two years. This week we also learnt from an excellent Noam Scheiber piece that he has his own distinctive vernacular: some Republicans are “knucklefucks”, Washington is “fucknutsville”. He’s often heard on the phone to friends, signing off with: “Fuck you. See you later. I love you.”
But Emanuel is also a brilliant political operator. The Scheiber piece paints a picture of him as deeply partisan but at the same time so pragmatic as to almost lack principles. That’s a simplification, and it’s important to emphasise the almost — Emanuel only lacks principles in so far as it is politically necessary to water them down in order to pass legislation. Uncompromising ideologues don’t understand this approach. You have principles, they are unwavering, and therefore if you’re “in power” you must accept nothing else. That works in a campaign: there’s a narrative and you stick with it. But this doesn’t work in the White House. It may seem obvious, but the nature of successful divided government is that it inevitably — except in rare circumstances — requires compromise.
Axelrod, Gibbs and co — the team who got Obama elected — are brilliant campaign flacks. And so in the White House they’ve been at their best when on the attack or defending the President. But they are, I think, poor at intra-governmental politics. Axelrod has talked about his role as being one of keeping Obama true to his campaign themes. That’s fine, but that’s also why Obama needs Rahm — because in the end, what you promise in the campaign proves not to be viable in the face of a Congressmen who didn’t get elected by the same voter base as you did.
In the battle to get enough votes to make progress, it isn’t enough to state your position and hold firm. Progress has been made in these last 14 months not just when the White House has been adept at selling itself but also when it has been willing to change its position in shifting sands. And that’s the argument for keeping Rahm Emanuel in post for as long as possible.
Online review: The Blind Side
Ah, the American Dream. Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman about it, Mad Men satirizes it, and millions of cookie-cutter American suburban bungalows (with SUVs to match) confirm it. The latest installment is The Blind Side, which paints a candy-coated picture of it that leaves a sadly saccharine aftertaste, and a predictably one-dimensional picture of American life.
The Blind Side follows the true story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a lumbering black teenager from the wrong side of the tracks who achieves, out of charity and a semblance of athletic promise, enrollment at a prestigious private Christian school in Memphis, Tennessee. Michael is failing his way through his first year when he meets a feisty blonde fireball of a Southern mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), who takes him into her sprawling home and gives him clothes, an education, and most importantly, a feeling of self-worth. Along the way, Michael wins the love and appreciation of the rest of his adoptive family: a precocious brother, aloof sister, and good-natured father. He is also helped by his well-meaning football coach (Ray McKinnon) and sage private tutor (Kathy Bates). Together they encourage him to reach his potential and ultimate goal of winning a Division I football college scholarship. All of this is achieved in spite of Michael’s drug-addled mother (Adriane Lenox) and gun-riddled upbringing that threaten to drag him back down to the southern slums of Memphis.
Let me just say that the experience of watching this film was strange. I’m half-American, and have lived the majority of my life within US borders, yet somehow seeing The Blind Side on the other side of the pond made a flimsy portrayal of American culture seem all the more stereotypical. To put it bluntly, the white Christian crusaders swooping in to save a black youth from his downtrodden culture and himself, in the name of God and football, is nothing new in American cinema and culture, and makes the premise of the film feel more like a Hallmark made-for-TV movie than an Oscar-worthy production.
The worst part of all of this is that this story is true: Michael Oher did in fact go on to play professional football with the help of the Tuohy family, which makes me feel a little bit guilty as I write this review. It’s an incredible accomplishment for Michael to have received that kind of recognition and achievement, and the Tuohy’s certainly practiced what their Christian morals preached. However, I couldn’t help feeling that in an attempt to make a feel-good movie feel good, The Blind Side forwent character and plot development for a simple message of charity and hope. This isn’t always a bad thing, and the film is certainly entertaining, compelling, and even inspiring, but the issues of race and religion that are touched upon are left glaringly un-dealt with, robbing the film of the substance it needs to make it truly successful. The Oscar nomination of Sandra Bullock speaks for itself—her performance as the immaculately groomed, morally conscious Mrs. Tuohy is stand-out, and by far the most developed, showing doubt beneath the bleach-blond hair and perfectly arched eyebrows. However, one of the most underrated performances is that of Michael’s mother, whose appearance gives the movie a brief sense of authentic humanity and understanding.
For what it’s worth, every American I’ve spoken to has loved this film. It has the crucial elements: achievement, athletics, and the good ol’ US of A. But it is the over-saturation of ‘heart’ that makes the Academy’s nomination for best picture so questionable, and leaves this incredible story feeling more insipid than inspiring.
3 stars
Feature: Beyond Bourne
To put this into context, the majority of us at the press conference had seen Green Zone about an hour before we found ourselves sitting infront of the two people responsible for giving new meaning to the term ‘action film’. As a pair, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have made the last two (and best) installments of the Bourne trilogy, and, I believe, most of us had come out of the screening of their third effort feeling pleasantly surprised that they had built on that track record, without merely replicating it.
Yet this didn’t stop Greengrass from being defensive from the very first question. Asked what he was trying to convey through Green Zone, he felt it immediately necessary to affirm that he did indeed have something to say, and that the film is much more than, as the phrase being tossed around indicates, ‘Bourne in Baghdad.’
I had found before the conference a wonderful quote from Greengrass in Vanity Fair. He said in that interview that he feels “it is never too soon for cinema to engage with events that shape our lives.” That is, as he put it, people watch films for all sorts of reasons: to escape, to laugh, to relate, but also, most importantly, to connect with reality and engage with politics. This last realm, he said, is the hardest for directors to successfully pay testament to, without creating something so niche that the film becomes irrelevant. Yet he retained a belief in the possibility of popular movies of a serious, social nature. Can we honestly say anyone would have a better chance of creating such a film, than the men with the backing of the Bourne fan-base?
Greengrass argued the reason people liked the Bourne trilogy was not only because of its adrenalin and action, but also because of the aura of lying and truth-exposure that dominates all three of the films. The task was thus to bring the same audience across to a film with similar themes, but which was now asking these questions in the context of the real world. Damon said he knew instantly that the WMD-saga was more than sufficiently fertile ground for creating such a film, and both were committed to the belief that Green Zone was one step further than Bourne, and that it would be enough to make people talk.
What was of most interest, however, came solely from Damon. Provoked by a question about how ‘real’ his character was, he explained that in preparation for the film he had spent a lot of time with an American soldier called ‘Monty’ Gonzales. Monty was a leader of the hunt for WMDs, and, in a revelation that brings Green Zone scarily to life, Damon explained that Monty knew from his very first mission that something was wrong. Intelligence passed down from Washington had led his division to a porcelain factory, which they all instinctively knew after raiding it could never have been anything more than just that. Miller starts asking questions after three seemingly phony intelligence reports. The reality is that Gonzales sensed deception from the beginning, and came to believe that through its lies, America lost its moral authority. Damon sees the consequent search for truth to be a noble, legitimate quest.
Looking forward to the future, Damon made it clear he has no intentions of slowing down, and indeed, he has been busy: The Informant, Invictus and Green Zone will have all come out in the space of 6 months. Confessing the reasons for this hyperactivity, Damon says that he wants to direct himself some day. When he’s getting offers left, right and centre to work with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Paul Greengrass and even, soon, the Coen brothers, he’s clearly not going to pass up the opportunity for on-the-job training from some of the best directors in the world any time soon.
The Cherwell’s online review of Green Zone is available in the film section.
Online review: Green Zone
The trailer wasn’t promising. Comprised of car chases, exploding helicopters and multiple reminders that this was another joint project between Damon and Greengrass, it did nothing but fuel a worrying expectation: that Green Zone would be nothing more than a money-spinning continuation of the Bourne saga which we’ve all seen before. Thank God it wasn’t.
It’s thanks to Greengrass that I can say the following with conviction: I came out of Green Zone feeling rewarded for staying with him. Yes, there is plenty of action. But the action does not feel majestic in the same way the perfectly coordinated New York car chase in The Bourne Ultimatum did. This is manic, messy stuff, set on the streets of hell; and Green Zone really does capture the mayhem of those streets, in a way that makes it feel much more authentic than the desolation implied by The Hurt Locker.
All this is set to the backdrop of a complex, political plot, loosely bound by the findings of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an excellent piece of investigative journalism that detailed the Iraqi reconstruction project undertaken by the Americans, and reminded us of what a shambles it was. There is an excellent scene that captures the book’s sentiment in the space of three short minutes: the camera swings across the Baghdad skyline from the streets of chaos to the government palaces. In the latter you find Washington bureaucrats, naively planning Iraq’s democratisation and totally oblivious to the looting and futile search for WMDs outside.
It is Paul Miller, played by Matt Damon, who leads this quest, which he becomes increasingly suspicious of when the intelligence proves unfruitful time and time again. At this point we get the predictable characters responding to Miller’s anger: ‘the reasons don’t matter.’ His job is to execute, not to question. And everyone seems to share this sentiment, except for one CIA official (played, excellently, by Brendan Gleeson), who Miller teams up with to try and uncover the truth.
The film follows this line of thought through an enthralling two hours. We meet Freddie, a civilian seemingly alert to the path his country was on under Saddam, yet equally suspicious of the American mob that he hopes will somehow save it. We see the Guantanamo-style conditions under which prisoners were kept. We meet even more of the naive US officials that convince themselves they’re ‘doing a good thing here.’
In short, we are treated to a rich insight into the occupation of Iraq, and are given a thorough reminder of the worrying fragility underlying the justifications for being there in the first place. Admittedly this is accompanied by a healthy dose of action, but the motives for its inclusion are legitimate. This is not Bourne. Miller says more in Green Zone than Bourne says in the entire trilogy. But the dialogue nevertheless retains a sense of efficiency, and this is undoubtedly intentional, for Green Zone is not a psychological analysis into soldiers, nor does it pretend to be. Its actors and their action scenes are a medium for a timely reminder: namely, that we were almost certainly misled. And Greengrass’s other films (cue United 93), are testament to his desire to say this.
4 STARS
What’s in a name?
Inertia, entropy, Hilbert space, angular momentum, the Schwarzschild metric… Physics abounds with jargon, technical terms, and specialised vocabulary—something of a double-edged sword. One the one hand, the incomprehensibility of much scientific discourse to all but the experts in the field can serve to further isolate the ideas of physics from mainstream culture. On the other, a specialised language facilitates rapid and effective communication of ideas, whilst minimising the risk of confusion.
So where does all this come from? What are the sources of our most well-worn and treasured physical terms? And what can the background to these words tell us about the history of their associated concepts?
The attachment of particular words to certain concepts is, in the main, a lengthy process of historical accident. At the time of coining a term, researchers may not even have a clear idea of what concept it’s supposed to express—indeed, the working out of such definitional issues is itself a key stage of conceptual clarification. Take 17th-century physics for example, where an almighty mess of words were used in relation to a bundle of closely related ideas: force, mass, momentum, inertia, weight, moment, motion, matter, body, extension, speed, velocity, impulse, acceleration… Such terminological overlap is bound to cloud clear-cut comparisons of different claims—how to know if a conservation law is correct, when it’s unclear what is being conserved? As more and more agreement is reached upon which words are to be used for which ideas, we can see our more modern physics filtering out from the distillation of older ideas.
However, this is not a one-way street; the use of certain words is intimately bound up with the physics being worked with. Partly, this is because the theories themselves provide the conceptual distinctions needed for clear terminology. It’s only with a theory of gravity, for example, that a systematic distinction between weight and mass can be drawn: the former as the force felt by a given body in a gravitation field, and the latter as the resistance of the body to motion. The working-out of theories can also illuminate where a single word is being used to describe two quite distinct phenomena, perhaps because of a superficial similarity. The physics of Leibniz (1646–1716) spoke of two kinds of ‘force’: the vis viva, or ‘living force’, as against the vis mortua, or ‘dead force’. However, to modern eyes these are quite different ideas (and neither of them is a force in the modern sense either): the vis viva is the mass times the square of the speed (so twice the kinetic energy), whilst the vis mortua is a more general idea of an ability to move—roughly equivalent to modern potential energy, but extended to include things like centrifugal force. Once we have succeeded in a theoretical separation of concepts, a linguistic separation is the natural next step.
However, more recent physics tends to specifically invent the words it wants to use, probably because many of the concepts in modern physics have no everyday analogue. Nevertheless, it is still eminently possible for the meanings of words to migrate far beyond their creators’ original intentions—something which helps explain the strange etymology behind many modern terms. Why, for example, should the disorder of a system—its ‘entropy’—have a literal meaning of ‘a turning towards’? Well, at the time of invention, the entropy was just another variable in the thermodynamic equations which describe how heat, temperature and other forms of energy interact. Since it was simply a variable, on a par with energy, heat, or temperature, the term’s inventor Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) just invented a term to sound like energy—only including the Greek word trope, for transformation, to indicate entropy’s special quality of always increasing as the system transforms over time. It was only the development of statistical mechanics (the study of how thermodynamics can be explained by the microscopic motion of atoms and molecules inside substances) that recognised that Clausius’ entropy was a large-scale representation of something microscopic and more fundamental—the underlying disorder in a system.
The phrase-coining has continued apace into modern times. Ironically though, as physics becomes ever more abstract, the fashion for appropriating words wholesale from everyday English has grown. Take the quarks (a name itself taken from the sound made by ducks): there are the strange quarks, charm quarks, truth quarks, beauty quarks… Even the classification of quarks according to ‘flavour’ does its best to make them seem homely. Of course, such terms aren’t a problem—no-one is tempted to mix and match their everyday meanings (licking a quark would be of minimal experimental value). Indeed, the linguistic dislocation of ordinary language in amongst the arch mathematical formalisms arguably helps guard against straightforward assumptions regarding the nature and behaviour of phenomena in the distinctly odd quantum realm. At any rate, as physics carries on growing, its language use will do so too—and the words used will continue to be an insightful guide to what is happening in its theories.
Online review: The Princess and the Frog
It’s been a confusing winter for films. As I write this Avatar is still number one in the UK box office, and why shouldn’t it be? The world that James Cameron has created, if not the dialogue or plot, is ground-breaking. When I left the cinema the real world seemed dull. Yet as I look at the box office charts the film at number two is an entirely different affair, in many ways a blast from the past, a veritable stegosaurus next to Avatar.
Yet The Princess and the Frog is a case of a few steps back and huge leap forward for a company that seemed to have been lost in the modern world. While Disney combinations with Pixar have been well thought, well scripted and well made this cannot be said for the 2D animation. You’ve probably forgotten Treasure Planet, but if you’d been forced to sit through it on DVD with a younger cousin then you too would have it seared forever on your memory. Yet in late 2006 John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Disney, announced that the studio would be leaving CGI to Pixar and working exclusively with hand-drawn animations. The first product of the revitalised studio is The Princess and the Frog.
Theis film’s quality was far from assured; Disney proved plenty of times that it’s possible to make a bad hand-drawn animation. But it seems that returning to this more basic style reminded Disney of what it’s meant to be; endearing. Spending painstaking hours on a few seconds of footage makes every moment valuable and The Princess and the Frog has an attention to detail that is unparalleled almost anywhere outside of Studio Ghibli. Indeed Lasseter is in a large way responsible for the huge fan base that films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke enjoy in the west and the influence of Miyazaki is evident in the glorious backgrounds of New Orleans in the twenties. Choosing such a music-rich setting was putting pressure on a soundtrack to deliver but Randy Newman’s jazz soundtrack proved successful in echoing, if not quite matching in quality, that of The Junglebook.
The plot is a clever reworking of the Grimm Brother’s Frog Prince where rather than returning the frog prince (Bruno Campos) to human form the unsuspecting Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) falls prey to the same Voodoo magic and becomes a frog herself. Some may cry that this runs a bit close to Shrek, but you are forced to forgive because what follows is an original and enchanting story. We dive into the swamps of the Mississippi pursued by a villain, Dr. Facilier (Keith David), as terrifying as any of the studios creations since the Bogeyman in Tim Burton’s stop motion The Nightmare Before Christmas. Throw in a trumpet-playing alligator (Michael-Leon Wooley) and a Cajun firefly (Jim Cummings) and you are on your way to a proper Disney film. Yes it may be predictable at its heart but what films that are essentially aimed at children aren’t?
The Princess and the Frog may not break new ground but it makes good use of a tried and trusted format. Much has been made of Tiana being the first black Disney princess, a fact that is worthy of note as a shocking indictment of another of Disney’s past failings. Hopefully the film will become truly significant for the era that it heralds, a return to the golden ages of the 50’s and 90’s when children’s films were not churned out for the plastic toys of Disney films you found at the bottom of your Happy Meal. It will take up half as much of your money, half as much of your time but it will charm you more than any combination of lanky smurfs ever could.