Frozen
Story: Frozen is an endearing fairy tale about two princesses, their dreams, desires, fears, self-discovery and above all, unconditional love for each other.
Review: A 'snow queen' of sorts, Princess Elsa has the power to create snow. Everything she touches turns into ice. A deadly mishap convinces her that she is born with a curse. Ashamed and heart-broken, she distances herself from the world and goes into a self-proclaimed exile. Clumsy and vivacious, younger sister Anna is kept in the dark about Elsa's secret, until their kingdom bears the brunt of it.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
Story: Part bonkers, part brilliant Flint Lockwood (Hader) now works for The Live Corp Company, after accepting an invite from his idol, Chester (Forte). While Chester wants to save Swallow Falls from being swamped by mutant creatures and critters, Flint, who is enlisted to help save the town, soon finds himself having to take some important decisions.
Review: While its predecessor had more emotional impact, this second helping of Cloudy... is more adventurous and fun, while losing precious little of the overall charm of the characters and location.
Flint's earlier invention of a machine that turned water to food was of great benefit to the people of Swallow Falls as it created a smorgasbord of free grub for the townsfolk to chow down on. While Flint, his father Tim (Caan) and his buddies Sam (Faris), Brent (Samberg) and Steve (Harris) had been living elsewhere, they have to now return to their old town. This is because Flint's old machine has become self-aware and started creating a glut of hilariously-titled 'foodimals' - living creatures made out of various food items with portmanteau names like 'shrimpanzees', 'watermelephants', 'double bacon cheespider' and 'tacodiles'.
Flint now gets recruited by Chester, who apparently wants to save Swallow Falls. And as frantic Flint finds himself both inspired and driven by Chester, his newfound success makes him more socially acceptable and he drifts further away from the grounding effect of his old buddies. There are a few smaller subplots too, but apart from creatively-titled names and a hallucinogenic landscape, Cameron and Pearn keep the narrative tight and in focus without rambling all over the place.
While kids will enjoy the jokes, there are sight gags galore to give adults a good guffaw or three. Generously laden with a buffet of food puns and savoury set locations, this is a film filled with gorgeous, vivid animation and no-holds-barred creativity. With plenty of 'tasty' surprises, the umpteen food references make it as much a gustatory delight as it is uplifting.
Angelique: Marquise des Anges: Film Review
The Bottom Line-
A handsome and romantic costume drama with some swordplay, a dash of feminism and good performances.
Opens
Dec. 18 (in France)
Director
Ariel Zeitoun
Cast
Nora Arnezeder, Gerard Lanvin, Tomer Sisley, David Kross, Mathieu Kassovitz
The Angelique novels, written by Anne Golon and her husband, Serge, have reportedly sold over 150 million copies since they were published in the 1950s. They were adapted for the screen in the 1960s by director Bernard Borderie, withMichelle Mercier, Robert Hossein and Jean Rochefortheadlining the sprawling cast. However, these films were quite conservative in that the titular heroine was more of an object than the subject, though this has been rectified in the new film, in which Nora Arnezeder (Faubourg 36) incarnates the young but strong-willed protagonist who’s married off against her will to an ugly but rich nobleman she doesn’t even know, Joffrey de Peyrac (Gerard Lanvin).
There’s a nostalgia factor at work for French audiences, who’ll remember the original films or have since caught up via countless TV re-runs, that won’t offer quite the same draw abroad, though the film has already been sold to many European territories including Germany, much of Eastern Europe and Russia.
In the mid-1600s France, Angelique (Arnezeder) is married by her practically penniless aristocratic father (Matthieu Boujenah) to the Count of Peyrac, a man whose fortune is so great, people whisper he’s practically as rich as the Sun King himself, Louis XIV (David Kross), who’s still in his early 20s. The riches of Peyrac, who had an accident in his youth and has a huge scar on his face and a limp as result, stem from a gold mining operation that utilizes a new technique to extract the precious metal, though his adversaries claim he’s a sorcerer who can turn things into gold.
Initially, Angelique rebels and tries to make love to the handsome Nicolas (Mathieu Kassovitz) so that she’ll be defiled and thus won’t have to marry a man she doesn’t know. But her father, her uncle (Miguel Herz-Kestranek) and her insidious cousin, Philippe (Tomer Sisley), “save” her and manage to deliver her to Peyrac.
In a nice twist, Peyrac may be ugly and older -- even a lot older than in the book in this adaptation -- but he’s also an expert at understanding people and Angelique is impressed when he doesn’t freak out when she provocatively shows up for their wedding wearing pants. In order for the film to work, the relationship between the unlikely duo, which slowly evolves into respect and then love, has to be believable and at the same time not undermine Angelique’s fierce individuality. Thankfully, Zeitoun and his Belgian co-screenwriter, Philippe Blasband, working from a story summary by the novelists’ daughter, Nadia Golon, manage to do just that, and Arnezeder and Lanvin imbue their characters with both their own eccentricities and a pleasing sense of complicity.
The film’s best set piece involves the visit of Louis XIV and his extravagantly dressed entourage to the surface mine where Peyrac extracts his gold. Kross, so good as the shy and naive lead in The Readeropposite Kate Winslet, is an unexpected but perfect fit for the imperious Louis the Great and the film’s occasional detours into Saturday matinee material is never more evident than here, where a handful of bad guys scheme to do harm to one person but their plans go delightfully awry. Most of the action is relatively light but well staged and, something increasingly uncommon, flows directly from the needs of the narrative.
Costume and production design are opulent and the cinematography of regular Werner Herzogcollaborator Peter Zeitlinger is entirely in tune with the film's generally-old-school-with-a-dash-of-feminism feel.
Opens: Dec. 18 (in France)
Spain's Box Office Sales Drop 15 Percent in 2013
A downward spiral of poor movie attendance and government austerity measures coupled with Europe's highest VAT on ticket sales left the film industry gasping for breath.
MADRID -- The year can't end fast enough for the Spanish film industry, which was hit by austerity measures that depleted state subsidies, piracy that ranks among Europe's worst and a VAT sales tax hike on theater admissions that skyrocketed to 21 percent.
Spain 2013 in Review: Pedro Almodovar Lights Up Box Office, Government Cuts Back
Massive unemployment, a sharp dip in TV advertising and less government support made 2013 a rough year for the Spanish industry, but local films enjoyed a box office bump.
Broadcaster Shut Down By Regional Government
Government cutbacks and job losses – the main Spanish narrative of 2013 – hit a new low in November when the Valencian regional government closed the public regional broadcaster.
Government cutbacks and job losses – the main Spanish narrative of 2013 – hit a new low in November when the Valencian regional government closed the public regional broadcaster.
The decision followed the Supreme Court's reversal of a decision already in effect to fire 1,000 employees to cut costs. The Valencian government shut down the broadcaster, RTVV, saying it couldn’t find the $56 million needed to keep its staff employed.
The workers’ union challenged the move in court, arguing the dismissals violated labor laws. But the local government said the shutdown and firing of employees was necessary as "a restructuring of the public business sector, with the goal of making a lighter, more sustainable administration."
Spanish Producers Squeezed By Subsidy Cuts
With a backlog of unpaid state film production subsidies going back to 2011, it was clear to everyone that Spain’s ailing production industry was in need of an overhaul.
REVIEW: A Wolf at the Door: San Sebastian Review A government commission presented its recommendations early in the year, calling for tax breaks, state subsidies and more investment from TV. But, come fall, little had been done, and Spanish producers accused the government of dragging its feet. The industry continued to struggle to tap private capital to fill the financing gap and to work around Spain's tax laws, which give producers a 18 percent tax break towards feature films but grant private investors a measly 5 percent. On Dec. 18, Spain’s Culture Ministry finally reached an agreement with the country’s film producers for a new financing model that ramps up fiscal incentives for the industry and lowers the whopping 21 percent sales tax on movie tickets introduced earlier in 2013. Another work committee is still studying the relationship between broadcasters and film production as of mid-December. With a backlog of unpaid state film production subsidies going back to 2011, it was clear to everyone that Spain’s ailing production industry was in need of an overhaul.
Telefonica Studios Goes Global
Spanish telecom giant Telefonica set up Telefonica Studios, a worldwide content producer that clusters the group's various production activities in Europe and Latin America under one umbrella.
Learning from the lessons of the now-defunct Telefonica Media, which snapped up blue-chip companies like Endemol more than a decade ago before going bust, Telefonica Studios plans to forge partnerships with local powerhouses in international territories.
At a stroke, Telefonica Studios became Spain's number one production outfit and a leader in Latin America with more than a dozen films in the production pipeline, smashing box office records. Telefonica’s Argentine network Telefe delivered such local box office hits as Juan JoseCampanella’s Foosball, the Ricardo Darin-starrer The 7th Floor and Lucia Puenzo’s Argentine Oscar bid Wakolda, helping domestic films take a new high of 17.6 percent market share of the box office.
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