| Withnail & I: From Cult To Classic |
FROZEN
CLASSIC SOUNDTRACK
VARIOUS WALT DISNEY RECORDS
Talk about ‘almost there’. Despite the many strengths of Tangled and The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s early 2000s musicals never quite matched the peaks of the 90s renaissance. In 2013 that all changed, as Elsa busted the castle confines, quite unperturbed by the cold and ready to transform the mountainous landscape.
A decade on, it’s too easy to dismiss Frozen-mania as a freak cultural-weather phenomenon, stirred by snowstorms of supermarket merch and publicity. Remember, after all, that Disney’s PR machine even avoided marketing Frozen as a musical initially. And any cynicism can’t do justice to the copperbottomed songcraft of spouses Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, which engaged everyone from kids to LGBTQ+ groups and f-bombing parodists with foot-stomping fervour.
It all began with Let It Go, spawned by loose script instructions: ‘Elsa’s Badass Song’. The songwriters delivered so emphatically that writers/directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee rewrote Elsa to match. As a song, Let It Go is impeccably plotted, its progression from minor-key self-doubt to self-realisation bursting righteously off screen. Neither too specific nor vague, the song’s empowerment foundations emerged fully equipped to withstand numerous claims on its meaning. On film, the result is also a test-case display of careful integration, building character, situation and world in song.
The other building tune runs it close, mind. A harbinger of innocence inevitably lost, Do You Want to Build a Snowman? traces a coming-ofage arc in 3.5 minutes, melting any ice in cynical parents’ hearts. Upgrading Tangled’s When Will My Life Begin?, For the First Time in Forever and Love Is an Open Door add zest. In Summer is a nicely dopey breather, matched by Kristoff’s ‘Ken’ moment on Reindeer(s) Are Better than People. And Fixer Upper is so buoyant it practically demands a mob-handed Broadway makeover.
Christophe Beck’s score fleshes out proceedings brightly, mixing Nordic influences, snow-swirl strings, tumultuous timpani and driving action cues with a tight grip on pace, place and peril. Smartly, Beck doesn’t overuse the songs, imbibing their spirit rather than their melodies to avoid muzzling their clout. Oscar glory followed for Frozen, complemented by enough ubiquity to keep playgrounds in dressup options and YouTube in sweary/COVID-y/Walter White-y homages for decades. Frozen II couldn’t quite match up, but coming second to a genreshifting juggernaut is no slight. With Frozen III inevitably forecast, Disney’s ice age surely won’t melt any time soon…
FRESH SPINS
Fluorescent sound and expansive fission…
BARBIE: THE ALBUM ★★★☆☆
Curator Mark Ronson makes mixed work of Barbie’s ‘Peloton-pop’ mix: sometimes perky, sometimes predictable. Besides Lizzo’s paint-bynumbers Pink, Dua Lipa’s disco frolic, Charli XCX’s Hey Mickey sampler and Ava Max’s Euro-pop throwaway are flatly rote. Haim and PinkPantheress brighten proceedings, but the Kid LAROI and Khalid’s pat entries are party-poopers. At least Ryan Gosling has fun, gamely echoing Frozen II’s Lost in the Woods via Jack Black’s Peaches for complaint-rocker I’m Just Ken.
OPPENHEIMER ★★★★☆
Ludwig Göransson projects first-person scoring onto a historical canvas for his second Chris Nolan summit meeting. The orchestral-electronic results are so enriched that they perhaps needed the double-album treatment. But what’s here is immersive and abundant, with Oppenheimer’s six-note theme and the violin’s multiple tonalities mapping out extremes from warmth to dread. Ground Zero and Trinity are tense centrepieces, though Destroyer of Worlds is equally gripping: introspective, pensive and haunted.