Frozen and Disaster in March

My Experience with Frozen

(Unabridged Post from my Media Shelf blog)

I find myself in this weird world where Disney is not making any hand animated features, and Pixar is endlessly putting out horrible sequels to my least liked Pixar movies.  I don't like this world.  The thing is... the Disney Studio's recent CGI movies are trumping Pixar.  Wreck-it-Ralph had a hand up when it comes to me because its based on video games, and thankfully it was created by people who actually loved video games(of all eras).  Wreck-it-Ralph was amazing.  Frozen, I wanted to hate Frozen.

Frozen had no excuse to me as to why it was CGI and not hand animated.  It was a Disney princess tale, not a movie about computer created characters. The last Disney Princess movie done CGI was Tangled.  I disliked Tangled, which I thought would have been better animated by hand and stole too much from other popular non-Disney movies.   I started picking Frozen apart early.  The snowman thing looked horrible.  Then there was the whole "dumb guy, smart princess", but now probably 1/2 of Disney movies use this dynamic... oh and 100% of today's sitcoms.

I think it turned around for me during the amazing landscape sequence I was waiting for, because the song was amazing.  The song sequence "Let it Go" is easily the highlight of the entire movie for me.  I got the incredible visuals I was expecting, and a pretty good song I was not.  Early on I really liked that the two Princesses were not enemies.  This was a movie made for sisters to watch together.  It is a dynamic not explored in Disney before.  Then they also had some hard political intrigue.  I'm not talking "oh no the guy from the other nation doesn't like things", I mean they had economic manipulation and diplomatic position shifting.

Idina did an amazing job on the Oscars right before they announced that Frozen had won for best original song.  Even during the Oscar performance, I was like "this is a very powerful song".  I can even overlook the incessant need for people to put a "let's talk in the song like Pink" part at the very end.  Then the pair that came up to accept the Oscar were like the most bubbly and funny pair I'd seen at the Oscars all night.  They also looked like normal, every day people among a sea of plastic and paint.  I was very happy for them.

The stupid animated snowman never redeemed himself.  I took the opportunity of his song sequence to go take a piss.

March 5th, 2014

DISASTER!

My guitar amp blew.  Looks like something in the pre-amp fried.  I have a couple of choices to continue playing.  I can play through Rocksmith, but I can't watch my Youtube while learning and doing that.  I can put my amp-modeler into my bass amp.  I have wide response speakers in my bass cabs, and they have tweeters as well, so it doesn't sound too horrible, and I am lucky in that I like "dark" sounding cabs to begin with.  I just can't get it fixed right now, and its probably near 50% of its worth to get it fixed.  I will probably take this opportunity to switch to a head + speaker cab set up instead of a combo... for this specific reason.  I blown head doesn't mean my speakers are useless.  I am thinking of getting an empy speaker cabinet and transplanting my speakers into it, that'll save me quite a bit.  But that's a long way away...

Was a good day up until then.  I did my early Spring cleaning of my wardrobe.  Reduced my laundry load by a large amount.  I always dislike getting ready for warmer weather.  I like sweaters and multiple layers.  I hate warm weather.  I am not a "feet in the sand" kind of person, I am not a "moderate" climate kind of person.  I like the idea of Montana.

Getting psyched about Easter coming up... well the amp going out kind of puts a damper on things, now that I think about it.  I was looking forward to maybe playing with a few of my cousins.  If i have to use my bass amp as a guitar amp, that leaves no bass amp for me to play bass on.  I will still get to grill out and cook food for everyone, and see everyone playing and having fun.  Also, I get chicken salad.