Frozen Hotel

It’s a rare movie that I see twice, but last week I saw two that just might fall into that exalted category.
 
I saw Disney’s megahit “Frozen” with two children (aged 7 and 10) who had already seen it umpteen times and could sing all the songs and lip-synch most of the dialogue.  Usually this would drive me up the wall but these kids were adorable and I couldn’t help but laugh inappropriately and thus sometimes missed some important facts and/or plotlines.  I guess the movie itself is charming (yes, there’s a prince) and it seems to have risen to the level of some of the bygone Disney classics, although blessed with a fairly anachronistic non-period script and jazzy lyrics/music.  I don’t think I really listened to the songs and sometimes my eyes wandered to the chickadees in attendance rather than the screen so, to be fair to both myself and the movie, I need to see it again.  Hmm, come to think of it maybe I should leave it alone…I might lose control of my old-fogey anti-sugar gag-reflex.
 
Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is about as quirky a movie as you might see since the heyday of, say, the Marx Bros.  It’s almost relentlessly so and I missed a lot of the details so that a second, or even a third, viewing might be required to remedy that.  It’s a mad, mad world set in a never-existed European Alp country just before a major World War.  In other words it’s a damned serious movie taken lightly-with-caviar and it has a farcical panache that is hard to resist.  Ralph Fiennes is absolutely perfect as the historic and heroic concierge of the hotel and he attacks his role relentlessly, plays it gloriously straight and never cracks the veneer of what is required for his character’s impossible job.  Almost everybody in the cast is terrific in their own way (or maybe they are just giving in to Mr. Anderson’s “way”) with the exception of a couple of clinkers who were obviously cast in bit parts to draw I-see-you titters from an otherwise engrossed audience.  I don’t think it ruins anything to tell you that Mr. Fiennes’ character is a gerontophile, a word I love for several reasons, including just looking at it.  The GBH is probably one of the best movies of 2014 and I hope the Oscar folks have long memories.