"Tangled", Nathan Greno, Byron Howard (2010)

Disney´s "Rapunzel" fails miserably to update that staple of the company: the teenager princess musical.  The CGI animation is pretty good, but you can see all of the strings trying to pull you to feel something at the right moments.  It does not work, we have seen this done better countless times.
The anachronistic dialogue is tuned to attract the pre-pubescent girlie crowd, but it is so obvious that takes the viewer outside the film.  Dialogue can be snappy, but doesn´t need to be at odds with the surrounding world of the characters.  It is marketing at its worst, thinking that the audience is so stupid that cannot understand classic dialogue without modern references on it. The musical part is mostly innocuous, a disservice to all great Disney musicals.
This Disney villain is not overtly evil, and the sudden ending to her predicament is not at all warranted.  Lets see: an old woman, presented as a witch but that doesn´t have powers kidnaps a baby (Rapunzel) that has magical hair, that can make the old woman live forever young.  So the baby grows up thinking about this woman as her mother.  What this woman did is terrible, yet it is clear that Rapunzel cannot dismiss her as quickly as it happens here, and a half second shot of a futile attempt at salvation is not enough to clear Rapunzel morally.  If the old lady did not try to kill one character, Rapunzel would be put in a very interesting spot: let her die or to maintain her young forever?  The step-mother is not wrong, if Rapunzel gets out there everybody will want a piece of her hair, so she will be forever doomed to sing her days away.
In the end, is another Disney story about an American teenager fighting with her parents about going out to have fun, hardly classic material.  It is fun as it is disposable, and for a movie so many years in the making, it is a shame and a travesty. (3/5).

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398286/

Armond White: http://www.nypress.com/article-21903-twisted-tale.html
AW sustains that this movie is a gimmick-machine.  American cinema has his roots in vaudeville and the medium as a bag of tricks, and lately is the only clear aspect of lauded mainstream films.  Movies as circus, but not even as moving, only the cheap magician, not even the clowns.