Jungle Book review

Disney’s reboot/remake of their 1967 classic animated film “The Jungle Book” is a rare achievement, in that it pays lip-service to the most iconic beats of the original feature, while still finding a way of presenting the material without becoming all-together tired and superfluous. Jon Favreau, the character actor turned director of such blockbusters as Marvel’s “Iron Man” and the Christmas comedy “Elf,” has taken on the task of putting this digital IKEA piece together, working within an almost entirely animated environment and using hardly any live-action sets or actors.  This working method of course demands a lot of trust with his crew and the post-production effects team to ensure that his vision, whatever it may be, is represented accurately, and with a multi-million-dollar budget and a small army collaborating to make it work, any number of things can snag on the process. Luckily, things seem to have gone well enough here to bring what is essentially a safe and non-offensive retelling of a slightly better movie.

Neel Sethi gives the only live performance as Mowgli, an orphaned human child who was saved at birth by a black panther named Bagheera (Ben Kingsley). The cat then leaves the boy with a pack of wolves to raise as one of their own cubs, which upsets a tyrannical Tiger names Shere Kahn (Idris Elba) who fears the child might serve as a danger to the Jungle and its current political landscape. It becomes apparent that Mowgli is drawing too much unwanted attention to the pack from Kahn and he offers to leave the forest to be with his own kind in a nearby village. On the way, he is separated from his panther chaperone and falls into the easy life with a lazy bear named Baloo (Bill Murray), nearly escapes a slithering soothsayer named Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and is trapped by a massive orangutan mobster named King Loui (Christopher Walken).  

There aren’t enough risks taken with this project to be proud of its sustainability as a story, but there’s just enough love and passion put into the production effort to accept its purely corporate purpose for existing. The animal animation is convincing and the CGI jungle environments are beautifully rendered. The team involved did a wonderful job creating a digitally sculpted world that has weight and tactility and Sethi is able to interact with it seamlessly. The celebrity voice cast is given updated dialogue to work with and they all fit their parts well. Murray’s Baloo is warm and inviting and Elba’s Kahn is genuinely intimidating—in an age appropriate, Disney sort of way.

The plot is familiar but it’s comfortable in its own skin and moves naturally. Though largely inspired by the 60s animated feature, the few divergences it takes seem to be cued directly from Disney’s other jungle adventure, The Lion King, and the two stories share enough structural similarities to mix without complications. Sometimes the movie is confused as to whether or not it should include the iconic musical sequences of its predecessor, and most of the it doesn’t, which only makes it all the more awkward when a song or two is attempted without the musical foundation to lay them on. Outside of that hang-up “The Jungle Book” plays like a good time a community theater production of your favorite play – it’s doesn’t have the zest or originality of its reference point, but it’s an acceptable and faithful recreation.

Grade - B- 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2016

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Jungle Book."

The Monuments Men review

                Originally slated as a late 2013 release, Grant Heslov and George Clooney’s World War II heist dramedy “The Monuments Men” was pushed to the early months of this year, which rarely says anything good about the studio’s faith in the project. But hey, how could you go wrong with a cast like this one, comprised of strongly-identifiable, older-aged actors like Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon and Cooney himself. As it turns out, the same reverence towards these actors that recognized a yearning to see them together in the same flick might also be the same factor that placed them on an unreachably high pedestal, cased behind glass, where audiences are nervously asked to carefully observe the film from a safe distance.

                During the final stages of WW2, art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) is asked to put together a scrappy team of other artists, architects and scholars to enter Nazi occupied France, in search of stolen paintings and sculptures from Europe’s past. The team is assembled quickly and even rushed into a military basic training camp before sweeping the bloodied battlegrounds, in search of the timeless artifacts. As the story progresses some of them are injured, others are killed and America’s international relations are placed in an opportunity for profound cooperation.

                Concurrently, James Granger (Matt Damon) is courting a French curator played by Cate Blanchet, who once worked under the Nazi’s before ending up in jail. Though Damon’s character is a married man their relationship skirts between professional and flirtatious, but is ultimately never resolved or rewarded by the film, much like everything else that happens.

                Heslov’s screenplay and Clooney’s direction is so guarded and safe that this movie eventually suffocates among all its narrative floatation devices.  You can’t help but notice every box being ticked as the story moves along: humorous fish-out-of-water scenes about old guys trying to fit into military life, check, secondary unrequited love story, check, sad moment when a one of the two soldiers who have spent the entire film learning to get along dies in the other’s arms, check. When these familiar beats pass by they don’t exactly ruin the overall goal of the picture, but they never really hit with the intended force of their formal purpose either.

                Cliché’s in a film like this are acceptable as long as the cover band can really jam out the classics, but unfortunately Clooney doesn’t mine his cliché’s for their inherent entertainment.  Because this movie is so focused on its message about the importance of preserving our humanity through art during times of political and economic upheaval—seriously, Clooney explicates this theme in not one but three separate lengthy speeches—everything else is treated lite and brief and frustratingly vague.  The film is never as funny as it should be and the cast members, as fabulous as they are, never seem to be on same page.

                With some thoughtful attention to period set-decoration, crisp cinematography, and a handful of notable scene-bits, I suppose “The Monuments Men” isn’t all bad.  It’s cute and old-fashioned in a somewhat obnoxiously knowing way, and it’s important and politically conscious in an absolutely obvious way. However, as an ensemble piece, the characters are dreadfully incidental and secondary to the plot’s strict sequencing of events. One might expect seasoned comedians like Murray and Goodman to spice things up with some much-needed improv or some creative line-readings but their direction is so edgeless and their scenes are so repetitively one-note that this movie only becomes a monument to the film it didn’t have the wherewithal to be.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014