Tag: Bill Murray

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Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

McKenna Grace as Phoebe, with Logan Kim as Podcast, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Ghostbusters is a prime example of lightning in a bottle. There are some things that are just unique products of the time and place where they were created. They defy formula. Even if you put the same team back together and gave them all the tools and time they needed, they couldn’t replicate their success. 

The 1984 Ghostbusters was the product of the fevered mind of Dan Aykroyd. The story of a trio of misfit scientists who travel through time and space to battle supernatural threats was meant as a follow-up to his and John Belushi’s mega-hit The Blues Brothers, with the third part to be played by Eddie Murphy. After Belushi died in 1982, Murphy got his own franchise with Beverly Hills Cop, and Aykroyd retreated into a fallout shelter on Martha’s Vineyard with Harold Ramis to retool the script for Bill Murray and director Ivan Reitman. The Ghostbusters became supernatural entrepreneurs, more pest control than Doctor Who. 

Grace, Kim, and Finn Wolfhard cruisin’ in the Ectomobile.

Genre-wise, the fantasy action comedy had very little precedent. Reitman got the tone exactly right. It was the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, so there was an ample budget for special effects. Aykroyd was still at the top of his game, Ramis played Spock-but-funny, Ernie Hudson was the relatable everyman, Sigourney Weaver was sexy as hell, and Murray delivered one of the greatest comedy performances of all time. Propelled by a theme song by former Stevie Wonder sideman Ray Parker Jr. that became an unlikely No. 1 hit, Ghostbusters became the most profitable comedy of all time. 

When the principals got back together five years later for Ghostbusters II, it wasn’t the same. The film has its moments, but the elements never gel the way they did the first time out. For years, Aykroyd worked on a third installment, called Hellbent, but Murray saw the writing on the wall and once Ramis died in 2014, that seemed to be the end of it. 

But Ghostbusters is all about coming back from the dead, so in 2016, a gender-swapped version was produced with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. It, too, had its moments, but lacked that certain magic, and was the subject of a sexist social media backlash. Which might be why Ghostbusters: Afterlife exists. 

At least it’s better than The Rise of Skywalker, the other film that was produced as a response to closed-minded people freaking out over changes to their favorite ’80s film franchise. Produced by Ivan Reitman and directed by his son Jason Reitman, Afterlife moves the action from New York City to rural Oklahoma. Callie (Carrie Coon) gets evicted from her New York apartment with her two children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), only to find out that her estranged father has died and left them a spooky old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. While Callie tries to deal with her late father’s estate, Trevor tries to fit in with the local teens — especially cool girl Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe, a budding science geek who is too smart for her own good, is drawn into investigating unexplained earthquake swarms with her summer school teacher Gary (Paul Rudd). This part of the film is a solid kids-solving-mysteries story, like Goonies, but less annoying. 

As the story threads come together, Phoebe and Trevor learn that their grandfather, whom they never met, was Egon Spengler, a member of the Ghostbusters who cleaned up the Manhattan ghost flap of 1984. Naturally, the reason he moved to central Oklahoma was ghost-related, and now his grandkids must clean up the mess he left behind or, you know … human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! 

It’s weird to say, but it’s the familiar elements that derail Afterlife. Just when things get cooking with the new kids, we have to pause to re-introduce the Ectomobile. When the surviving old guys show up to help save the day, it seems perfunctory. Even the glorious moment when Bill Murray is doing Peter Venkman again undercuts the “action” part of “action comedy.” 

You can’t catch lightning in a bottle a second time. But I’m willing to give Ghostbusters: Afterlife the benefit of the doubt for two reasons: one, the screenplay mostly works, with the story flowing from the internal logic Aykroyd set up in 1984, even though it’s not nearly as funny. And two, Mckenna Grace gives an absolutely crackerjack performance. Mark my words, she’s a movie star in waiting. 

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Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The French Dispatch

Editorial meeting: Anjelica Bette Fellini, Bill Murray, and Elisabeth Moss in The French Dispatch.

Mention director Wes Anderson, and eventually someone will say he’s “twee.” What does that mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster definition of “twee” is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The word itself is thought to come from the way a small child pronounces “sweet.” Anderson’s films, which began with Bottle Rocket in 1996, were sort of retroactively lumped into a poptimist mini-movement that arguably began with a 2005 Pitchfork article titled “Twee As Fuck.” 

But I’ve never thought of Anderson as particularly twee in the way, say, Shirley Temple was twee. Yes, he’s meticulous in his visuals, and childhood has been a recurring subject for him. You can tell he’s someone who has cultivated what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” staying in touch with the awe of youth most people lose as they grow older. But there has always been a darkness underneath the curated surface of his films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family trying to deal with the aftermath of growing up with an abusive drunk father. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is about failing to deal with failure. At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hero M. Gustav is summarily executed by Nazis, and the narrator Zero’s wife and child die in a flu epidemic. Moonrise Kingdom is … okay, I’ll give you Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s also a major fan favorite, and one of the director’s biggest financial successes. 

Anderson’s latest film is The French Dispatch. I’m going to go ahead and cop to being biased toward this one, because it’s about magazine writers, and that’s what I am. (Read me in the pages of Memphis magazine!) Befitting the eclecticism that is the magazine form’s bread and butter, it’s an anthology movie — an exceedingly rare bird these days. It begins with the death of publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a magisterial Bill Murray), whose will specified that his magazine, whose name is the film’s full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (okay, that’s pretty twee) would shutter after one final issue which re-runs the best stories from its long history. First, we get Owen Wilson narrating a cycling tour of the fictional French city of Ennui, which lies on the Blasé river, because of course it does. 

Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and a whole bunch of other people.

Then, Tilda Swinton delivers an art history lecture on the origin of the French Splatter-School Action Group. The wild painters were inspired by Moses Rosenthaler (an absolutely brilliant Benicio Del Toro), an insane, violent felon who takes up painting to pass the time during his 30-year prison sentence. His first masterpiece, a nude portrait of Simone (Léa Seydoux), a prison guard who becomes his lover and muse, is discovered by Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer imprisoned for tax evasion. 

Lyna Khoudri, Frances McDormand, and Timothée Chalamet on the barricades.

In “Revisions to a Manifesto” Frances McDormand plays journalist Lucinda Krementz, who abandons neutrality by having an affair with student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) of the 1968 “chessboard revolution.” Due to the students’ lack of demands — beyond unlimited access to the girls’ dorm — Krementz drafts the revolutionary manifesto herself. 

Jeffery Wright working on deadline.

“The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is the least coherent episode, but it features a killer James Baldwin imitation by Jeffery Wright as Roebuck, a writer whose assignment to do a profile on chef/gendarme Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) spirals off into a tale of kidnapping and murder, with very little actual food content. 

“Twee” implies closed off, hermetically sealed, and precious. The French Dispatch is anything but claustrophobic, even in the scenes set in an actual prison. This is Anderson’s most expansive and generous work, teeming with life in all directions. Heavy hitters like Willem Dafoe, Griffin Dunne, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss, and the unexpectedly dynamic duo of Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban appear for only seconds at a time. The dizzying array of faces flashing across the screen led me to count the acting credits on IMDB. I gave up at 300. While there are some great shots of the actual French countryside, most of the action takes place on soundstages. Nobody does set design like Anderson, and all kinds of wonders are on display, from tiny dioramas to livable multi-story cross sections. 

The French Dispatch is a love letter to the golden age of magazine journalism, and it made me think I was born in the wrong era. But the underlying theme is revolution in all its forms, from the students manning the barricades to new artistic movements springing from a prison riot. Maybe the critics are right, and all this stylized attention to detail designed for aesthetic shock and awe really is “twee,” but if so, it’s twee AF. 

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News The Fly-By

MEMernet: Flyer Meta, Two Cities, and “Corporate Memphis”

A roundup of Memphis on the World Wide Web.

This Checks Out

Posted to Twitter by @madmolecule

Two Cities

Posted to Twitter by @Jak46Judith

What’s In a name?

Posted to Twitter by @EvanCollins90

True fans of Memphiana will know the 1980s “Memphis Group” (of Italian designers and architects) launched a new design style of cartoony-looking furniture, fabrics, lighting, and more. It was named “Memphis” for Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.”

The style reemerged recently in illustrations of large, cartoony-looking people, now referred to as “Corporate Memphis” and widely used by companies. Design expert Evan Collins explained why the name may be misplaced in a long thread on Twitter.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Harriet, Mystery Train, and Frankie Lead Indie Memphis 2019 Lineup

Cynthia Ervino as Harriet Tubman in Harriet, the opening night film at Indie Memphis 2019

The Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the lineup for the 22nd iteration of the home-grown cinephile celebration, which will run October 30-November 4, 2019. The opening night film will be Harriet, a biopic of abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman by director Kasi Lemmons.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

Director Jim Jarmusch, who put Memphis on the arthouse map in 1989 with Mystery Train, will return for a 30th anniversary screening of the seminal independent film. Since the festival runs through Halloween this year, Jarmusch will also screen his latest film, zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die.

Producer/director Sara Driver, Jarmusch’s longtime partner and sometimes co-creator, will be the subject of a retrospective, and present the “spooky inspirations” for her work, which critic Johnathan Rosenbaum called “a conflation of fantasy with surrealism, science fiction, comics, horror, sword-and-sorcery, and the supernatural that stretches all the way from art cinema to exploitation by way of Hollywood.”

William Marshall wants to have a drink on you in Blacula.

On Halloween itself, there will be a special screening of the cult classic Blacula starring William Marshall as a vampire loose in ’70s Los Angeles.

Memphis director Ira Sachs returns from France with his latest picture Frankie, starring Isabella Huppert as an ailing movie star who summons her family and friends for one last gathering.
 

Harriet, Mystery Train, and Frankie Lead Indie Memphis 2019 Lineup

The Hometowner category, which spotlights films made by Memphis artists, boasts a healthy six features this year, including Cold Feet, a bachelor party horror comedy by Indie Memphis stalwarts Brad Ellis and Allen C. Gardner, which just won the writing award at the New Orleans Horror Film Festival. Musician and artist Lawerence Matthews makes his feature film debut at the festival with vérité documentary The Hub. Cinematographer and producer Jordan Danelz presents his first feature documentary In the Absence, which deals with blight and gentrification in Memphis. Jookin’ is the subject of Louis Wallecan’s Lil Buck: Real Swan. Jim Hanon profiles Memphis saxophonist Kirk Whalum in Humanite: The Beloved Community. Director Jessica Chaney makes her premiere with the girl power drama This Can’t Be Life.

Penny Hardaway (right) stars with Shaquille O’Neil (center), Matt Nover (left), and Nick Nolte (bottom) in William Friedkin’s Blue Chips.

The celebrated director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin will have a mini-retrospective with two films. The first is Blue Chips, a 1995 film set in the world of college basketball starring Shaquille O’Neil, Nick Nolte, and University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway. The second is Sorcerer, a film Friedkin called his masterpiece, but which had the misfortune to be released in 1977 on the week Star Wars went wide.

Another sure-to-be-anticipated screening will be Varda by Agnes, an autobiographical film by the late, revered filmmaker Agnes Varda, made when she was 90 years old.

The great director says goodbye in Varda by Agnes.

The Narrative Feature competition will feature five films from as far abroad as the Dominican Republic, four of which are by women directors. The documentary competition will be between four features, including Best Before Death, director Paul Duane’s portrait of artist Bill Drummond, which was filmed partially in Memphis.

The Memphis Flyer will have full coverage of the festival in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, you can find more information, festival passes, and tickets to individual screenings on the Indie Memphis website. 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Dead Don’t Die

The town of Centerville’s welcome sign says it all: “A Real Nice Place.” Police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) don’t have to work too hard to keep the peace. When The Dead Don’t Die opens, they’re checking out a report by Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) that old Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) has been stealing his chickens. The investigation goes pretty much nowhere, because Chief Robertson thinks Farmer Miller’s an asshole, and all Hermit Bob will say is “fuck you.”

As they head back to the station, Cliff and Ronnie notice that there’s something weird going on. This is, of course, the set up to nearly every zombie film ever made: Two people, their heads buried in the daily minutiae, slowly come to realize that their world is being overrun by the unquiet dead.

You probably don’t associate director Jim Jarmusch with the genre, but he has obviously seen a few zombie movies in his time. Jarmusch’s primary directing mode has always been that of the observer. He favors letting things play out in long takes, the better to get to know his characters, warts and all. His 1989 masterpiece Mystery Train, which immortalized the down-and-out Memphis of the era, lingered on the bewildered faces of Jun and Mitsuko, the Japanese tourists who were discovering the real America. In Night on Earth, he got a career best performance from Winona Ryder by simply riding around in a cab with her.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

But he’s also always had a taste for genre pictures, such as his 1995 Western Dead Man, where he shot Johnny Depp in creamy duotone while demolishing the genre’s black and white morality plays. His last foray into supernatural horror was 2014’s transcendent Only Lovers Left Alive, where Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston played centuries-old vampires feeling the weight of immortality.

As one of the godfathers of independent film, Jarmusch knows how to get a project done by rounding up all of your friends and showing them a good time while they work. The difference with Jarmusch is the quality of the friends’ talents. Sara Driver, who became his partner while he was making his first film Stranger Than Paradise, appears as a zombie. Steve Buscemi, who here sports a “Keep America White Again” hat, rode with Joe Strummer in Mystery Train. Tom Waits spouted gruff wisdom in Coffee and Cigarettes. Bill Murray was the lead of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. The director worked with Iggy Pop for years to make a documentary on The Stooges. Tilda Swinton, so chillingly elegant in Only Lovers Left Alive, appears in The Dead Don’t Die as an eccentric coroner who is aces with a samurai sword. Adam Driver was magnificent in Paterson, Jarmusch’s last film. The list goes on.

Murray and Driver, joined by Chloë Sevigny as Officer Mindy, first try to make sense out of the dead rising from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, then try to contain the zombie contagion. They also serve as their own Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it happens around and to them, delivering sly in-jokes, and making the occasional meta foray. There are references to earlier Jarmusch films, such as the road-tripping tourists, played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler (slicked up like Strummer), who pick the wrong time to hole up in a seedy room at the Moonlight Motel. Jarmusch, the consummate indie film hipster, gets a laugh at their — and his own — expense with the line “Infernal hipsters and their irony!”

In the tradition of George Romero, who invented and perfected the modern zombie picture, Jarmusch uses the walking dead as satirical mirrors of society. Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it’s wifi and chardonnay.

As a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die never reaches the manic heights of Shaun of the Dead; but then again, it never tries that approach. Jarmuch’s sense of humor is dry as a bone, and his pacing deliberate. Hermit Bob, who watches the zombie apocalypse gather strength through cracked binoculars, serves as the director’s alter ego. He can’t fully participate in the rapidly decaying human society, but he can’t look away, either. One line in particular from The Dead Don’t Die seems designed to resonate through Jarmusch’s entire filmmaking career: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The Dead Don’t Die

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Film Features Film/TV

Isle Of Dogs

When you’re a film critic, you have to watch a lot of crap. It’s right there in the job description: I watch crap so you don’t have to. But what I don’t think I was prepared for was the sheer shoddiness of some of the films I see. I’m not talking about the kind of corner-cutting you see on low-budget pictures. I’m talking about poor craftsmanship in studio blockbusters. You’d think if you’re spending $200 million on a production, you would at least care enough to make it look good on screen. It’s disheartening to see stuff like Transformers: The Last Knight, where the special effects finale included terrible composite jobs and recycled stock footage. If they don’t care about their product, why should I?

That’s one of the reasons critics like Wes Anderson. His work can be truly great, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom; or divisive, like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or head-scratchingly misguided, like The Darjeeling Limited. But at least it’s never shoddy. Even when it doesn’t work, you can tell he and his team are paying attention to detail, making each individual shot look the best it can.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my reviews, even if you fail, you get points for honestly trying — and deductions for cynical, advertising-driven cash grabs that are directly proportional to the size of your budget. So when I see a film that is both as lovingly crafted and as emotionally resonant as Isle of Dogs, I’m gonna praise it like it was Medicare for All.

Wes Anderson celebrates his love for dogs and Japanese culture in Isle of Dogs.

This film is about two things: Anderson’s love of dogs, and his love of Japanese culture. Isle of Dogs‘ prologue is a Noh drama about “a little samurai” lovingly staged in flawless stop motion, complete with black-clad stagehands the audience is trained to ignore. Right from the beginning, Anderson uses layers and layers of artifice stacked together to reach for something higher. But his little curlicues, which have in the past threatened to overwhelm the bigger picture, are here focused on the story. The Noh bit sets up the history of the powerful, cat-loving Kobayashi family before flashing forward to the near future, where Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) rules fictional Megasaki City. The mayor uses the cover of a dog flu epidemic to banish all of the city’s dogs to Trash Island, which prompts his ward Atari (Koyu Rankin) to steal an airplane and fly to rescue his beloved pet, Spots (Liev Schreiber).

Atari’s landing skills are not great, so he quickly finds himself needing a rescue. Fortunately, he’s found by a pack of heroic dogs, voiced by Anderson regulars: Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). They take the “Little Pilot” under their paws and help him navigate treacherous Trash Island in search of his lost dog. Meanwhile, Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) and his assistant Yoko Ono (voiced by the actual Yoko Ono) search for a cure to dog flu, and an American exchange student named Tracy (Greta Gerwig) uses her school newspaper to unseat Mayor Kobayashi.

Anderson careens from one incredible set piece to another. Professor Watanabe’s lab comes right out of a Toho production like The Mysterians. The director uses Kobayashi’s brief visit to a sumo match as an excuse to create a fully realized arena tableau that echoes Raging Bull. The island where most of the adventure plays out provides endlessly varied environments, from orderly stacks of cubes made from compacted trash to a slimy toxic wasteland. Our canine heroes hide out in a hut made of discarded saki bottles that provide a luminous and colorful background. Unlike the finely polished (and criminally overlooked) Kubo and the Two Strings, Anderson foregrounds the stop motion process — like King Kong; the dogs’ fur is in constant motion, disturbed by the animator’s unseen fingers. But there are also some spectacular effects, such as when characters eyes well with artificial tears.

Anderson loves nothing more than making self-contained worlds that play by their own internal rules. But there’s an underlying melancholy to his work. His orderly creations are a way to provide escape from the chaos and pain of the real world, if only for a couple of hours. Isle of Dogs is twee as you would expect from Anderson making a movie about dogs, but the underlying hurt is much closer to the surface here than in an idyl like Moonrise Kingdom, and that gives it a fairy-tale vibe. This is a kids movie that knows the kids can handle the darkness better than the grown ups.

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Film Features Film/TV

Ghostbusters

Why remake Ghostbusters?

A perfect movie is a rare beast. To make every shot work, every actor deliver, to land every script beat requires skill, vision, and luck. The 1984 Ghostbusters originated in the fevered brain of Dan Aykroyd while he was in the middle of one of comedy’s greatest hot streaks. The OG SNL star conceived of three movies to feature him and his best friend, John Belushi: The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and Spies Like Us. Just as the unlikely success of The Blues Brothers gave the pair the run of Hollywood, Belushi OD’d. Aykroyd and Caddyshack director Harold Ramis retooled Ghostbusters‘ insane first draft, which featured psychedelic scenes of astrally projecting Ghostbusters fighting hordes of interdimensional spectres, as a more grounded ensemble movie set in New York City.

In 1984, all the pieces fell together for producer/director Ivan Reitman to make the quintessential action comedy. Aykroyd and Ramis created a pair of indelible geek icons in the schlubby Ray Stantz and the Spock-like Egon Spengler. Sigourney Weaver did duel duty as symphony musician Dana Barrett and gatekeeper spirit Zuul, playing off of Rick Moranis as a geeky accountant possessed by the Keymaster Vinz Clortho. The role of Winston Zeddmore was originally offered to Eddie Murphy, but when he turned it down in favor of Beverly Hills Cop, Ernie Hudson stepped into the thankless role of audience surrogate. Looking back on Ghostbusters from the perspective of 2016, it’s clear that Bill Murray is the key to the picture’s success. His Lothario con man turned paranormal investigator Peter Venkman is a perfectly pitched performance worthy of Chaplin, Keaton, or Cleese.

Remaking Ghostbusters seemed a fool’s errand. Reitman captured lightning in a bottle, an artifact of a certain moment when all the players were at the top of their game, by mixing ’80s horror beats with Second City gonzo yucks. Even the core creative team couldn’t reproduce the magic. Remember Ghostbusters II? Of course not. You might as well try to remake Casablanca.

This was the task set before director Paul Feig. In a move that upset a vocal hoard of internet man-babies, the creator of Freaks and Geeks upped the already impossible difficulty level by gender-swapping the characters. Well, I’m here to tell you that the Men’s Rights movement picked the wrong hill to die on.

Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Kate McKinnon don the proton packs in Paul Feig’s remake of Ghostbusters.

Feig surmised that the secret of Ghostbusters was in the chemistry, and the director of Bridesmaids knows funny women. The team of Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones is even more finely balanced than Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Hudson. Wiig’s Erin Gilbert, a former paranormal investigator trying to get tenure as a physics professor at straight-laced Columbia University, can’t touch the crystalline genius of Murray, but she’s a good fit for this version. McCarthy hones her wild talent with discipline and precision, turning in the best performance of her career as Abby, the Ray Stantz analog. Feig and Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold’s script gives Jones’ character, Patty, a New York transit employee who gets sucked into the Ghostbusters’ world, more to do than Hudson, and the film is all the better for it. The most perverse casting choice is Chris Hemsworth in a hybrid of Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts’ cynical receptionist; Thor rises to the occasion by whipping out previously unseen comedy chops. But it’s McKinnon who slyly steals the show. McKinnon reworks Ramis with a brash physicality. Geeks are cool now, but McKinnon, who takes her look from the animated version of Egon, avoids the autistic minstrel show approach epitomized by The Big Bang Theory and wrings more depth out of renegade techie Holtzmann than the script provides.

As long as Feig and Dippold follow Aykroyd and Ramis’ beats, the movie hums along, but when they attempt to graft on a parody of The Avengers climax in place of the intimate confrontation with Gozer the Destructor, the film spins out of control. Still, speaking as an old school Ghostbusters fan, this remake is better than it has any right to be. In 1984, Ghostbusters was a standout in a quality field that included Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Purple Rain, and fellow action comedy classics Gremlins and Romancing the Stone. 2016’s Ghostbusters comes as a sip of water in a historic drought. Feig has pulled off the impossible by successfully reworking an unlikely masterpiece, and everyone involved deserves major kudos.

But seriously, let’s not try to remake Casablanca, OK?

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Film Features Film/TV

The Jungle Book

As my wife said when we were leaving The Jungle Book, “That was a lot better than I was expecting it to be.”

She’s right. Jon Favreau’s entry into Disney’s campaign of remaking its classic animation titles as CGI-heavy live action films is a solid little adventure story starring talking animals. Mowgli (Neel Sethi, in his feature debut) is one of only two real humans onscreen. His co-stars are a menagerie of CGI animals that constitutes the film’s biggest achievement.The computer-generated animation and backgrounds on display here are astonishing. The animators get all of the little things right, like the ripple of a wolf’s fur or the quiver of a porcupine’s quills, making this one of the visually best CGI-driven films since Avatar.

We meet Mowgli, the foundling raised by his wolf mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o), as he’s trying to run with the pack. Try as he might, he can’t keep up, but alpha wolf Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) encourages him to keep trying. A drought brings all the animals of the jungle together in a water truce, where they promise not to eat each other while gathered around the last pond of drinkable water. It’s here that Shere Khan (Idris Elba) first sees Mowgli. Shere Khan carries scars inflicted by a human wielding the “red flower” of fire, and Mowgli becomes the focus of his grudge. The angry tiger threatens the wolf pack if they don’t turn over Mowgli, forcing the boy on a dangerous jungle sojourn with Bagheera (Ben Kinglsey), the black panther, as his guide. His ultimate goal is to make it to the human village, but Mowgli is unsure if he really wants to go, leaving him trapped between worlds.

Wolf boy — Neel Sethi as Mowgli.

The voice casts are all quite good, led by America’s spirit animal Bill Murray as jovial slacker bear Baloo, and including Scarlett Johansson as the hypnotic python Kaa and the recently departed Garry Shandling as Ikki the porcupine. Favreau and company devise a series of cleanly executed set pieces to put Mowgli in peril as he navigates through the dangerous jungle.

Favreau’s Jungle Book is visually lush and innovative, but you know what else was visually lush? The 1967 animated adaptation of The Jungle Book, which was the last film Walt Disney worked on before his death in 1967. That version sanded some of the rough edges off of Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist source material and imbibed the characters with some of the best songs in the Disney canon. Orangutan King Louie, played in 1967 by Louis Prima, flirted with racial caricature, but his version of “I Wanna Be Like You” is a heavy-bopping freight train of a song. Favreau turns the colonialist overtones way down by casting Christopher Walken as King Louie and referencing Brando’s performance in Apocalypse Now. Walken delivers a fine take on the song, but not fine enough to erase the memory of the original. Along with “Bear Necessities,” it’s one of only two songs to make it into this version, and that’s the problem in a nutshell. Disney wants to make some kind of slightly gritty reboot of The Jungle Book that will appeal to the hypothetical kids today, but also channel the spirit of the original, but in trying to thread the needle, Favreau takes a middle path that fully satisfies on neither level. The Jungle Book is not quite as inessential as last year’s Cinderella, but ultimately it still fails to justify its own existence.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Jungle Book

As my wife said when we were leaving The Jungle Book, “That was a lot better than I was expecting it to be.”

She’s right. Jon Favreau’s entry in Disney’s campaign of remaking its classic animation titles as CGI heavy live action films is a solid little adventure story starring talking animals, denying me the opportunity to use the line I had prepared for this review: “More like BUNGLE Book, amirite?”

Mowgli (Neel Sethi, in his feature debut) is one of only two real humans onscreen. His co-stars are a menagerie of CGI animals that constitutes the film’s biggest achievement.The computer generated animation and backgrounds on display here are astonishing. The animators get all of the little things right, like the ripple of a wolf’s fur or the quiver of a porcupine’s quills, making this one of the visually best CGI driven films since Avatar.

We meet Mowgli, the foundling raised by a his wolf mother Rakasha (Lupita Nyong’o) , as he’s trying to run with the pack. Try as he might, he can’t keep up, but alpha wolf Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) encourages him to keep trying. A drought brings all the animals of the jungle together in a water truce, where they promise not to eat each other while gathered around the last pond of drinkable water. It’s here that that Shere Khan (Idirs Elba) first sees Mowgli. Shrere Khan carries scars inflicted by a human wielding the “red flower” of fire, and Mowgli becomes the focus of his grudge. The angry tiger threatens the wolf pack if they don’t turn over Mowgli, forcing the boy on a dangerous jungle sojourn with Bagheera (Ben Kinglsey) the black panther as his guide. His ultimate goal is to make it to the human village, but Mowgli is unsure if he really wants to go, leaving him trapped between worlds.

The voice cast are all quite good, led by America’s spirit animal Bill Murray as jovial slacker bear Baloo, and including Scarlett Johansson as the hypnotic python Kaa and the recently departed Gary Shandling as Ikki the porcupine. Favreau and company devise a series of cleanly executed set pieces to put Mowgli in peril as he navigates through the dangerous jungle.

Favreau’s Jungle Book is visually lush an innovative, but you know what else was visually lush? The 1966 animated version of The Jungle Book, the last film Walt Disney worked on before his death. That version sanded some of the rough edges off of Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist source material and imbibed the characters with life using some of the best songs in the Disney canon. Orangutan King Louis, played in 1966 by Louis Prima, flirted with racial caricature, but his version of “I Want To Be Like You” is a heavy bopping freight train of a song. Favreau turns the colonialist overtones way down by casing Christopher Walken as King Louis and referencing Brando’s performance in Apocalypse Now, and Walken delivers an adequate take on the song, but not fine enough to erase the memory of the original. Along with “Bear Necessities”, it’s one of only two songs to make it into this version, and that’s the problem in a nutshell. Disney wants to make some kind of lightly gritty reboot of The Jungle Book that will appeal to the hypothetical kids today, but also channel the spirit of the original, but in trying to thread the needle, Favreau takes a middle path that fully satisfies on neither level. The Jungle Book is not quite as inessential as last year’s Cinderella, but ultimately it still fails to justify its own existence. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Hyde Park on Hudson

Hyde Park on Hudson, a light historical period piece from director Roger Michel (Notting Hill), is an apparently unintentional companion piece to 2010 Oscar winner The King’s Speech, even if it now seems very unlikely to garner the same kind of industry and even critical approval.

The film portrays Franklin Roosevelt (Bill Murray) over the course of a long weekend at a family home in upstate New York, where he hosts the new English monarch, King George VI (Samuel West) and enters into an illicit relationship with Daisy (Laura Linney), his spinster fifth cousin.

Like The King’s Speech, Hyde Park on Hudson is a middleweight chamber dramedy heavily dependent on a lead performance that rises above its station, and Murray is good here in the moments where he has some decent material. This is more often in his ostensible “B” plot scenes with West than in his scenes with Linney.

The film peaks when Roosevelt and George break through diplomatic decorum during a late-night meeting in the president’s study. Here, Murray enacts a perilous solo journey across the room, showing the strength and resourcefulness of the disabled president, and then gives some wise, avuncular advice to the worried new king. West, a generally unknown British character actor, gives one of the year’s most underrecognized supporting turns.

But if Hyde Park on Hudson is better than advertised when it shows FDR on the job, it suffers in putting its primary focus elsewhere. From Gone With the Wind to Casablanca to Titanic, it’s been Hollywood style to subsume the world-historic into the romantic and personal. But, here, that’s a big mistake, and the depiction of the relationship between Roosevelt and Daisy is an uncomfortable mix of prim and prurient. Early on, when Daisy, ahem, manually stimulates him in a car, amid a sea of wildflowers, with period music on the radio and a cigarette in his hand, it’s maybe the most awkward scene of the year — for performers and viewers alike. (“I knew then that we were not just fifth cousins, but very good friends,” Daisy says in a howler of a voiceover.)

Hyde Park on Hudson seems to think it’s doing the good work of humanizing a historical figure, but it has the misfortune of sharing theaters with Steven Spielberg’s extraordinary Lincoln, which humanizes an iconic president without shortchanging what actually made him great.

Hyde Park on Hudson

Opening Friday, January 4th, Ridgeway Four