Tag: Jon Favreau

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Spider-Man: No Way Home

From "Spider-Man: No Way Home."

“The Simpsons Already Did It” is a 2002 episode of South Park. Trey Parker wrote the now-classic installment out of frustration, because he was always scrapping good ideas for episodes after someone remembered that The Simpsons had gotten there first. In sci-fi circles, there’s a lesser-known equivalent: “Doctor Who did it,” a recognition that, over the almost 60 years Doctor Who has been on the air, staff writers at the end of their wits have already tried everything. In the 1970s, for example, the Doctor Who serial “The Ark In Space” donated many plot points to Alien, including parasitic, wasp-like creatures who feed on human hosts, and an ending that is uncannily similar to Ridley Scott’s. In “The Deadly Assassin,” the Doctor must enter a computer simulated world called The Matrix to battle a malevolent intelligence that controls the fabric of reality. In 1973, Doctor Who celebrated its tenth anniversary with a very special episode, “The Three Doctors,” in which all three of the actors who had at that time played the regenerating Time Lord teamed up to defeat an ultimate evil. 

Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange separates Spider-Man’s soul from his body.

Which brings us to Spider-Man: No Way Home. Since the new Marvel film just scored the second-biggest opening weekend in history, taking home a dizzying $637 million worldwide as of this writing, I’m going to assume you already know where I’m going with this Doctor Who digression. 

The film, directed by Jon Watts, helming his third Spider-Man solo outing, begins immediately after the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. Longtime spider-antagonist J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) uses his paranoid tabloid website TheDailyBugle.net to broadcast a video from the dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaall) outing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as Spider-Man. Peter, having just returned from saving London’s bacon, is intent on exploring his new relationship with MJ (Zendaya) and getting into M.I.T. Instead, he finds himself at the center of a media maelstrom, and the lives of the people around him, like Aunt May (Marisa Tormei), his bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon), and handler Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), are thrown into chaos. 

Since Peter knows that the post-Thanos world was set right by the reality bending power of Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) magic, he seeks out help from his super-colleague. But when they try to cast the spell to erase the world’s knowledge of Spider-Man’s identity, Peter’s indecisiveness distracts Strange at the wrong moment, and the universe shudders. Suddenly, Spider-Man is called to fight some villains that are unfamiliar to him — but familiar to us in the real world who have watched nine Spider-movies in the last 20 years. 

Wilem Dafoe as The Green Goblin

For, you see, Spider-Man: Far From Home is the result of a long-running dispute that has made many a corporate lawyer’s boat payment. Spider-Man has been the jewel in Marvel’s crown of classic characters since his introduction in 1962. When the company fell on hard times, back in the 1980s, it sold Spidey’s movie rights to stay afloat. This resulted in a series of collapsed projects and lawsuits that stretched over 16 years. Ultimately, Columbia Pictures traded its claim on the James Bond franchise to MGM in exchange for the spider-rights, and parent company Sony footed the bill for the excellent 2002 Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire as the friendly neighborhood webslinger. After three movies, Raimi and Maguire handed the baton to Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield for The Amazing Spider-Man, which was decidedly less than excellent. 

Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger (who is retiring at the end of 2022 to go count his money) had the bright idea to just buy Marvel outright — albeit without Spidey. Disney took the Marvel B-team, the Avengers, and made them the core of a cash machine. Meanwhile, Sony was thrown into crisis when the North Korean government hacked its computers as retaliation for the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, and it was forced to the bargaining table with Disney. After unfathomable amounts of money changed hands, Spider-Man could once again share the screen with other Marvel characters. 

Zendaya as MJ flees the paparazzi with Spider-Man.

Far From Home is essentially a reunion show, bringing back familiar faces from the franchise’s multi-corporation evolution. First, there’s Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), who confronts Spidey on the now-mandatory bridge fight scene. Also from the Sam Raimi Spider-years is Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), and The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). From the Amazing Spider-Man years come Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx), and they’re all confused when they see that the MCU Peter Parker doesn’t look the same as he did when the intellectual property was controlled by Sony. 

Surprise! Doctor Strange’s magic also brought Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, both sporting their respective spider-jammies, to Earth C-53, and the aforementioned classic Doctor Who episode breaks out. If it ain’t spider-broke, don’t spider-fix it! 

Seeing the three Spideys together, it’s safe to say the hero has had good luck with casting. Maguire, nowadays mostly a producer, exudes emo gravitas. Garfield, saddled with bad scripts and indifferent direction during his tenure, blossomed as an actor in his post-superhero career. He looks like he’s having the most fun. Holland, meanwhile, tries valiantly to hold the whole mess together, one reaction shot at a time. On the other side, the always brilliant Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe deliver better than the material deserves. Meanwhile, current it-girl Zendaya outshines everyone whenever she and Holland scheme together to, as Doctor Strange says, “Scooby Doo this shit.” 

As a stand-alone work, No Way Home can’t match either the Raimi-Maguire era or even Holland’s first outing, Homecoming. But the film, which just had the second biggest opening box office weekend of all time and is being hailed as the savior of the theatrical experience, is better understood as the successful culmination of a decades-long branding exercise by the two largest intellectual property conglomerates on the planet. Hooray for Hollywood! 

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The Mandalorian

Under that fashionable armor is Pedro Pascal as The Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Star Wars has always worn its influences on its sleeve. Its most direct influence was, of course, the cheap Flash Gordon matinee serials of the 1940s. But George Lucas was a fan of all kinds of movies, like the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa, such as The Hidden Fortress, which gave its plot to A New Hope; and World War II air combat films such as Twelve O’Clock High and The Dam Busters, which Lucas plundered for the Death Star trench run. In the prequels, he expanded his palette ever further, mounting Ben Hur’s chariot race with rocket pods in The Phantom Menace and a sword-and-sandals gladiator match in Attack of the Clones.

Hovering in the background, as it does in most American action movies, was the Western. The famous double sunset shot from A New Hope is a copy of a single-sunset shot in The Searchers. Put a hat on Han Solo’s vest and gunbelt combo and he becomes a cowboy. Now, with the premiere of the first ever live action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, the Western aspects take the forefront.

The Mandalorian, created by Iron Man director Jon Favreau and a team which include The Clone Wars’ Dave Filoni, is set in Star Wars’ equivalent of the frontier, the Outer Rim. The title character comes from the same warrior culture as Boba Fett, who apparently prize armor couture above all else. Pedro Pascal’s titular Mandalorian With No Name has yet to even take his helmet off, but he’s already hit a few choice Western tropes, like breaking a wild horse (in this case, a toothy biped lizard-thing), a rowdy bar fight that turns deadly, and a gatling-gun enhanced town square shootout. The details, such as the hero’s pitchfork-shaped energy weapon, which references the original Boba Fett cartoon from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, put it in sci fi drag, but at its core, the show is basically Bounty Law from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Werner Herzog as The Client.

The House of Mouse has a lot riding on this Lucasfilm production, which is the flagship show for its new Disney+ streaming channel. It’s clear from the cinematic sweep of the pilot that no expense has been spared. Pascal is appropriately stoic, and he’s surrounded by colorful characters. Chief among them is the legend Werner Hertzog, whose appearance as a former Imperial official who offers a big money job to the Mandalorian is used to establish the post-Return of the Jedi setting. Taika Waititi appears in the pilot as the amusingly literal bounty droid IG-11, and Carl Weathers is our anti-hero’s agent. So far, the show’s biggest problem is its lack of a decent female character, which is unfortunately consistent with the Western blueprint.

The pilot ends with the revelation of the biggest Western trope of all: the worldly gunfighter seemingly finding his humanity when forced to travel with and protect a young innocent. It has proven quickly that it can deliver on the thrills front, but the jury’s still out as to whether Favreau and company can deliver depth.

The Mandalorian

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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

Jon Favreau’s Chef satisfying, not spectacular.

That Eli Roth’s cannibal film The Green Inferno played as a trailer to Chef appeared to be a good omen, but Jon Favreau’s foodie film, of which he serves as writer, director, and star, is a chain restaurant movie — serving up fare that is reliable, if not spectacular.

The story revolves around Carl Casper, a chef anointed the biggest thing going in the L.A. food scene, but that was 10 years ago, and where Casper sees beauty in the greens of a bundle of beets, his boss, Riva (Dustin Hoffman), sees it in the greens of a bundle of money brought in by customers who’ve been coming back for the same decade-old menu.

A visit by an important critic finds Casper and Riva at odds. Casper wants to try something new and exciting, Riva wants to play it safe by serving the same old scallops and lava cake. The chef gets slammed by the critic, and what follows is a violent confrontation (one that is filmed and goes viral) that leaves Casper without a job and doubtful about his future. Thrown in the mix is the relationship Casper has with his 10-year-old son, who yearns to spend more time with his dad.

As a food film, Chef never reaches the heights of 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman, but it does capture the giddiness as seen in 2009’s Julie & Julia of creating and sharing a meal so fine that the mood is electric. And, if the film doesn’t quite make you want to be a chef, it will certainly make you want a sandwich.

It’s clear that Favreau did his homework. It’s seen in such foodie flourishes as the Lucky Peach magazine in Casper’s apartment and the appearance of culinary stars like Aaron Franklin of Austin’s Franklin Barbecue and Roy Choi of the Kogi BBQ Taco Truck in L.A. At one point, Chef becomes a road-trip movie, with Casper, his right-man, and Casper’s son driving across the country, from Miami to L.A., in a food truck. The trip serves as a primer for Casper’s son — Cuban sandwiches in Miami, beignets and muffulettas in New Orleans, and Texas barbecue in Austin. (Interestingly, there is apparently nothing noteworthy foodwise between Texas and California.)

The film is well served by its supporting cast. Scarlett Johansson is Casper’s sympathetic and (duh) sexy sounding board, while John Leguizamo adds humor and energy as Casper’s sous chef. There’s a cameo by Amy Sedaris as well, stirring up memories of the fantastic Jerri Blank as the too-tan, not-hearing-a-word publicist. The film’s biggest laughs, however, go to the brief though wonderfully weird and awkward scene with Robert Downey Jr. playing the ex-husband of Casper’s ex-wife.

It’s ironic, then, that another of these supporting roles points directly to the chief weakness of Chef. Hoffman, as the nervous restaurant owner, does not want to try anything that stretches the imagination. And while Favreau’s character fights the static, Favreau as a writer and director does not push the boundaries. There are at least three musical interludes (two too many), and the ending, while pleasing, is about as pat as they come. Ultimately, Chef feeds you just enough to be satisfied.