The latest in Disney's now neverending string of live-action remakes of their animated properties:

Hope it's closer in quality to Cinderella than Alice In Wonderland.

It's a Jon Favreau movie...for the most part, you know what you're going to get.

Eh.

I have no interest to see the film - was never a fan of THE JUNGLE BOOK as a cartoon.

Haven't always been a huge fan of Favreau's output but, regardless of how the film turns out (and it sounds like they might have a winner), it's nice to see this for a change...

Maintaining the buoyant heartbeat beneath all the digital flash, Favreau never loses sight of the fact that he’s making an adventure story for children — no small matter in a kid-pic landscape flooded with inappropriately gritty reboots and frenetic distraction devices — and when positive word of mouth arrives to buttress Disney’s all-out marketing efforts, the studio should have a substantial hit on its hands.

http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/th ... 201743393/

Movie was apparently "shot on location in Downtown Los Angeles" (CGI) -- and is credited as such!

Monterey Jack wrote:Hope it's closer in quality to Cinderella than Alice In Wonderland.

8.5/10

It is. A gorgeous adventure film that's perfect family viewing (exciting and humorous without being unnecessarily dour or bloated), it's hard to believe this was "filmed in downtown Los Angeles"...the illusion that this was shot in some fairy-tale jungle is eerily convincing, and the central performance by winning newcomer Neel Sethi goes a long way into selling the fact that we're not looking at a kid surrounded by greenscreens and tennis balls on sticks. While there is an undeniable disconnect between the photorealism of the film's menagerie of CG animals and their very recognizable celeb voices, the film has cast those roles extremely well, with Bill Murray a perfect Baloo, all slovenly con-man charm. John Debney's score suffers a tad in that he's handcuffed to the melodies of the famous Sherman Bros. songs and George Bruns' underscore for the animated version (one wishes he had been allowed the free reign that Basil Poledouris had in his excellent score to the 1994 Stephen Sommers version), but he does an excellent job arranging those melodies into a lush whole, and hearing Christopher Walken crooning "I Wanna Be Like You" is a surreal treat (yes, there is MOAH COWBELL! ). While it's easy to be depressed at Disney strip-mining their back catalogue of animated classics for these new live-action interpretations, at least we've gotten two excellent films out of them so far (with this and Cinderella), so I'm cautiously optimistic at the prospect of the new Beauty & The Beast next years with Emma Watson.

How about that PETER PAN remake they announced the other day? I've never seen a LIVE-ACTION Peter Pan movie before!! lol

Anyway I am glad to hear this one is solid at least. Disney doesn't stray far from formula and why not when they are making tons of money off remakes, super-heroes and nostalgia.

AndyDursin wrote:How about that PETER PAN remake they announced the other day? I've never seen a LIVE-ACTION Peter Pan movie before!! lol

Has there EVER been a live-action Peter Pan movie that has made money? Even Hook barely broke even compared to its bloated budget. Why studios continue to think that modern-day tots will be interested in this fey, fanciful material is beyond me.

The only thing I can think of is that PAN's failure opened the door for this film. Maybe Disney was going to make it either way, but the fact the Warner Bros. movie bombed so hard and was seen by so few, likely meant it wasn't going to over-saturate the market for their own Pan film.

But....I agree with you, the material seems played out, and it's antiquated for this generation. HOOK did do well, but it took it a long time to get there -- at the start, they were sure it was going to bomb (it also cost a fortune, and probably has to be one of Spielberg's biggest-budgeted films).

AndyDursin wrote: But....I agree with you, the material seems played out, and it's antiquated for this generation.

Hey, I'm all for the innocence of childhood, and all that, but it's hard to imagine some modern-day twelve-year-old surfing for porn on his iPhone putting it down so he can clap for Tinkerbell, of whatever. It's not the fifties anymore, and having Hook perform Nirvana songs(!) like in last year's absurd Pan isn't enough to "modernize" the property for today's prematurely jaded, media-savvy tots. Making a live-action Peter Pan movie in this day in age seems every bit as out-of-the-loop as that joke from Ghostbusters II when the kids at the birthday party demanded He-Man (that film was released in 1989...when did they stop making new He-Man episodes, like 1984? '85 at the latest? Those kids should have been clamoring for the Ninja Turtles).

LOL I agree. And a "child of the 80s" (or at least late 70s/early 80s) I was never into Peter Pan growing up. The Pirates, the Indians -- the whole subject kind of bewildered me. I remember our neighbors taking their kids and I to see the Disney film at the Apple Valley theater in Greenville (RI) when I was probably 7 or 8, and I was like "whatever". I would rather have seen STAR TREK II or ROCKY III in the theater nextdoor.

I do think the 2003 film, after seeing it a second time, was better than I thought initially. It's at least superior to HOOK and PAN.

AndyDursin wrote: I do think the 2003 film, after seeing it a second time, was better than I thought initially. It's at least superior to HOOK and PAN.

At least that was an actual Peter Pan movie, instead of the depressing semi-sequel of Hook or whatever the hell Pan was supposed to be. That's the problem with "modernizing" old-timey stuff like Peter Pan, The Lone Ranger or Zorro...you end up with this weird, neither-fish-nor-fowl hybrid, that doesn't appeal to a now-middle aged or even elderly generation who won't recognize whey they grew up with, and today's kids who have zero cultural context to recognize it in the first place. The Mask Of Zorro was a film that respected the character's origins, and told a classic swashbuckling story well enough to bridge that generational gap, but something like The Lone Ranger seemed embarrassed by the titular character, which lead to a film that literally drug the Ranger's head through a pile of steaming horse droppings in an apt visual metaphor for the level of respect the filmmakers had for the property. Something from our generation like Star Wars or Indiana Jones has weathered the decades and remains culturally vibrant (even the terrible reception to the Prequels couldn't dampen the enthusiasm that greeted The Force Awakens), but what about Ghostbusters? The last movie was TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, and it's not like there's been a ton of merchandising or cartoon shows or whatever in the interim to keep the property in the public consciousness for kids.

Good God, they're actually still proceeding with the Andy Serkis version, aren't they? Be like if someone made a big-budget Sherlock Holmes movie in-between the two Robert Downey, Jr. flicks. Who is going to want to see this with a sequel to last year's terrific Disney version coming in 2020? It's gonna confuse the HELL out of people.