Jon Favreau

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review: A Blaster and an Apprentice

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring both title characters

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there was a swashbuckling sci-fi/Western TV series whose snappy writing and charismatic actors eventually inspired a bona fide big-screen adventure. But enough about Firefly. Here we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, the latest product in the Disney empire’s content-generation machine. It’s been seven years since the last Star Wars movie (the unduly maligned Rise of Skywalker), during which time the Mouse House has glutted your streaming queue with all manner of Sithian spin-offs. These offshoots varied in quality—Andor was quite good, The Book of Boba Fett was pretty bad, I forget everything that happened in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka—but they all fulfilled their mission of sating fans’ appetites for intergalactic mayhem and Force-laden profundity. The Mandalorian was the first of these, and also the most successful according to certain commercial metrics, so it’s been plucked from the outer rim of television and holo-projected into the multiplex, where Disney hopes that the universe’s deadliest bounty hunter and his loveable little green friend will restore the franchise to its prior cinematic glory.

It’s a dubious bet. But when I tell you that The Mandalorian and Grogu is my least favorite Star Wars film to date, it’s both an expression of my disappointment and an acknowledgement of my advancing age. This world that once filled me with excitement and joy—the blue-tinted rushes through hyperspace, the exotic lightsaber duels, the premonitions that someone has a bad feeling about this—now seems chilly and mercenary. Did I grow up, or did the movies bog down? Read More

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The Lion King: I Just Can’t Wait to Be Pointlessly Remade

Jeremy BeckReviews
This is a lion in the movie "The Lion King".

In the new Lion King, the circle of life soothes us all, but especially the Walt Disney Company’s shareholders. Made a quarter-century after the original enchanted audiences with its blend of Shakespeare, music, and fart jokes, this remake takes pains to follow the unwinding path that Carmen Twillie sang about all those years ago. Yet rather than traversing a harmonious circle, this Lion King progresses in a straight line, one pointed squarely back toward the past. In our present era of Disney dominance, everything new is old again.

Directed by Jon Favreau, and taking place in the increasingly populous cinematic netherworld that lies between animation and live action, this new Lion King aspires to remind nostalgic viewers of its predecessor as bluntly and repeatedly as possible. But it is notably different in one respect: It’s longer. Favreau’s version clocks in at 118 minutes, a full half hour greater than the hand-drawn classic. You might think that Favreau and his screenwriter, Jeff Nathanson (whose odd career includes three Spielberg movies, plus a bunch of inferior sequels), would use this additional time to meaningfully expand the film’s universe, perhaps by dynamizing its action or supplementing its story. But while there are a couple of new songs—and while the shot-for-shot concerns that sprang up last year prove unfounded—none of the added material carries any spark of originality. Favreau hasn’t made a movie so much as a museum artifact—a weird, faded echo of a time gone by. Read More

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The Jungle Book: Welcome to the Digital

Jeremy BeckReviews
Neel Sethi as Mowgli, alongside Bill Murray's Baloo, in "The Jungle Book"

If it hadn’t already experienced one two decades ago, Walt Disney Pictures would be in the midst of a renaissance. Even ignoring its partnership with Pixar, the company’s animated division has been on a hot streak, producing a string of critically and commercially successful hits like Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and a little film called Frozen. But where the mouse house’s animation department continues to place a premium on forward-thinking, original storytelling, its live-action complement has preferred to look backward, rebooting classic studio properties for the millennial age. A few of these efforts have been successful—The Muppets was wonderful (its sequel, less so), while Maleficent put a fresh and exciting spin on Sleeping Beauty—but the concept of dusting off golden oldies for a new audience remains both predatory and lazy, an easy substitute for real creativity. Last year’s Cinderella was perfectly fine, but it offered no real reason for its existence beyond seeing quality actors stuffed into ravishing costumes. Now comes The Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling’s popular anthology, which in 1967 Disney turned into a beloved cartoon musical, and which is now receiving a live-action adaptation.

Though perhaps I should put “live-action” in quotation marks. It is true that this movie features a flesh-and-blood actor in Neel Sethi, a 12-year-old Indian-American who plays the iconic Mowgli with competent cuteness. He also does it basically by himself, appearing in front of the camera alongside a potpourri of CGI animals that prowl across digitally rendered landscapes. (There are even rumblings that the movie could compete in the Best Animated Feature category at next year’s Oscars.) In the process, The Jungle Book strives to position itself as a new classic for the current generation of Disney-reared children, trying to combine the plucky joy of the prior cartoon with a tinge of contemporary seriousness. In this, it fails. But it remains notable as a signpost that marks the continually disappearing line between the corporeal and the computerized, illustrating just how skilled Hollywood technicians have become at turning artifice into art. Read More

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