The Jungle Book - 2016

Disney is set to release a new version of The Jungle Book on April 15th 2016.

The cast will consist of many well known actors such as Bill Murray Ben Kingsley Idris Elba Scarlett Johansson Lupita Nyong'o Giancarlo Esposito and Christopher Walken

I personally am very excited for this film to be released. One of my all time favorite childhood memories is watching the Jungle Book with my family. I am very interested to see what they change and how big of a success it will be.  This is a timeless film as is, so seeing the modernized version should be quite an experience. 

 

 

The Director, Jon Favreau Has worked on many huge hollywood films such as Iron Man, The Avengers, and The Wolf On Wall Street. In my opinion the film is in good hands.

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Innovative Directing

As I was scrolling through Buzzfeed today I stumbled upon a post about the "18 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Elf". Even though it's only the start of November, I indulged myself in some Christmas spirit by reading this article. The article was very interesting because there really were 18 things that I didn't know about the movie. One of my favorites was that the scene where Will Ferrell is testing jack-in-the-boxes.

The reaction that he has at this moment is completely genuine. The director of this movie, Jon Favreau, used a remote control to manually make the jack-in-the-boxes pop up. This excellent directing caused Will Ferrell to have the perfect reaction. There is total anticipation and then surprise during this scene. It is one of the more memorable scenes in this movie for me because, no matter how many times I've seen Elf, I am still startled just like Buddy the Elf.

After I watched this I looked up other creative ways to direct actors so that the acting they do does not come off as phony. In the movie Saving Private Ryan, Stephen Spielberg made every single actor (including Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, and Vin Diesel) go through bootcamp for 10 days. He literally put them through hell so that the actors would get a glimpse as to what war was actually like. He even went as far to feed them all old canned rations and he hired a marine give everyone orders like they were any other soldier.

This just goes to show that direction of the actors is key in making a spot-on performance by the actors and a truly authentic movie.

Revolution on NBC

I would also like to talk about Revolution this week. I started watching it about a week ago and I am not caught up with all 4 episodes thus far, and I have to say that I am enjoying it. The Pilot episode felt a bit rushed but it got a lot better from there. The Pilot wasn't bad, it was just they dove in head first with all of this information and and background info and what happened and why it happened (the power going out) and how everyone came to be. As someone who is into VFX, the one thing I was disappointed in was the plane crash in the beginning, it just looked odd, I feel like that is not how a plane would crash. Besides that, all of the matte painting and set extensions look incredible and they really made it feel as though you are in post apocalyptic America.

Another thing that I had a problem with was the look of some of the characters. Some of them look as though they just had a haircut and just put makeup on and have no cuts or blemishes whatsoever. I mean, it is after all 15 years after the power went out so they may have figured something out. But that does not take away from the story and what is happening so I can overlook that pretty easily.

Something that I really did like was the action sequences and the build up for a lot of them. I think they made the audience feel suspenseful during many parts and had enough action to entertain anyone and still have a good story.

It was recently picked up for a full first season of 22 episodes so obviously it is getting some good reviews considering that most TV shows don't even make it past their first season. I am going to try to watch every episode of the season and see how it turns out. Who knows, maybe it will become the next big thing.