The Jungle Book

For F*** Magazine

THE JUNGLE BOOK

Director : Jon Favreau

Cast : Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Lupita Nyong’o, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Walken

Genre : Action/Adventure

Run Time : 106 mins

Opens : 7 April 2016

Rating : PG (Some Intense Sequences)

Disney recently took us to a vividly-imagined concrete jungle with Zootopia. Now, it’s time for a sojourn to a jungle of a more traditional sort. Mowgli (Sethi) is a human boy, or ‘man-cub’, raised by a pack of wolves led by Raksha (Nyong’o) and Akela (Esposito). The panther Bagheera (Kingsley) brought Mowgli to them when the man cub was but an infant. The powerful, menacing tiger Shere Khan (Elba) is disgusted by the presence of man in the jungle, threatening Raksha and Akela. Mowgli voluntarily leaves his adoptive family, Bagheera guiding him back to a human village. Along the way, he befriends Baloo (Murray) the bear, and encounters less friendly creatures in the form of Kaa (Johansson) the python and King Louie (Walken) the Gigantopithecus. Mowgli must come to terms with his identity as Shere Khan stops at nothing in his bloodthirsty hunt for the man-cub.

            The Jungle Book is a remake of the classic 1967 animated film, which in turn was an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s collected stories. For those worried that this is yet another pointless grim and gritty remake, rest assured that The Jungle Book is plenty of fun. There are also stakes and a good deal of peril, but these are necessary ingredients in any riveting adventure. This might seem an odd thing to say, considering the countless times Kipling’s stories have been adapted, but there’s a certain freshness about this take on The Jungle Book. Justin Marks’ screenplay is focused and coherent, incorporating just the right amount of Kipling-isms. Director Jon Favreau manages to deliver just the right dose of nostalgia for those who hold the cartoon movie near and dear, while also delivering breath-taking scale and pulse-pounding action sequences that are awe-inspiring in 3D.

            Not only are the animals fully computer-generated, the backgrounds are as well. This is an excellent example of new ground in filmmaking technology being broken not merely for the sake of it, but in service of a good story. The visual effects were primarily created by the Moving Picture Company and Weta Digital, with Avatar’s Robert Legato serving as one of the visual effects supervisors. Favreau made the choice to have the animal characters created via key frame animation instead of relying on performance capture, in an effort to avoid the highly undesirable “uncanny valley” effect. The animal acting on display here rivals that seen in Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. There’s life and nuance; the characters becoming far more than a mere assemblage of soulless voxels. You’d think talking animals in a realistic setting might pull the viewer out of it, but The Jungle Book draws one in, and the viewer soon forgets that all of this was built in a computer.

            A great deal rests on newcomer Sethi’s slight shoulders; the child actor picked from over 2000 hopefuls in an "exhaustive worldwide search". Quite a lot is demanded from Sethi, who is the sole human being onscreen for the bulk of the film. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop built life-sized animatronic animal puppets for Sethi to react to in order to aid his performance, so he wasn’t exactly “acting against nothing”, but that’s not to take away from the how challenging the role is. There are some spots where this reviewer found Sethi lacklustre, overshadowed by the dazzling imagery around him, but all things considered, it’s a commendable performance.

            The star-studded voice ensemble Favreau has gathered may seem gimmicky, until one realises how perfect each actor is for their respective characters. Kingsley brings dignity and warmth to the watchful Bagheera, while Murray’s lackadaisical charm and casual friendliness ensures Baloo is as loveable as ever. It’s very easy to believe that Elba’s baritone would emanate from a fearsome tiger and his impactful turn as Shere Khan is terrifying yet restrained, making for a worthy villain.

Nyong’o is a luminous presence onscreen, and just her voice has almost the same effect. Raksha’s bond with Mowgli provides some of the film’s most heartfelt moments; her kindness standing in contrast with Esposito’s sternness as Akela. Johansson gets just one scene, but she puts that husky femme fatale timbre to fantastic use. This film’s realisation of Kaa’s hypnotic gaze is also delightfully effective. King Louie is characterised like a mob kingpin; Walken supremely entertaining yet also subtly sinister as the orangutan-like Gigantopithecus. There’s also a great in-joke: right before meeting King Louie, Mowgli picks up a cowbell; a sly reference to Walken’s famous “needs more cowbell” sketch on Saturday Night Live.

Any number of things could have gone horribly wrong with this version of The Jungle Book: the tone could’ve been too grave, the animals could’ve looked silly, the references to the cartoon could’ve been clumsy, the cast could’ve comprised big-name stars who weren’t great voice actors, this list goes on. Favreau has managed to avoid a large number of pitfalls and we’re sure many audiences will be extremely pleased that the iconic songs “The Bare Necessities” and “I Wan’na Be Like You” weren’t excised; the latter featuring revised lyrics by Richard M. Sherman. This Jungle doesn’t merely rumble, it rocks.

Summary: The Jungle Book is visually enthralling, thrilling, funny and meticulously crafted, quality family entertainment in almost every respect.

RATING: 4.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

Non-Stop

F*** Magazine

NON-STOP

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Cast: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Anson Mount, Michelle Dockery, Corey Stoll, Linus Roache, Omar Metwally, Lupita Nyong’o, Jason Butler Harner
Genre: Action, Mystery, Thriller
Run Time: 106 mins
Opens: 27 February 2014
Rating: PG13 (Some Coarse Language and Violence)

Perhaps there should be a subgenre of action/thrillers called “Badass on a Plane”. In Non-Stop, Liam Neeson joins the ranks of Wesley Snipes, Kurt Russell, Harrison Ford, Samuel L. Jackson and Jodie Foster as a man on a mission stuck in one of those scary metal tubes 40 000 feet in the air. Neeson plays U.S. Federal Air Marshal Bill Marks, who boards a non-stop flight from New York to London on duty. He receives a series of ominous text messages from an unknown sender aboard the plane, threatening to kill one passenger every 20 minutes until a sum of $150 million is paid. With the help of Jen (Moore), the woman in the next seat and Nancy (Dockery), the head flight attendant, Bill must apprehend the perpetrator. Anyone could be a suspect, including fellow air marshal Jack Hammond (Mount), schoolteacher Tom Bowen (McNairy) and NYPD cop Austin Reilly (Stoll).

Non-Stop reteams Neeson with Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed him in Unknown. Non-Stop continues Neeson’s second wind as a tough action hero, though it is a suspense thriller rather than a straight-up action flick. In Unknown, Collet-Serra created a stylish atmosphere and a genuinely intriguing mystery that crumbled more than a little by the time it reached its conclusion, and Non-Stop is similar in those regards. While Non-Stop’s twist ending isn’t as crazy as the one in Unknown, audiences will still find themselves trying to thread together the narrative loopholes afterwards.


Collet-Serra is great at setting moods. Here we have a whodunit on a commercial airliner and Non-Stop plays on many of the fears a good number of travellers face every time they board a plane. There are several clever visual touches, like a moment in which Bill is surrounded by floating graphical representations of the text messages he is receiving, almost like they are closing in on him. There are also some cool camera moves: in one scene, the camera sweeps laterally down the aisle of the plane, then zooms outwards, crosses the exterior of the fuselage, and zooms back in to the rear of the cabin. The screenplay by John W. Richardson, Chris Roach and Ryan Engle is taut if far from watertight, effectively ratcheting up the tension.

Liam Neeson plays the same gruff, grizzled do-gooder archetype he’s been playing a lot in his later career, meaning he doesn’t get to show off his range but he is what the fans what to see him as – a badass. The Bill Marks character isn’t given a lot of depth, and is established upfront as a troubled alcoholic and smoker prone to violent outbursts. There are times in the film when the characterisation of Bill crosses over from “flawed” to “possibly at least a little incompetent” and he does get critically outsmarted by the mystery villain. But should one choose to say “here’s a tough guy on an airplane and I don’t really need to know more about him”, Non-Stop can be enjoyed. Neeson is unflinchingly serious, and don’t call him Shirley.

Non-Stop also reunites Neeson with his Chloe co-star Julianne Moore, who is a friendly, helpful and comforting presence that we as an audience are still supposed to question. It’s not the best use of her talent ever but we’re not complaining. Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery is believable as an attentive, cool-headed flight attendant but it is a pity that Lupita Nyong’o, the breakout star of 12 Years a Slave, gets very little to do here. We have a veritable fish market of red herrings and the actors playing the passengers are generally decent, House of Cards’ Corey Stoll particularly arresting.

A theme that unexpectedly crops up in Non-Stop is that of the role that mass media plays in unfolding crises and an instance in which sensationalist news coverage is satirised is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the film falls back on clichés and stereotypes, bending over backwards to be politically correct in its portrayal of Islamic character Dr. Fahim Nasir (Metwally). There’s also the obligatory “motive rant” speech, in which the culprit lays out the rationale behind the evil plot which makes less sense the more one thinks about it. On the whole, Non-Stop is a fairly entertaining and thrilling diversion and even though the pay-off is not altogether satisfying, Non-Stop is sufficiently absorbing in the moment and this reviewer did get invested in the mystery. It’s one of those “don’t think too hard about how it all fits together” movies, but it emerges above average thanks to the stylish direction and its dependable leading man.

Summary: The title isn’t the only thing silly about Non-Stop, but there’s an adequate “grip the armrests” quotient and is unlikely to wholly disappoint Liam Neeson fans even though it doesn’t quite soar.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

12 Years a Slave

For F*** Magazine

12 YEARS A SLAVE

Director: Steve McQueen
Cast:         Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Sarah Paulson, Lupita Nyong’o, Alfre Woodard
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 133 mins
Opens: 19 December 2013
Rating: M18 (Violence and Sexual Scenes)

The term “historical film” carries with it the old Hollywood-style notion of an epic scope, a cast of thousands and grandiose spectacle. In spite of the appeal of such films, what has been proven time and again is that audiences gravitate to personal, intimate stories, and that focusing on the journey of a single character or a small group of characters helps put history in perspective – especially the parts of the past that are hardest to come face to face with. 12 Years a Slave is perhaps the most pertinent of such films in recent memory.



Solomon Northup (Ejiofor) is a free black man living with his wife and two children in Saratoga Springs, New York, circa 1841. A skilled violinist, Solomon is approached by a pair of travelling performers who offer him a job as a circus musician. The next day, Solomon awakens chained in a bare room and realises he has been kidnapped and duped into slavery. In New Orleans, he is sold to plantation owner and preacher William Ford (Cumberbatch) and comes into conflict with Ford’s overseer John Tibeats (Dano). Solomon, forced to take on the slave name “Platt”, is later handed to another slave-owner, the savage Edwin Epps (Fassbender), who frequently brutalises the slaves under him. In the midst of his ordeal, Solomon meets the likes of Patsey (Nyong’o), who consistently picks the most cotton but is the most severely mistreated of the slaves, and Bass (Pitt), a Canadian construction worker sympathetic to his plight. Solomon continues to endure slavery, yearning to be freed and reunited with his family.



12 Years a Slave is based on Northup’s autobiography of the same name, a book which director Steve McQueen’s wife found and brought to his attention. McQueen had been looking to collaborate with screenwriter John Ridley (whose credits include U-Turn, Three Kings and Red Tails) on a film about slavery and settled on telling Northup’s story. McQueen, a video artist who made his feature film debut with 2008’s Hunger, has earned a reputation as a filmmaker who makes films that are worth watching but aren’t exactly easy to watch, and 12 Years a Slave definitely falls under that umbrella.



Issues of race and equality continue to rear their heads in a supposedly “post-racial” America, and different filmmakers have addressed this in their own ways. McQueen, his cast and crew have pulled off a truly commendable balancing act. 12 Years a Slave is raw and pulls no punches, but it does not come off as overwrought or emotionally manipulative and isn’t a jump-on-a-soapbox-style polemic. It’s a story that would be very easy to politicise, but McQueen resists. It’s a grim, well-painted portrait of one person’s extraordinary journey which comes off feeling largely bereft of the embellishments that tend to accompany films of the “based on a true story” genre.



Ejiofor has garnered positive buzz and has been named an awards season favourite for his portrayal of Northup, and it is very easy to see why. His performance is earnest and authentic; the determination, desperation, sadness and particularly, the humanity he displays coming together to create a person and not a faceless victim. It is also worth noting that one doesn’t get the impression that the role is a blatant awards bid, as is sometimes all too evident with other actors. It has been said that audiences might lose sight of the larger, horrific picture of the landscape of slavery at the time when presented with just Solomon’s story, but Ejiofor takes the responsibility of doing justice to Solomon Northup’s name as seriously as he should, and it works incredibly well.



The film’s supporting cast provides gravitas in spades and help populate an already-convincing period setting. Cumberbatch has had quite a year, what with Star Trek Into Darkness, The Fifth Estate and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. His William Ford continues that winning streak, the character’s presence raising issues of morality and ethics (he’s a preacher and a slave-owner) without calling too much attention to that theme. Fassbender, who was the lead in McQueen’s first two films, makes for a terrifying and truly despicable Edwin Epps and yet never makes the character a thin, monstrous cliché. The film holds the more decent Ford and the outright cruel Epps side by side and asks “Is one really worse than the other?” Lupita Nyong’o has been considered the film’s breakout star for her turn as Patsey, every bit as much the hero as Solomon is. Producer Brad Pitt’s appearance in the film is brief, a good thing since he would probably be distracting if he was in it for any longer.



At a press junket, director McQueen said “the only reason I’m here, because… people suffered and died for my freedom, and therefore, I cannot pull punches on them. It would be a disservice to them. It would be a disservice to Solomon.” And indeed, no punches are pulled in this searingly affecting biopic, Ejiofor conveying the profound agony of a man so deeply wronged. Hans Zimmer’s score lifts all too liberally from his earlier work for Inception, but that is but a small nit to pick and an insignificant complaint when measured against the thought-provoking, eye-opening and immensely powerful whole that is 12 Years a Slave.

SUMMARY: 12 Years a Slave is not easy viewing but then again, it shouldn’t be. Director Steve McQueen and a strong cast ensure Solomon Northup’s story is given the full weight and respect it deserves.

RATING: 4.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong