Re-posting thoughts from last week:
“The Lion King” has just finished screening here in Montreal and the end-result is more of a showcase for VFX/photo-realism than an actually successful remake of a beloved Disney classic. Maybe they should have just left the 1994 movie alone. No, not maybe, actually, they should have really just not touched it. This remake’s director Jon Favreau (The Jungle Book, Iron Man, Chef) is so concentrated on the technological aspects of the film that he forgets about the emotional core and, when it comes to the shakespearian-influenced ‘Lion King,’ that is a mistake. The story, heavily adapted from the Bard’s most famous play, was such a gut-punch of narrative drama that it didn’t even matter that it was a beat-by-beat remake of Hamlet, but set in the African Jungle. And so, despite people telling me that it would not be a shot-for-shot remake of the original, well, this 2019 Lion King kind of is. The screenplay is quasi-similar to the animated movie — however, when it comes to this remake, after you start to get used to the stunning VFX, there is nothing left to cling on, just a retread of the same old story. The animated version had more emotions in its characters, more humanity in the hand-drawn than the coldly distanced VFX of Favreau’s version. [C]
Paul Greengrass’ "The Uprising," starring Andrew Garfield, opened to $3.2M from 2,068 theaters this weekend. Yikes. The budget hasn’t been disclosed, but is said to be in the $20-$30M range.