Film Review: The Jungle Book (2016)

One of the more surprising (not to mention lucrative) developments in recent years has been Walt Disney's decision to reach back into their cavernous back catalogue to create live-action versions of their animated classics. It's surprising both because of how successful those films have been (most notably Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide back in 2010), but also because it's such a simple idea that it feels like it should have happened ten times over already. With a steady stream of similar adaptations due over the next couple of years (some of which make more sense than others), Disney's nostalgia-mining looks set to continue for some time. We can only hope that the next installments display as much love and wit as Jon Favreau's take on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Or, more accurately, his take on the 1967 Disney version of The Jungle Book, since the story and design of Favreau's film has much more in common with that than the original stories.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 27 - Family

On this week's episode, Joe and I take inspiration from Derby's iD Fest, a film festival which each year chooses a theme and curates its schedule based on whatever that overarching theme is. This year's festival is held from the 9th to the 12th of May at the Derby QUAD, and the theme is Family.

After discussing some of the great films being shown at iD Fest, we start to discuss films about dysfunctional families (of which there are many), films about more-or-less functional families (of which there are few) and detail how Andy Samberg screaming in a wood has its basis in Greek literature and Freud. We wrap the episode up with a list of our favourite on-screen families, which nicely encapsulates the trends we discuss in the episode; cannibalism, incest and murder.

As always, you can stream the podcast using the link below, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the later, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.

Film Review: Oz The Great and Powerful (2013)

"I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow..."

While the ending is not always the most important part of a film, it is the one that most often shapes the audiences' overall impression of it. An unsatisfying or poorly handled ending can sour everything good that built up to it, whilst a great ending can help smooth over the rough edges of a flawed film. This holds especially true for Oz the Great and Powerful, Disney's new take on the work of L. Frank Baum directed by Sam Raimi, an inverse bell curve of a film which opens and closes strongly, but falls into a pretty bad trough while trying to connect those two peaks.