For the week of February 11th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing The Jungle Book to Blu-ray. This 1967 animated comedy has assumed a place in the pantheon of classic Disney features, though that "classic" status can sometimes seem a little suspect upon a recent reviewing. The story of young Mowgli's trials and tribulations during his formative years growing up in the jungle, The Jungle Book has an uncomfortable pro-colonialism undercurrent, though that subtext exists through no fault of the Disney staff; those elements also exist, to a degree, in Rudyard Kipling's original text. No, what hinders The Jungle Book most as a movie is an issue of timing: The Jungle Book was the last film that Walt Disney himself produced before his untimely death, a circumstance that places it right at the start of Disney's fallow period. From Walt's death through 1985's The Black Cauldron, the studio struggling to define it brand, and The Jungle Book carries some early signs of issues that would become much more problematic during this challenging period, including a flatter visual style designed to more closer replicate the television viewing experience and an over-reliance on celebrity guest stars (hence the spirited but creatively suspect appearance of singer Louis Prima as an orangutan named "King Louie"). These concerns are too nascent to fully cripple The Jungle Book, but they do keep it from achieving the same polish and flair as Lady and the Tramp or Dumbo. That said, if it isn't "classic," it's still worth your time, thanks to iconic vocal performances (such as Phil Harris' Baloo and George Sanders' Shere Khan) and a few classic songs, the best of which are "The Bare Necessities" and Prima's "I Wanna Be Like You."
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review noted that "Revisiting a beloved film you haven't seen in years is always an interesting exercise, and often reveals an entirely different film. Chalk it up to station in life, experience, tastes... pick your poison. Whatever the cause, there are moments where The Jungle Book is something of a relic of a bygone animation age, and it has very little to do with the sketch-work line art or animation style (One early example: the still-jarring shift from narration to dialogue that occurs within minutes of the title card). It remains a tried and true classic, sure. But a timeless classic? Kids won't notice, nor will adults wearing critical blinders. Subject The Jungle Book to honest scrutiny, though, and you'll begin to notice the flaws that lie beneath all the humor, toe-tapping tunes, and unforgettable beats. Fortunately, that's the joy of being a kid (or a kid at heart): grinning and laughing along with a childhood classic on its own terms, not picking it apart piece by piece or getting hung up on what could have been. Watching my son savor every minute of The Jungle Book made me envious of his ability to simply love a movie that was loving him right back. Those were the days."
From Lionsgate comes All Is Lost, the sophomore film from Margin Call filmmaker J.C. Chandor. The two films couldn't be more dissimilar - Margin Call is a verbally dense examination of the 2008 financial crisis, and this new picture is a high-seas adventure about a lone sailor (Robert Redford) trying to stay alive amidst some frightening physical challenges. In fact, if All Is Lost resembles any movie, it would be last year's smash hit Gravity. Both films strip away most narrative filigrees in order to emphasize the physical nature of survival (at sea for All Is Lost; in space for Gravity), and both keep that focus on a very limited character roster – Redford is the only person on-screen in All Is Lost, and Gravity quickly dispenses with any cast members whose names don't end in Bullock or Clooney. But Gravity, for all its visceral and technical brilliance – and it deserves every one of its Oscar nominations – is really just an incredibly austere Hollywood blockbuster, while All Is Lost is far more existential in nature. We know almost nothing about Redford's character: he has no name, and I'd be amazed if he spoke more than ten words in the entire film. Yet he registers powerfully as a main character. This might be Robert Redford's best performance; he delivers a master-class in conveying character and emotion through behavior and action. Everything we need to know about "Our Man," we learn it watching him struggling, and Chandor stages the different levels of his struggle so relentlessly that they take on meaning outside their surface coding. In the right light, this could be a treatise on self-reliance, or a retelling of the book of Job, or even a parable about the brutal realities of aging. All Is Lost uses its slim scaffolding to invite such interpretations, and that open-ended nature gives it a spooky power that exceeds its ample thrills.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that, "All Is Lost is certainly a tour de force from a pure performance perspective. Redford is really the only character on screen for the film's running time, and as mentioned above, there's barely a word of dialogue uttered throughout the entire film. What we're left with instead is an incredibly visceral story of survival against incredible odds. Sound familiar? Of course it does—this film plays like a waterlogged cousin of Gravity. All Is Lost also features a similar kind of technical mastery. While Gravity's Alfonso Cuarón and his team spectacularly recreated the daunting problems Ryan faced in a weightless environment, they at least had the benefit of being able to digitally manipulate the cinematic environment in several cogent ways to help foster that illusion. All Is Lost is obviously completely earthbound, and while much of the film was evidently done in a tank, there's still somehow a more viscerally 'real' feeling to seeing raging water pouring over the film's unnamed hero than there perhaps is in the Cuarón film. Interestingly, there's another connection between the films, in terms of a major plot conceit both share: in both of these outings, it's 'junk' floating around indiscriminately that wreaks the havoc from which the central characters spend the rest of the films trying to recover."
With the BBC's new Sherlock: Season Three set, viewers can finally resolve the Season 2's epic cliffhanger, which Spoilers showed Benedict Cumberbatch's title sleuth seemingly falling to his death after a confrontation with criminal mastermind Moriarty (Andrew Scott), only to then reappear near his own tombstone, watching a distraught Watson (the great Martin Freeman) End spoilers. That scenario already beggared belief, and its explanation may test your initial enjoyment of Season 3 – while witty and exciting, the first episode struggles to plausibly "revive" Sherlock while reintegrating him into a world that has moved on without him. That latter concern proves key to Sherlock's dramatic reinvention, particularly with the addition of Amanda Abbington as Watson's fiancée, who motivates Season 3's best episode: the wedding of Watson. It is here that we see how emotionally dependent the "functioning sociopath" Sherlock has become on other people, and Cumberbatch does a brilliant job playing Sherlock's genuine affection for Watson off his resentment over a "competitor" stealing his best friend. It's surprisingly rich material, so much so that the more plot-heavy finale suffers by comparison; Sherlock and Watson are the heart of this series, more so than any last-minute plot twists and surprises.
Another television show hitting Blu-ray this week is FX and Fox's The Americans. The advance word on this one wasn't encouraging, what with its high-concept premise about two Soviet spies (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) trying to balance their professional life (maintaining their cover as a loving American family; embarking on covert missions to destabilize the USA) with their personal one (negotiating which feeling for one another are counterfeit and which are real) – the promos cast it as a weird mix between Salt and Mad Men. But The Americans is a much stronger, more interesting show, one that hits the ground running with its brilliant pilot episode, which lays out the emotional and physical challenges for Russell and Rhys' characters with suspense and ruthless efficiency (bonus points for the show's instantly iconic use of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" during an extended foot chase/assassination). After that opener, it takes The Americans a little while to hit its stride – like Season 1 of Justified, The Americans ambles along episodically for half a season before its overarching plot kicks in – but it's always compelling and interesting, with great supporting performances from the likes of Derek Luke, Margo Martindale, Annet Mahendru, and Noah Emmerich. Best of all are Russell and Rhys, though. The Welsh-born Rhys is the show's secret weapon, employing a flawless American accent as a spy who would really like to be a simple family man, much to the far-more steely Russell's dismay. She's worried he'll blow their cover, and she worries us – Russell effectively demolishes her good-girl, Felicity image, playing a frighteningly capable warrior who places family at a distant second to her love for the former USSR.
Also from Fox is Ridley Scott's crime thriller The Counselor. Forget The Wolf of Wall Street: for those who saw it, The Counselor was 2013's most divisive film. For all its surface pleasures – a star-studded cast (Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz), some pulpy violence, and Scott's crisply elegant widescreen compositions - The Counselor pulled somewhat of a bait-and-switch. Ostensibly an Elmore Leonard-meets-Breaking Bad-esque genre piece about a corrupt lawyer (Fassbender) whose life spins out of control when he tries to profit off an international drug deal, The Counselor is far more philosophic in nature; even more than Scott, the film's most important creative force is novelist Cormac McCarthy's, whose script foregrounds long, grave discussions about good, evil, sex, and death over traditional genre thrills. This is a European art-film disguised as a thriller, and its distain for conventional narrative beats makes McCarthy's similarly weighty No Country for Old Men look like Independence Day. At times, these musings can be a chore – there's a wide discrepancy between, say, Brad Pitt's wry comfort with McCarthy's text and Cameron Diaz's far more halting and uncomfortable recitations (Diaz's most memorable/notorious moment is a nonverbal one where she does unspeakable things to the windshield of a Ferrari) – and the last half hour of the film randomly and unsatisfyingly jettisons major characters in order to support McCarthy's nihilistic thesis that the world is brutal and uncaring, yet something about The Counselor lingers. You may love it or hate it, but you won't forget it.