Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #407: The Jungle Book

It’s fair to say Walt Disney provided me with a great deal of entertainment while growing up. His colourful characters were in my storybooks, Saturday morning cartoons, and in some of the first movies I saw as a child. “The Jungle Book,” produced by Disney and directed by Wolfgang Reithermann, is filled with talking animals, hand-drawn animation, and song and dance numbers. That’s all you needed back in 1967, when the movie was made. There is no 3D, no big movie stars providing the voices, and no pop-culture references.

This is one of those movies that bring me back to a simpler time, when I couldn’t go to bed past 10:00pm and when grandma’s apartment was the best place in the world. That’s probably where I first saw this movie. Either that, or someone read me the illustrated book based on the movie. You know the kind. There’s a whole catalogue of short books filled with what are basically stills from Disney movies with about five sentences on the right page to add narration. I might also have had an audio version on an old cassette tape. I can’t be too sure since it’s been at least 22 years. Either way, it did the job.

Based on the 1894 novel by British author Rudyard Kipling, “The Jungle Book” tells the story of Mowgli (Bruce Reithermann), a young boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. When the wolves learn Shere Khan, a man-eating tiger, has returned to the jungle, they decide he must return to his people. Bagheera (Sebastian Cabot), a black panther who found Mowgli when he was a baby, volunteers for the quest.

Before making it to the village, they will run into a menagerie of animals, some friends some foe. It is the jungle after all. Among the foes there is Kaa (Sterling Holloway) a python who would love to have Mowgli for dinner; King Louie (Louie Prima) an ape who kidnaps Mowgli to find out how to make fire; and always lurking in the trees is the merciless Shere Khan (George Sanders).

Among the friends you have the elephant patrol, led by colonel Hathi (J. Pat O’Malley), who rules over his pack like a drill sergeant. Then there are four vultures perched on a dead tree who are stuck in a perpetual cycle of boredom. Their entire conversations revolve around the questions “What are we gonna do?” and “What do you wanna do?” These guys desperately need some action.

The most entertaining character is Baloo (Phil Harris), a bear whose carefree lifestyle clashes with Bagheera’s seriousness. If Bagheera is the responsible adult, Baloo is the teenager who never grew up. Why take Mowgli to the humans when they could just hang out in the jungle, sleep in the shade, and eat? If they were to do this movie now, they would probably have Jeff Bridges do the voice, just to evoke the idea of The Dude from “The Big Lebowski” for the grown-ups.

At a brisk 78-minute running time, this is an effective movie for young children. It should work even for today’s kids even if the movie was made back in the 1960s. The animation still holds up, the musical numbers are entertaining, and the fight scenes aren’t too scary. The fight between Baloo and Shere Khan towards the end might be a bit unnerving, but if kids can survive Bambi’s mom getting shot, they can survive this.

I enjoyed this movie as a child, but in later years I enjoyed two other very different adaptations of “The Jungle Book” which seriously deviated from the Kipling novel.

First there was there was the cartoon series “TaleSpin” which re-imagined Baloo as a bush pilot in the fictional city of Cape Suzette. In this show King Louie is the owner of a bar on his own private island and Shere Khan is a business tycoon.

Second was the 1994 live-action remake, directed by Stephen Sommers (“The Mummy”). In this version, the animals actually kill a lot of people. Characters get buried alive, drown in quicksand, get mauled by Shere Khan, and get their throats ripped by Kaa the snake. Oddly enough, Walt Disney Pictures also distributed this version.

So to sum up, if you are an adult and you want to see a mash-up of Indiana Jones and the “The Jungle Book” watch the live-action version. But if you have young children, let them watch the 1967 version and wait until they are at least 12 before showing them the version where a man is chased by hungry tiger in the jungle. (The tiger catches him.)

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #102: The Hustler

Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) is proof that any sport can be used for good cinematic drama even if that sport is pool. Although this is not a game that involves a massive sport arena and bloody boxing gloves, things can get dramatically interesting if the monetary stakes are high, and visually arresting if the filmmakers shoot from the right angle. It also helps a lot if the man putting his money on the table is played by a young Paul Newman in a career-breaking role. Prior to watching the film I had a vague idea of the meaning of the word “hustling” and a rather passive interest in the game of pool. It’s a fun game to play if you are having a couple of nachos and chicken wings on a Friday evening with friends, but I didn’t see it as a spectator sport. Watching The Hustler in the classics section of Netflix two years ago was a bit of an education since it shows the sport as a way of life for some people, and a huge source of revenue for big time gamblers. Newman star as...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

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