Jaume Collet-Serra
184 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Whether it’s the clear inspiration of the untouchable classic The African Queen , the unavoidable flavor of any Indiana Jones entry, a surprising amount of similarity to Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy , or even the shocking number of recognizable beats and concepts from another Disney theme park ride that was turned into a movie.
As long as you don't compare it to The African Queen, Jungle Cruise is an amusing action adventure that's mediocre and harmless without taking itself too seriously, except for one scene where the Frank recalls his traumatic past that feels tonaly uneven when juxtaposed with the rest of the film.
Based on the theme park ride, “Jungle Cruise” is a celebration of the ride; a cheeky, frolicky fun homage to “The African Queen,” “Romancing the Stone” and then throw in all what Disney does best.
In fact, the original ride was designed with John Huston’s 1951 classic film, The African Queen , starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn as an inspiration.
That movie was 1951’s The African Queen , the key inspiration for Walt Disney and Harper Goff when designing the Disneyland Jungle Cruise ride.
Based on an opening day Disneyland ride heavily inspired by John Huston’s The African Queen , the long-delayed Jungle Cruise is unnecessary, unoriginal and practically unwatchable.
Romancing the Stone (1984)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced Jungle Cruise (2021)
Plot Characters Dialogue
Based on the theme park ride, “Jungle Cruise” is a celebration of the ride; a cheeky, frolicky fun homage to “The African Queen,” “Romancing the Stone” and then throw in all what Disney does best.
Those hoping for something akin to the 1999 The Mummy or Romancing the Stone should be suitably thrilled by the comparable chemistry between Johnson and Blunt, always emitting the type of will-they-or-won’t-they vibe that makes them such a fantastic onscreen pair.
For long time adventure fans, this really is the throwback blockbuster we’ve been waiting for, with plenty of nods and homages to greats such as Romancing the Stone , The Mummy and Indiana Jones.
The script from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (among other names) is surely looking back towards classics like Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones for inspiration, but the most prominent influence is actually Disney’s other IP based on a theme park ride, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Their relationship is reminiscent of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone.”
For anyone old enough, or old-movie-centered enough, to care (which is maybe five percent of this movie’s prospective audience), the banter between these two could be said to evoke Bogart and Hepburn — or, at least, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in “Romancing the Stone.”
Not “Jaws” (a much better film); not even the R-rated “Deep Blue Sea” (a much funnier film).
This week that arrives in the form of "The Shallows," a thriller that's part "Jaws" and part "The Raft" sequence from "Creepshow 2." Like that latter short that featured characters stuck on a platform in the middle of a lake where they could see the shore but didn't dare try to swim there due to something in the water between them and there, this one features Blake Lively as a surfer who ends up surviving an initial shark attack, only to end up on a rocky outcrop and then nearby buoy where she can see the safety of shore but just can't get there without being eaten.
2016 is the 50th anniversary of the heart-pounding “Jaws,” that gave us the famous line, “You need a bigger boat.”
In the tradition of Jaws, Collet-Serra begins with a shark attack before retreating to teases and false alarms for a while.
There's a long history of shark thrillers, and you can't get a much better blueprint (or movie) than Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic "Jaws."
It helps, of course, that the film has done something almost unthinkable in the four long decades of increasingly kitschy shark-attack movies since Spielberg’s Jaws — namely, that it has taken itself, and its premise, seriously.
Whether it’s the clear inspiration of the untouchable classic The African Queen , the unavoidable flavor of any Indiana Jones entry, a surprising amount of similarity to Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy , or even the shocking number of recognizable beats and concepts from another Disney theme park ride that was turned into a movie.
Worse, while the film’s rollicking adventure is often reminiscent of the Indiana Jones films and 1999’s The Mummy , its mythology is largely a rehash of 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl , another movie based on a Disney theme park ride.
Also along for the ride is her dandy brother McGregor (a very game Jack Whitehall), whose “I better not get dirty on this grand adventure” energy is so evocative of the sibling character in “The Mummy” that Whitehall should tithe half of his residuals directly to John Hannah (“Jungle Cruise” owes a lot to the spirit of that late ’90s hit, though its way of paying homage tends to be more in the vein of “distractingly bad CGI” than “vivid location photography”).
Those hoping for something akin to the 1999 The Mummy or Romancing the Stone should be suitably thrilled by the comparable chemistry between Johnson and Blunt, always emitting the type of will-they-or-won’t-they vibe that makes them such a fantastic onscreen pair.
It's reminiscent of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in The Mummy , in that you fully believe everything they go through together, including their frustrations with one another, which makes the bond they eventually form much more emotionally satisfying.
It even borrows its central dynamic from 1999’s The Mummy , as a brother-and-sister duo of academics enlist a rogueish adventurer to help find a lost corner of civilisation.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Jungle Cruise (2021)
Visuals Characters Plot
Action beats are lifted from Raiders Of The Lost Ark , music comes (mystifyingly) courtesy of Metallica (in collaboration with composer James Newton Howard), and there are endless references to The Mummy .
Manically directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, this latest derivation of a theme-park ride shoots for the fizzy fun of bygone romantic adventures like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981).
Seemingly channeling Ronald Lacey in Raiders of the Lost Ark , he devours scenery as the main baddie, but, given how good he is - it's a sin how limited his screen time is until the finale.
An occasionally amusing, low-rent version of those Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” films with a large dose of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Jungle Cruise” is a copy of a copy directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the guy who used Blake Lively as bikini-clad bait in the “Jaws” knockoff “The Shallows.”
It’s a bland misfire that borrows heavily from 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and 1951’s “The African Queen.”
It’s obvious by that premise director Jaume Collet-Serra (“The Commuter”) and screenwriters Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa set out to make an old fashion, swashbuckling action-adventure movie in the vein of “Romancing the Stone” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Indeed, the film contains blockbuster-sized set pieces with thrilling chases, spectacular stunts and danger lurking around every river bend.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Black Adam (2022), Jungle Cruise (2021)
Plot Characters Visuals
One can sort of see the inspiration here: The actor was often compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier in his career, and the film at times seems to be going for a Terminator 2: Judgment Day vibe; there’s even an excitable, skateboarding teen who tries to teach Adam catchphrases and how to act like a hero.
And, instead of allowing Dwayne Johnson’s natural charisma to come to the fore, the requirements of the script demand that he ape Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character (from Terminator 2), right down to the young male sidekick.
Johnson’s movie-star career has long reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and Black Adam feels deeply indebted to Terminator 2, where Schwarzenegger turned his rampaging villain of the first film into a shotgun-wielding champion who learned a code of morality from a wisecracking teen.
He also develops a relationship with the young Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) that clearly took inspiration from the Terminator and John Connor in T2 .
Which is a shame since the early related efforts sort of give the impression this could be akin to the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 cyborg in "Terminator 2" and learning about his trappings (and slang and so on) from the teen he's sent there to protect.
The viciousness feels unearned; Black Adam bends over backward to link its antihero to Clint Eastwood's iconic Man with No Name, but apart from a few flashes of PG-13 gore (signature-free Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra grasps for the vibe of Terminator 2: Judgment Day ), the film is unusually toothless.
Still, in aspiring to match the thrillers of Frankenheimer and Hitchcock (and Polanski’s Hitchcock homage Frantic), Unknown mostly lacks the grindhouse energy fans of Taken might come expecting; they may find the picture a little too tasteful in the hands of director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) and as adapted by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell from Didier Van Cauwelaert’s novel (a.k.a.
I was reminded of Roman Polanski's " Frantic " (1988), in which Harrison Ford played a doctor attending a convention in Paris with his wife.
For those of you who missed Roman Polanski's under-appreciated 1988 Harrison Ford thriller, "Frantic", do yourselves a favor and rent (or stream) it from Netflix rather than running out to see "Unknown", the latest version of the American-caught-in-a-foreign-city formula.
And, perhaps, we're walking in the footsteps of Roman Polanski and his 1988 thriller Frantic -- also about an American on business in a European city (Harrison Ford), who finds himself in the centre of a conspiracy.
2. Ford's a good analogy, because Neeson's new film "Unknown" is basically a worse, more ludicrous, glossed-up version of Ford's "Frantic," directed by Roman Polanski in 1988.
Spielberg’s “Jaws” remains the benchmark of the effective thrillers about oceanic predators, but nearly all that have come after have gone beyond mere inferiority: many are just downright insulting, including a string of terrible sequels and a generation of ridiculous made-for-television “Sharknado” films (only Renny Harlin’s “Deep Blue Sea” was ever worth mentioning).
If you’re in the right mood, though, it’s a ridiculous, eye-rolling hoot: A sub-90 minute, check-your-brain-at-the-ticket-window diversion not unlike 1997’s Deep Blue Sea (minus the show-stopping Samuel L. Jackson death scene).
Deep Blue Sea, Kon-Tiki, Dinoshark, Soul Surfer, Sharknados 1-3 (with the fourth installment, Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens, planned for release in late July), and the many, many other films in the Jaws genre … all of them summon the fear that sharks are not just predators, but also—much more than other powerful animals manage to be—monsters.
The Great White stars of the Jawsiad quickly ceased to resemble any beasts found in nature — they were bringing down helicopters as early as 1978's Jaws 2. But even Jaws: The Revenge ("This time, it's personal") looks like Gorillas in the Mist compared to the 21st century made-for-Syfy-shark-portmanteau plague, which asserts that camp is a thing you can engineer the way the scientists in 1999's Deep Blue Sea engineered sharks with ape-level intelligence.
Unequivocally the best shark movie since “Jaws” (yes, even better than “Open Water” and “Deep Blue Sea”), this back-to-basics thriller either eliminates or reclaims all of the excess and gimmickry that have watered down the genre since Steven Spielberg first invented it — there’s only one killer fish, she’s shot in beautiful 2D, and it doesn’t appear as though the beast has developed the ability to swim backwards as the result of reckless genetic modifications.
But once Nancy is toppled from her board and forced onto a rock that’ll only be available until the high tide in the morning, the film morphs with surprising ease into a stranded-tourist thriller pitting an endlessly resourceful woman with a propensity for swimming into hazardous rocks against what appears to be one of the hyper-intelligent great whites from Deep Blue Sea.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
influenced Jungle Cruise (2021)
Plot
Worse, while the film’s rollicking adventure is often reminiscent of the Indiana Jones films and 1999’s The Mummy , its mythology is largely a rehash of 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl , another movie based on a Disney theme park ride.
Disneyland added references to the “Pirates to the Caribbean” film franchise in 2006 after the 2003 film “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” was successful enough to warrant a 2006 follow-up, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”
3 Stars (out of 4) Tweet Back Side of Water By Jeffrey M. Anderson Based on the great, pun-filled Disneyland ride, Jungle Cruise falls between the disappointment The Haunted Mansion and the fantastic hit Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (both 2003).
Of course, one can’t always expect to generate lightning in a bottle the way Disney was able to with 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl .
There were few who expected Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to be particularly good, let alone score Johnny Depp his first Oscar nomination and launch a wildly successful franchise that would ultimately net more than $4.5 billion at the worldwide box office.
But if Carry-On works, it's because Ethan is an everyday person in the same way John McClane was an everyday guy in the first three Die Hard movies.
Taron Egerton would no doubt very much appreciate it if you would take the bait and compare his new, holiday-adjacent Netflix action thriller Carry-On to Die Hard … or perhaps Die Hard 2, actually.
When Nora further urges him to give his dream another shot, Ethan decides to try putting more effort into his life by petitioning his boss, Phil (Dean Norris), for a more important shift working baggage inspection on Christmas Eve.
Carry-On does not, in other words, find Ethan at the same point in his life that Die Hard finds John McClane.
As for Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent shark thriller The Shallows (2016) or the ne plus ultra of the genre, Jaws (1975), considered an overbudget debacle during its shoot, they are but small fry next to The Meg, both in budget and in featured fish—Steven Spielberg’s Great White, at an estimated 25 feet, would be chum for the mighty Meg.
Nor, in fact, does it even make it to the level of the 2016 Blake Lively effort, The Shallows .
The blandness begins with the film’s washed-out color palette, which denies us the expressionistic beauty that Jaume Collet-Serra cultivated in The Shallows (fuck, sorry, I know that’s another shark movie) and, more generally, the red-blooded pleasure that should go with a story about a monster eating people who are dumb enough to swim or experiment scientifically in its general vicinity.
Director Jon Turteltaub (“National Treasure”) has all the ingredients for a late splash of summer fun, although the film never embraces the wink and nod charm of past shark flicks (Blake Lively faced tougher odds in “The Shallows”) and can't seem to overcome a script that's too dull, even by the low standards this CGI-laden genre tends to bark up.
Ahí están los guiños al clásico de Steven Spielberg, Tiburón (Jaws, 1975), o a Alerta en lo profundo (Deep Blue Sea, 1999) calcados con poca inspiración, a diferencia de, por ejemplo, lo hecho por Jaume Collet-Serra (El pasajero, Desconocido) en Miedo profundo (The Shallows, 2016) donde, si bien, no se transformaba lo previamente establecido o se habrían nuevas veredas de exploración, sí se presentaba la historia como un gran juego visual de supervivencia, con colores saturados y situaciones ridículas dignas del mejor serie b.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
influenced House of Wax (2005)
Themes
Meanwhile, the film pays tribute to Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1965) in a bizarre, wax-figure movie theater scene.
Up the road from the cinema (where "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" is the seemingly perpetual offering) is Trudy's House of Wax, a grotesquerie of morbid history and familial horrors.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Directed by Werner Herzog
influenced Jungle Cruise (2021)
Plot Characters
There’s a whole list of cinematic inspirations, really, which would surprisingly include Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid .
In fact, one could also make the argument that it’s more indebted to Humphrey Bogart’s The African Queen and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God than to the ride.
Aguirre was a real person, a cruel and vile human, who most modern viewers probably know from Werner Herzog’s magnificent Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with an unhinged Klaus Kinski starring as the titular terror.
Movie fans may remember Aguirre from Werner Herzog's masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), wherein he searched the Amazon for the lost city of gold, El Dorado (he was also a real person).
It’s a tense meet-up between Neeson and Harris that reminds you just a bit of that exchange between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in “Heat.”
This movie may not pack the genuine emotional punch of Michael Mann's "Heat" or James Mangold's "Cop Land" -- or, for that matter, any of the countless Westerns that inspired it -- but "Run All Night" is a mostly satisfying action-drama from director Jaume Collet-Serra, who made Neeson's "Non-Stop" such a guilty pleasure.
It’s not quite like De Niro and Pacino squaring off over a diner table in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), but the scene where Jimmy and Shawn sit across from each other in a respectable restaurant, with the former requesting that his son be spared and the latter assuring him that he won’t, has a frisson that emboldens even the most routine of action-movie moments.
More than just a Child’s Play or Orphan rip-off — no matter how inevitable the comparisons are — this is a film beholden to concept more than formula, which is the key to its many delights.
For one thing, it’s hamstrung by a PG-13 rating which prevents it from being as nasty as one senses it might be (the high water mark for this sort of film remains Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, and I fear the window may have already closed in which a major studio might release a film capable of competing).
Wan no oculta que estamos frente a una cruza entre La Mala Semilla ( The Bad Seed , 1956), de Mervyn LeRoy, Las Esposas de Stepford ( The Stepford Wives , 1975), de Bryan Forbes, Chucky: El Muñeco Diabólico ( Child’s Play , 1988), de Tom Holland, Hardware (1990), de Richard Stanley, y La Huérfana ( Orphan , 2009), de Jaume Collet-Serra, e incluso coquetea con el slasher una vez que nuestra muñeca tuneada avant-garde desata su furia contra todos aquellos que amenazan física o psicológicamente a Cady, como el perro de la vecina Celia (Lori Dungey), un animal que se abalanza contra el androide y la niña cuando ambos osan entrar en la morada contigua, o un purrete psicópata llamado Brandon (Jack Cassidy), quien “viola” simbólicamente a M3GAN -esto es el mainstream yanqui, casi todo está vedado para lograr una baja calificación por edad para el estreno masivo en salas- cuando se lleva a la muñeca, la tira al suelo, le saca un zapato, la golpea en la cara e incluso le agarra el pelo, ganándose q…
You know that the nightmare of a ghoulish forced abortion that opens the movie is a premonition of bad experiences with evil kids, but you're thinking The Omen or The Bad Seed – something in the devil cult or genetic malfunction line.
Has John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) ever watched The Bad Seed, for heaven’s sakes?
When watching the new Orphan, it's hard not to think of earlier "evil children" movies like Alice Sweet Alice (1976), The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976 and 2006), and Village of the Damned (1960 and 1995).
Before you can say “The Bad Seed just got badder,” she’s attacking her snotty classroom rival on the playground, casually crushing injured pigeons with bricks, and threatening to castrate her stepbrother with a carpet knife.
There have been plenty of good films about people being stuck in bad situations alone -- "Cast Away," "The Martian," "All is Lost" -- where the fun, if you will, is in watching them react to the situation, try to come up with a game plan to survive, and then deal with complications, setbacks and such.
Her companion throughout this long, lonely ordeal is a wounded seagull, the movie's version of Wilson the volleyball in Cast Away.
Ideally a sequel to "The Shallows" ("Shallows 2: This Time It's Really Very Shallow") would spin off the gull for its own film co-starring Wilson the volleyball from "Cast Away" and Daniel Radcliffe 's gassy corpse from the upcoming "Swiss Army Man."
The supporting actors are serviceable in their roles, but the fact that they’re all upstaged by a seagull (undeniably this film’s take on Cast Away‘s Wilson) is a prime illustration of the characters (except Nancy) being props to showcase the terror of the shark.
Our hero is scared: The screenwriters do Lively very few favors, with some awkward Tom Hanks -in-“Cast Away” exposition-heavy monologues.
Lively joins a group of nobodies that includes Robert Redford (All Is Lost), Tom Hanks (Cast Away) and a boulder-challenged James Franco (127 Hours), but if you ever saw her swan her way through an episode of Gossip Girl, you’ll know that she thrives in piranha-infested waters.
If you’re looking for a short, sharp hit of sun-soaked adrenaline (and who isn’t?), you won’t do any better than The Shallows, a delicious endurance thriller (think 127 Hours or All is Lost) that pits woman against shark for 87 often nerve-jangling minutes.
High-concept survivalist dramas have become an unusually rich and varied Hollywood subgenre in recent years, with a dramatic bandwidth elastic enough to accommodate the hopped-up intensity of “127 Hours,” the sublime minimalism of “All Is Lost” and the astronomical razzle-dazzle of “Gravity.”
It’s helpful to think of “The Shallows” — the spare yet serviceable new shark-themed thriller starring Blake Lively — as less of a 21st-century “Jaws” than a distaff version of “127 Hours.”
It doesn’t have any of the beaming self importance of “Open Water” or “127 Hours,” which makes it a lot more fun than it has any right to be.
The Shallows is most obviously going to call to mind Jaws, though it does so whilst borrowing elements of 127 Hours (in that we spend most of our time focused solely on one person trapped in a horrifying situation) and Castaway (Nancy’s sole companion is a friendly seagull who helps stave off delirium and madness, a slightly peppier Wilson the Volleyball).
“Non-Stop” is nothing but entertaining; a locked-room mystery combining elements of Agatha Christie and “Air Force One.” Neeson is Bill Marks, a United States Air Marshal suffering from one too many ailments.
This is more in line with Air Force One, although it's not as tightly wound as Wolfgang Petersen's 1997 thriller starring Harrison Ford as the U.S. President.
This film needed a more confident filmmaking hand, someone to replicate the sleekness Jan de Bont brought to “Speed” or Wolfgang Petersen provided in “Air Force One.”
In terms of danger-on-a-plane scenarios it’s superior to “Flightplan” and “Turbulence” but not as goofily entertaining as “Red Eye,” “Air Force One” or even “Con Air.”
Likewise, it effortlessly tops Michael Curtiz's static, two-strip Technicolor original, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).
Just as Marcus Nispel reworked Tobe Hopper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the MTV generation, Serra similarly tricks-out André de Toth's 1953 classic (it's doubtful he's seen Michael Curtiz's 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum), except the film more accurately brings to mind the groove of David Schmoeller's underrated 1979 chiller Tourist Trap, in which a bunch of teenagers stumble upon a mannequin museum operated by two brothers, one a mysteriously-masked freakazoid.