Hello to everyone who has been following this blog for many years - I'm still blogging, I'm just moving over to https://www.claireheffer.com/blog - please continue to follow and let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been kind enough to visit over the years. May the lists continue...
Showing posts with label snake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label snake. Show all posts
Monday, 5 November 2018
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Sunday, 12 August 2018
FILM 1817: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII
FILM 1817: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII
TRIVIA: First collaboration between writer/director Andy Sidaris and actor Rodrigo Obregón, who would appear in almost every one of Mr. Sidaris' subsequent films.
There is a scene where a poster of Malibu Express (1985) is shown in a wall. The movie is a reference to Andy Sidaris' previous movie.
DIRECTOR CAMEO: Andy Sidaris: Whitey the TV director.
Sunday, 6 May 2018
FILM 1774: ANACONDA
FILM 1774: ANACONDA
TRIVIA: During the filming of one scene the controls for the animatronic Anaconda shorted out, causing it to completely lose control. Some of the footage is included in the movie.
The CGI for the Anacondas cost $100,000 a second.
This film is listed among the 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide.
Strong language was dubbed with (for example, using 'freaking') in order to get a PG-13 rating. Not only do the ADR'd lines have a slightly different sound to the rest of the dialogue, but the actors' lips do not match the new dialogue when they speak.
Contains two allusions to Ice Cube's musical career. His first line of dialogue is "Today is a good day," referring to his 1992 hit "It Was A Good Day." There is a scene of him listening to Mack 10's song "Foe Life," which he co-wrote.
Anaconda was not filmed in the Dominican Republic. The majority of the river scenes were filmed on the Rio Negro, in the vicinity of Manaus, Brazil. The remainder were filmed at the Los Angeles Arboretum.
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Sunday, 30 October 2016
FILM 1585: THE LADY EVE
TRIVIA: Edith Head's
first in a long line of costume designing for Barbara Stanwyck. The
wedding gown caused a fashion sensation. So much so that it was copied for
brides and called, "the Lady Eve dress."
Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda rarely retired
to their dressing rooms between takes. Instead, they hung out with Preston Sturges, listening
to his stories and reviewing - and often re-writing - their lines.
With so many people on the set, Preston Sturges dressed
eccentrically so that he would stand out. He usually wore either a brightly
coloured beret or a hat with a feather in it. This sartorial splendour led to
his being dubbed the worst-dressed man in Hollywood.
Sunday, 11 September 2016
FILM 1655: THE JUNGLE BOOK
TRIVIA: Amid the treasures in King
Louie's temple, one of them happens to be Genie's lamp from Aladdin (1992).
In The Jungle Book (1967),
King Louie was an orangutan. In this film, he's a gigantopithecus, an ancestor
of the orangutan whose range is believed to have included parts of India. This
change in species was made to make the film more fantastic, seeing as it would
be a good way to represent him as King of the Monkeys, and since orangutans are
not native to India. Despite this, the film does still feature some animals not
native to India, like Peccaries and Red-Eyed Tree Frogs.
Actor Neel Sethi said that since
he never actually worked with real animals onset during filming, director Jon Favreau would on
occasion stand in for where the animals would be present, one most notably as Shere
Khan lunging out from the tall grass.
All the locations in the film are
computer-generated VFX. The story may have been set primarily in India, but the
film was completely shot at the LA Center Studio in Los Angeles, California.
The CG character Baloo is so large
and furry, he took almost five hours of rendering time per frame.
This is the first time that Kaa the
snake is portrayed as a female, rather than a male. Jon Favreau said the
change was a deliberate one, as he felt there were too many male characters in The Jungle Book (1967).
Lyricist Richard M. Sherman, who
wrote songs for The Jungle
Book (1967), composed a new verse for "Wanna Be Like You"
for Christopher Walken.
Ben Kingsley described
Bagheera as a military character: "He's probably a colonel, he is
instantly recognizable by the way he talks, how he acts and what his ethical
code is."
The animal characters were both
motion-captured and performed live on set by puppeteers from the Jim Henson
Company. For the on-set performances, Jim Henson's Creature Shop built
elaborate life-sized puppets to act alongside Mowgli and serve as eye-lines.
The 3D of the film and the original
1990s Walt Disney Pictures opening logo were a tribute to the multi-plane
camera system. Director Jon Favreau
said that one his is "rules" for making The Jungle Book (2016) was
"let's treat the 3D like multi-plane. Let's be as gimmicky as Walt Disney would have
been-but not more." The multi-plane camera is a special camera used to
create a sense of dimensional space-of a camera moving through a set, instead
of one just taking photos of a series of still images. Disney had a special
version of the system developed, which was used first in the Silly Symphony
animated short film The Old Mill
(1937) and later in Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Favreau went on: "There are
tremendous shots in Pinocchio
(1940) and Bambi
(1942) where the multi-plane was a new technology and they were using it to
show off, and that was the 3D of its day. And so we were studying that very
closely and became very fascinated with the multi-plane and what went into it
and the artistry and ingenuity." This aesthetic philosophy extended to the
movie's treatment of the main castle logo. "I got the idea, 'Let's do the
opening logo, and instead of doing a super high-tech one, let's have a
hand-painted, cel-animated multi-plane logo,'" Favreau said. "And not
only that but 'Let's make the kingdom behind the castle have elements from what
the live action version would have been,' so it was almost like a little taste
of what's back there."
Right before he meets King Louie,
Mowgli finds a cowbell in the monkey palace and proceeds to pick it up and
shake it, causing Louie to appear. King Louie is played by Christopher Walken, who
once famously stated on a sketch on Saturday Night Live in 2000, "I have a
fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"
The animal characters were created
entirely in key frame computer animation, with the assistance of footage of
real animal movement, the actors recording their lines, and performance capture
for reference. The production team underwent a thorough process to
realistically convey the animals' speaking, while still making them
perceptually believable to the audience. Favreau researched earlier films
featuring anthropomorphic animals - including Walt Disney's animated features,
such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937) and Bambi
(1942), as well as modern films such as Babe (1995) - and adopted
certain techniques from those films into The Jungle Book (2016).
Nearly 70 separate species of native animals are featured in the film, with
several species being portrayed as "150% larger" than their actual
counterparts. Jim Henson's
Creature Shop was brought in to provide animal puppet figures for Sethi to act
against, although none appear in the finished film. Director Jon Favreau expressed a
desire to avoid overusing motion capture in order to prevent an uncanny valley
effect. Moving Picture Company (MPC) and Weta Digital created the film's visual
effects. MPC developed a new software for animating muscular structure in the
animals. Around 1,000 remote jungle locations in India were photographed and
used as reference in post-production.
This is Idris Elba's second of
three starring roles in Disney films of 2016, following Zootopia (2016) and Finding Dory (2016). All
of the three films feature Elba in prominent animated voice-over performances.
Over 2,000 children auditioned for
the part of Mowgli, in his first audition, acting newcomer Neel Sethi won the part.
The first time King Louie appears
on the screen, he is sitting in a chair, his face obscured by shadows and talking
in a sinister, slightly muffled voice about offering Mowgli protection before
finally revealing his face. This is an obvious homage to the classic film Apocalypse Now (1979) in
which Marlon Brando's character,
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, first appears on screen similarly composed.
The end credits feature "The
Jungle Book" in book form that has the same cover design as the book seen
in the opening credits of The Jungle
Book (1967). It is in fact the original book prop, taken from
Disney's archives, as mentioned in the making of featurette.
Thursday, 6 March 2014
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