Moviefone Editorial

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Watch Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Cheech Marin, and Jane Seymour in the trailer for ‘The War with Grandpa’

Robert De Niro has had a long and storied film career, often playing tough guys. But he may have finally met his match! In the trailer for ‘The War with Grandpa’ we see De Niro’s Ed take on his grandson Peter in a no-holds-barred fight over who will get the bedroom that used to belong to young Peter.

Here’s the official synopsis:

Sixth-grader Peter (Oakes Fegley) is pretty much your average kid-he likes gaming, hanging with his friends and his beloved pair of Air Jordans. But when his recently widowed grandfather Ed (Robert De Niro) moves in with Peter’s family, the boy is forced to give up his most prized possession of all, his bedroom. Unwilling to let such an injustice stand, Peter devises a series of increasingly elaborate pranks to drive out the interloper, but Grandpa Ed won’t go without a fight. Soon, the friendly combatants are engaged in an all-out war with side-splitting consequences.

Based on the award-winning book by Robert Kimmel Smith, The War with Grandpa is a hilarious family comedy featuring an all-star supporting cast: Christopher Walken, Uma Thurman, Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin, Laura Marano and Jane Seymour.

‘The War with Grandpa’ opens nationwide on October 9.
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August 16, 2020
23 Things You Never Knew About Woody Allen’s ‘Annie Hall’

Why do we still care about “Mary Tyler Moore’ episode… He didn’t trust it. It was a real leap for him. It was a big moment for Woody and he had to be scared. But I wasn’t.”
11. A few future stars had blink-and-you’ll-miss-it roles. Charlie’s Angels” star Shelley Hack was half of the cheerfully-shallow young couple Alvy stops on the sidewalk. And Sigourney Weaver made her screen debut as Alvy’s movie-theater date at the end of the film.

12. Oh, and the man in the park that Alvy jokes is the winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest? That’s no lookalike; it really is the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” author.
13. There’s also a two-scene appearance by a pre-fame Christopher Walken, as Annie’s hilariously disturbed brother Duane. His name is misspelled “Wlaken” in the closing credits.
14. Entertainment Weekly published a wonderful interview with Russell Horton, who played the annoying professor in line at the movie theater (above), the one whose pontifications about Marshall McLuhan Alvy shuts down when he pulls the real McLuhan out of nowhere. Horton — whom you may know better as the voice of the Trix rabbit in the cereal commercials — recalls that Allen had originally wanted to make Federico Fellini or Luis Buñuel appear (Horton’s character was spouting nonsense about Fellini, too), but the European art-film directors both declined to be in Allen’s movie. The gag still worked with the Canadian media scholar, even though, after 17 or 18 takes, McLuhan still stumbled over his dialogue. “He had one line, and he kept blowing it,” Horton recalled.

15. There’s no instrumental score in “Annie Hall.” All the music is pre-existing songs, overheard at parties, on car radios, or sung by Keaton as part of Annie’s cabaret act.
16. Annie’s costumes, consisting largely of oversized but elegant menswear from Keaton’s own wardrobe, spawned a fashion trend, yet they almost didn’t happen. Allen said that his costume designer, Ruth Morley, disapproved of Keaton’s choices, but he recalled telling Morley, “She’s a genius. Let’s just leave her alone, let her wear what she wants.”

17. Allen famously welcomes improvisation on his sets, and “Annie Hall” was no different. Much of the spontaneous clowning in the lobster-cooking scene (which was the first scene in the shoot) was truly spontaneous. So was the gag where Alvy sneezes away a fortune’s worth of cocaine (pictured). Allen and editor Ralph Rosenblum had to lengthen the scene after test audiences laughed so long that they missed the next lines of dialogue.

18. Allen and Rosenblum rescued the sprawling film, whose rough cut ran nearly 2 1/2 hours, in the editing room, slashing most of the fantasy sequences and flashbacks and making the Annie-Alvy romance the backbone of the film. Even then, Allen didn’t have an ending for the film; there was an awkward and glum scene of Annie and Alvy after their break-up, and then nothing.
19. It wasn’t until Allen was riding in a taxi on the way to a test screening that he came up with an ending, jotting down some notes that evolved into the bittersweet, hopeful monologue that closes the film.

20. “Annie Hall” cost a reported $4 million to make. It earned $38 million in North American theaters, becoming the 11th biggest hit of 1977 and the fourth most lucrative of Allen’s nearly 50 films. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $148 million today, making it the biggest-grossing hit of Allen’s career.
21. “Annie Hall” was nominated for five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress. It won all but Best Actor.

22. Allen wasn’t present to receive his two trophies; he chose not to attend the Academy Award ceremony because it conflicted with his long-standing Monday night gig playing Dixieland clarinet at Michael’s Pub in New York.
23. Allen was still unhappy with having transformed his ambitious, psychological screenplay into what he felt was a conventional romantic comedy. Shortly after its Oscar sweep, he referred to “Annie Hall” as “a very middle-class picture that appealed to people because it reinforced middle-class values.”

April 19, 2017
Why Disney’s Live-Action ‘Jungle Book’ Has Deep Roots in ‘Bambi,’ ‘Lion King’

In anticipation of Disney‘s live-action adaptation of “The Jungle Book,” Moviefone had the opportunity to chat with director Jon Favreau about what inspired him to re-imagine the beloved animated classic.

Opening this Friday, Favreau’s movie takes us back into the jungle with Mowgli and friends using cutting-edge technology that renders an incredible, photo-realistic world in 3D. When you see it, you’ll be shocked by the knowledge that “The Jungle Book” was shot entirely in Downtown Los Angeles using practical sets and Dolby vision laser projection. In other words, if you thought movies like “Avatar” and “Life of Pi” looked amazing, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We also get some of what we love from the original musical Walt Disney production but fit to reflect the time and outfitted with a stellar voice cast. Newcomer Neel Sethi plays Mowgli and is joined by Sir Ben Kingsley (Bagheera), Lupita Nyong’o (Raksha), Bill Murray (Baloo), Scarlett Johansson (Kaa), Idris Elba (Shere Khan), Giancarlo Esposito (Akilah) and Christopher Walken (King Louie).

With all of this in mind, we couldn’t wait to talk to Favreau about raising the bar on visual storytelling using a tried and proven method: the Walt Disney way.

Moviefone: What I took away the most from your take on “The Jungle Book” was just how steeped in Walt Disney’s philosophy for storytelling it was. You did what he did with fairy tales and the classic Kipling story to create a new take on a beloved movie. How did you go about mining the core of the original film’s narrative to build your own vision?

Jon Favreau: You just can’t make the movie exactly like the old one. It wouldn’t work live-action, so we had to make some changes to it. Hopefully, we honored the legacy of the original one enough that you feel satisfied if you’re expecting that, but yet you’re seeing something that goes further in some ways.

Enough people who love Disney have seen it that I feel comfortable that we didn’t at least put them off — that we didn’t do our homework and embrace the original. That was an important film for me.When tackling this project, what helped you focus on the story you wanted to tell as you researched the original?

It’s interesting because it’s not like going back to the original movie unlocked all those puzzles. The trick that I had done on “Iron Man” that had worked pretty well was: the first thing I do is try to remember and brainstorm for the images and the things I remember most clearly because if it sits clearly in your memory it’s probably been prioritized and is most important. And so “Bare Necessities” was a big one, and “I Wanna Be Like You,” King Louie and the crumbling temple, and Kaa with his hypnotic eyes, and the boy being woozy, and me being scared. And then floating down the river and singing, and Shere Khan and the torch, and the elephants and the baby elephant.

I make a big list of all that stuff, and then I look at the materials because, when you watch it fresh, you’ll connect with different things. I wanted to make sure to include all those images that I had connected to. And then I actually took a lot of cues from the way the plot unfolds the story because that was actually well done. Walt’s a great story man, and that was very different from the book. We looked at the books, too, to get inspiration. Certain things the books were better at. I like the treatment of the elephants in the books. I like the treatment of Ikki, the porcupine, I liked Raksha, the mother. So I kinda pick and choose between the two. I think me being such a fan of the material and connecting with it gave me confidence that my instincts were going to be the instincts of others like me.

With that wealth of information, how did you tread through it and not let it overwhelm your vision for “The Jungle Book”?

They say a book is like designing a boat, and a screenplay is like designing an airplane. It has to lift. Once you hit the end of that runway, the thing has to take off. And if it doesn’t fly under its own engineering, it falls apart. So there are certain rules you have to stick by. You have to keep the pace at a certain rhythm, you have to have the right mixture of emotion and tone, and once you lock into that you could get clues from other movies. Honestly, as much as we looked at “Jungle Book,” we looked at “Bambi,” we looked at “Pinocchio,” we looked at “The Lion King.” For the PG version, we made, there were more clues in those films than there were in “The Jungle Book” for how to present it, because we always found ourselves tonally: a little too young, a little too humorous. So whenever we brought in a musical element or a humorous element from the original, we found ourselves really having to be careful that we didn’t trip up the whole film.On a recent trip to the old Ink and Paint building over at Walt Disney Studios, I saw a multi-plane shadowbox for the opening scene of “Bambi,” which I immediately thought of during the opening of your film in its composition.

We looked at that shot. We looked at the opening of “Bambi” because back, when he was doing Bambi, Walt was still flushed with success and revenue from “Snow White,” which was a huge hit and, unfortunately, over Walt’s career, they were operating to diminishing returns from that point on. But Walt was so passionate that he would convince Roy, his brother, to give him the resources and the people that he needed. “Bambi” was really the one where he wanted to raise the bar like they were able to do in “Snow White” and that was his labor of love for many, many years.

I don’t know if he was ever fully satisfied with the version that came out judging from the notes that I had read, because the studio was coming into a lot of other challenges. I think the war was coming on or the strike. I think it was the strike for that film, and there was definitely a version of the film he was going for and what was nice is that he got stenographers keeping notes of all their story sessions. On the Blu-ray of “Bambi,” you hear them talking about how they were gonna make the animals look photo-real, and the tone of the performance vs. how cartooney they were in “Snow White,” how realistic they were presenting them, and the way there were gonna show the photo-real backgrounds, and how they would stylize things. And the way they would treat the hunter, and the way they would treat the weather. Hearing it in his read-back transcript, it was almost like having him available to us. And he really was wrestling with a lot of things people wrestle with today. Certainly, we did.

So we drew inspiration looking at the shots. The beauty of the shots in “Bambi” were unsurpassed by the time we got to the ’67 “Jungle Book” film. Although character animation was still hitting a high watermark because you had the Nine Old Men around. I think most if not all of them were still around for the animated emotional moments. You didn’t have the same lushness of the multi-plane, nearly the amount of artists designing a project like this. And, although it was a big success for them financially, it wasn’t embraced in the same way the films like “Snow White” were in its day. So I think by trying to channel the entire Disney legacy and then also “The Lion King,” which came afterwards (that was affected very much by “The Jungle Book” if you hear the animators of that one speak). I think that one was essential in having fun musical moments but also having scary moments, where characters are in serious danger.

And taking cues from Walt there makes so much sense, it immerses you in Mowgli’s world, with its practical and CGI surroundings.

He used to do that with his “Alice” and old “Laugh-O-Gram” stuff by having a live-action girl in an illustrated world. It was something he was first drawn to. So yeah, we really tried to honor the legacy but tried to do something new and exciting that just stands on its own two feet.

We’ve got to talk casting; this is an incredible ensemble. What inspired you to approach the talent attached to the film?

That’s a big part of my job. You know Walt Disney in “The Jungle Book” was the only time he did celebrity casting because those people were famous back then before the film, so I think it gave me permission to go after higher people like Christopher Walken or Idris Elba.

Loved the cowbell reference by the way. So meta!Did you catch it? I’m so glad it’s in there. That was an on-set discovery. That was a prop in the background that I pulled and I said, “Oh my god, this is what Mowgli has to use. I knew he had to touch something that would get the attention of King Louie and I saw the cowbell off to the side and I pulled that in and swapped it out for the prop that we had designed for it.

Awesome. Sorry, back to casting…

With Christopher Walken and Bill Murray, I let them really be themselves and be recognizable through the characters. I think that was part of what made the original special as well.

Disney’s “The Jungle Book” opens Friday, April 15th.

April 12, 2016
5 Things You Need to Know Before Seeing Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’

Disney’s latest live-action update of one of its classic animated features is “The Jungle Book.” But don’t expect just a shiny CG update of the 1967 cartoon that turned Rudyard Kipling’s fierce beasts into mostly adorable, toy-ready critters. For one thing, if you’ve seen the trailers, you know this new version features some impressive-looking animals, speaking with the voices of some impressive stars. For another thing, its director is Jon Favreau, who helped launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe with “Iron Man.”

Favreau and Disney clearly wanted to make something more than just a retread of the studio’s 1967 cartoon — or Disney’s 1994 live-action version. Judging by the 100% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, they’ve pulled it off. Here are five things you need to know before entering the “Jungle.”

1. Think ‘Avatar,’ Only Earthbound
The James Cameron epic is a movie Favreau has name-checked often in describing the exotic, immersive, 3D forest world he’s tried to create here. From its setting to its jungle animals, Favreau’s film is almost completely CGI — except, of course, for Neel Sethi, the 12-year-old New York native who plays wild boy Mowgli.

Favreau and his effects team shot the whole film on stages in downtown Los Angeles, digitally added lush vegetation, and populated it with creatures based on the appearances and movements of real animals — but given an artistic flourish by digital animators. Imagine the CGI tiger in “Life of Pi,” except that he’s moving his lips as Idris Elba’s (above) menacing voice emerges from his mouth.

2. This Is No Cartoon
The generally-lighthearted 1967 cartoon wasn’t especially faithful to the source material. Favreau has said his film delves deeper into the Kipling stories, which means the animals are more savage and the danger to Mowgli is greater. Elba’s tiger Shere Khan is reportedly one of the scariest screen villains since — well, Elba’s warlord in “Beasts of No Nation.” No wonder some critics are calling the film a kiddie “Revenant.”

3. It’s Not Just a Guy Thing
Favreau decided that the cartoon, populated almost exclusively by male characters, needed more feminine presences. So Kaa the Python got a sex change; she’s voiced by Scarlett Johansson (pictured). Interestingly, in “Jungle Book: Origins,” Andy Serkis‘ upcoming 2017 take on the same public-domain Kipling stories, which will also mix live-action actors and motion-capture animals, Kaa will be female as well, voiced by Cate Blanchett.

Favreau also beefed up the role of Raksha, the wolf mother who adopts Mowgli. She doesn’t even speak in the cartoon, but here, she’s voiced by no less a luminary than Lupita Nyong’o.

4. The Animals Are Zoologically Correct
Well, except for the whole talking thing. But at least Baloo (Bill Murray) is now more obviously a sloth bear, a mammal native to India, than the generic bear of the cartoon. Alas, there are no orangutans in India, so King Louie (Christopher Walken) is now a Gigantopithecus (pictured), an orangutan-like ape that is now extinct but which did once live in India.

5. Don’t Worry, Your Favorite Songs Are Still Here
Darker tone aside, Favreau made sure to keep some of the cartoon’s comic-relief moments, as is apparent by the casting of Murray and Walken. (The late Garry Shandling is here, too, as a nervous porcupine.)

Baloo does get to sing “Bare Necessities” and Louie still sings “I Wan’na Be Like You.” Richard M. Sherman, who wrote that song’s lyrics 50 years ago, has updated the words for the new film. And Kaa still delivers the hypnotic “Trust in Me” — though, instead of Sterling Holloway’s Winnie-the-Pooh bluster, the snake now purrs the words in Johansson’s seductive, unsettling rasp.

“Jungle Book” hits theaters Friday.

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April 12, 2016
Disney’s Live-Action ‘The Jungle Book’: What You Need to Know

The first in-depth look at Disney‘s “The Jungle Book” was unveiled in Los Angeles last month, at a special presentation hosted by Walt Disney Studios and director Jon Favreau. We were able to exclusively experience the advanced 3D tech the film was being shot with and get a sense of how the adaptation of the beloved Disney classic aims to stand apart from the original.

Held at Hollywood’s El Capitan theater, the event’s emcee was none other than the director himself. Favreau introduced a selection of preview clips and delivered insight into what made now the right time to remake “The Jungle Book.” As it turns out, producer Alan Horn grew up on the Mowgli books by Rudyard Kipling, and Favreau grew up a fan of Walt Disney‘s animated classic. Together, they wanted to collaborate on a project to push technology forward and agreed that “The Jungle Book” had the characters, emotion, and music to make it the best option.

“Alan said, ‘Look at the technology, look at “Life of Pi.” Why not use the technology to make a whole world that transports you? Why be limited by going off and shooting plates?’ Let’s really embrace this technology and see what we could do if we push it to its limit.” – Jon Favreau

Dolby Extended Dynamic Range Laser Projection is the state-of-the-art technology that Disney and Favreau are using to bring “The Jungle Book” to audiences. It boasts photo-real imaging to recreate textures and environmental detail. Favreau’s adaptation seeks to bring a tangible cinematic world as far as our eyes can perceive. In the test footage we got to see, the CG (computer generated) elements, like water, lighting, and even wind, were astounding. It was hard to tell a rendered scene apart from real-life images. The process is advancing with animals as well, as now fur and skin can be recreated with near photo-realistic perfection.

Immersing an audience — and an actor — in a believable CG world has it’s challenges, but Disney uses an effective technique that is part practical and part optical illusion. The way the shots are set up goes something like this: Neel Sethi (Mowgli) performs in an active foreground on a practical set (i.e. real life), then the CG animators work to make the background and animal characters fully realized through the technology, seamlessly blending the real with the imaginary.

“If there was a giant we were standing on the shoulders of it was ‘Avatar.’ The first time I saw ‘Avatar,’ I got it, what this whole big screen 3D format thing was about. I got why I had to go to the movies to see that. I don’t know if anyone’s ever outdone the way the 3D was done there. So we shot native 3D using the PACE system, the system that Jim (Cameron) had been a part of developing and we used simulcap and all this technology that people haven’t really been using.” -Jon Favreau

The sights and sounds of the jungle previewed showed off how far the tech has really come since James Cameron‘s “Avatar.” In a scene in which Shere Khan (Idris Elba) begins to sniff out Mowgli’s presence, Sethi’s presence among the CG characters and environment is hard to discern. The way that Favreau places physical set pieces around the actor creates a sense of real space. Meaning, if he hides behind a rock, the rock is actually there.

“So if the kid’s walking 12 feet in the cut of the movie that we have, we built 12 feet of jungle. Each set was built for a shot. The art department or production designer would wheel in one set. We’d film that and across the street in Downtown LA we’d have the other set being prepped. We’d go back and forth and back and forth. It was a very cool efficient process” – Jon Favreau

In a scene in which Shere Khan chases Mowgli through a ravine, the mud the young actor runs through is real. So the trick to blurring the lines between a real and a CG space is in having the actor be affected by the environment, like the mud caked on his feet as he hops on a CG animal and escapes.The ability to really sell these scenes to an audience is a testament to young Sethi’s acting skills. He completely embodies Mowgli with charisma and real, child-like wonder. There’s a reason he was the kid — out of 2,000 who auditioned — to get the part.

“You need the personality and the humor and the charm and the emotion of the characters. That’s really what ‘Jungle Book’ represents. People don’t think about action, it’s fun to have it but really what you think about is the characters and the relationships. Neel really seems to capture for me what I remember of Mowgli in the film. He wasn’t just a cookie-cutter kid. He had spunk and a little swagger. He’s just a great kid and I loved working with him.” -Jon Favreau

Sethi’s acting further elevates the CG techniques Disney and Favreau are pushing to advance. Keep moving forward is a Disney mantra Favreau lives by, and he believes that, if Walt were alive today, he, too, would be experimenting with new, cutting-edge tech.

“I love film, love what Chris Nolan and ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Hateful Eight’ are doing. I don’t want to see film go away. But, at the same time, I think we have to push technology as far as we can because there are other things that digital art is better for. When it comes to such complicated visual effects and putting all these elements together, I want to continue to see digital continue to grow. I don’t want to see anything eliminated; I want to see everything perfected, including film.” – Jon Favreau

We also got a small glimpse of Bill Murray‘s work as the voice of Baloo, singing his signature tune and nailing the lovable bear’s endearing slyness. As Favreau explained, the key to using music in “The Jungle Book” this time around is to only use it when it makes sense for the movie. Favreau consulted with composer Richard Sherman, but no songs beyond “Bare Necessities” were confirmed to be in the movie.

“You’re trying to honor the memories of the people who grew up with this stuff but you’re also trying to make a movie that will appeal to the full audience. There is music but it’s not a musical.” -Jon Favreau

But how can you not have Christopher Walken, who will be playing King Louie, sing? In the last clip presented, we got our first real look at Mowgli meeting the King of the Monkeys. The reveal of the gentle giant hilariously balances action with comedy. Of course, Walken is a riot.

“Because this character lives in the ruins of man, there was a magical quality to him anyway. Who do you pick to play that character? It has to be Chris Walken.” -Jon Favreau

A fun tidbit Favreau shared is their solution to Louie being an orangutan in the animated film, which is inaccurate since, well, orangutans don’t live in India. This time around, they made Louie a mythical creature believed to have inhabited India; he’s basically a Sasquatch with orangutan-like qualities. Animators took special liberties with Walken’s mo-cap performance to imbue the character with the actor’s expressions. It can be a bit eerie, but it works really well.Near the end of the presentation, Favreau was joined on-stage by visual effects supervisor Rob Legato, who had previously worked on “Avatar.”

“In this particular project, which was really exciting, is that we’re creating a total photo-real world that we could recognize is real. We’ve all seen pictures of animals. We’ve all seen how they move, how they walk and how they talk. The really fun portion of this and why it was great to work with Jon is that we had the same sensibility. To actually create a real movie where the suspension of disbelief is easier to let go of because it looks like it could be conventionally filmed.” – Rob Legato, Visual Effects Supervisor

From what we’ve seen so far, Disney’s “The Jungle Book” is shaping up to be a must-see. Let’s be clear: Walt Disney Studios’ adaptation won’t be a shot-for-shot remake of the original, but uses the animated classic as a foundation, expanding Mowgli’s story through Kipling’s original tales in a stunning new format.

You can see for yourself when Disney’s “The Jungle Book” opens April 15th, 2016.

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February 22, 2016
‘Wedding Crashers’ Cast: Where Are They Now?

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If “Wedding Crashers” had been a real wedding, we’d owe it a gift of tin or aluminum now, since those are the traditional 10th anniversary presents.

When the raunchy romantic comedy came out 10 years ago this week (on July 15, 2005), it proved a career highlight for stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, while pushing the careers of Isla Fisher and Bradley Cooper to the next level. In the decade since, some of the movie’s stars have flourished while others have had a more tumultuous ride. Here’s what’s happened to the whole “Wedding” party since the last slice of cake went into the freezer.

July 15, 2015