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4K Picks: ‘The Lion King’ And ‘Charlie’s Angels’

This article is more than 4 years old.

It’s nostalgia of two different kinds this week! As we prepare for the next iteration of Charlie’s Angels to come to theaters, we get to rewatch the original and reassess Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King. Both are widely perceived as unnecessary, yet were one hundred percent inevitable in today’s IP driven climate. But you aren’t required to own them, on 4K and Blu-ray this week. So should you?

Critics pounced on The Lion King as a pointless retread, but with over $1.6 billion grossed worldwide, making it the seventh highest international grosser ever, audiences clearly disagreed. Or at least their curiosity overcame any bad buzz, and it’s fair to say the movie delivered what it promised: the story you know retold with realistic animals. It also functioned as a unofficial sequel of sorts to Favreau’s The Jungle Book, which made $966 million worldwide. Though the stories are unrelated, the formula of “Jungle Book guy redoes another Disney classic about animals, having totally pulled it off and visually wowed us the first time” is potent. Frankly, Favreau deserves way more credit for being a technically groundbreaking director than he gets.

And yes, it looks amazing in 4K. We can’t yet duplicate Dolby Vision 3D on a home system, but The Lion King was designed with the highest quality projection in mind, and deserves the best home presentation available. There is, at first, a touch of the uncanny valley: during the “Circle of Life” intro, the animals move with a slight fluidity more common to CG creations than more impulsive wildlife. But whether it’s a case of the viewer’s eyes adjusting, or the movie settling into a less stylized groove, the effect appears to go away once the story proper begins.

Side note: both my cats were captivated by the presentation of baby Simba. And if you can fool the eyes of a fellow feline...

Disney oddly promotes the movie as live-action, as fans protest that of course it’s animated – only one shot in the entire movie is of an actual African landscape. But the Blu-ray extras reveal that the techniques used to make the film were more live-action than may seem evident. To keep the look of a real-life nature documentary, Favreau and his team created the world in a virtual space, then had D.P. Caleb Deschanel film it practically within that space, using actual camera moves and dolly shots. The intent was to create the same sort of spontaneity and happy accidents that real-world filming entails, rather than carefully crafting each frame – and occasionally staging practically impossible shots – in the way an animated feature would.

I’m not the first to suggest that if nothing else, one can argue that the intent of the movie is live-action. But labels are only helpful when it comes to awards categories. Whether it is or isn’t animated should have little to do with your enjoyment, or lack of it. And I think once viewers have a chance to see how the movie was made, and hear Favreau’s commentary (recorded before the movie was released), they might come around to respecting it more. It’s unfair, for instance, to the film to take Chiwetel Ejiofor’s version of “Be Prepared” out of context and share it online as “proof” the new film sucks, when it isn’t remotely going for the same vibe as Jeremy Irons’ fantastical fascist vision. Favreau pointedly changes the dynamic between Scar and the hyenas, and rules out any musical numbers that would have animals doing things animals cannot do (besides talking and singing, of course). “Be Prepared” is barely a song now; it’s a semi-musical statement of intent, and not meant to be listened to individually.

My first experience with The Lion King was the Julie Taymor musical version rather than the original 2D cartoon, so perhaps I’ve always been more prone to accepting other interpretations. But this new version is a visual stunner, and a breathtaking technical achievement, and most of the alternate casting works. Sadly, the voices that don’t are the two primary lures, Donald Glover and Beyonce. The latter just feels out of her element, and the former mostly sounds sleepy. When you watch the behind-the-scenes, it makes sense: Glover in the audio booth conveys more through his facial expressions than purely his voice, and half the performance is lost in the final product. Fortunately, younger actors J.D. McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph are fantastic. And Chiwetel Ejiofor just deserves more great roles, period. (Marvel, bring Mordo back ASAP!)

I think a lot of critics have also neglected a key detail that helped really sell the film, and I can sum it up in one word: KITTY! Dog people have had numerous movies tailored to them for years, because dogs are trainable and can be persuaded to do pretty much anything on camera. Cat movies aren’t so common, because cats are mostly jerks when it comes to following commands. But now that we can make photo-real cats out of CG, all bets are off. The dawn of the feline film is here, people! (Incidentally, this is what PETA has proposed should be done in any movie featuring an animal, which feels extreme. But eventually it might even be more cost-effective.)

From a ‘90s throwback, this week also turns to the dawn of the 2000s, as the McG-directed Charlie’s Angels gets a 4K upgrade to help promote the upcoming remake/reboot. It grossed $125 million back then, and spawned a (disappointing) sequel, but how does it play now? Not just in terms of its general content, but to someone like me specifically, who was a super-horny twenty-ish single guy at the time, and is now middle-aged and married?

Well, from the opening riffs of KoRn on the soundtrack to its campy takes on Matrix wire-fu, Mission: Impossible disguises, and Tom Green cameo that spawned a quickie Hollywood marriage to Drew Barrymore, Charlie’s Angels is as Y2K a movie as it gets. Calculated to be perfectly hip at the time, it’s now an excellent time capsule. And yes, that includes occasionally cringey stuff like a geisha-themed party, Barrymore in Middle-Eastern “brownface,” and overuse of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things.” On the whole, though, it’s not as badly dated on that score as one might fear – the bit where Cameron Diaz dances onstage at Soul Train was clearly always meant to be uncomfortable, and the whole premise of these women using sex appeal as a distraction tactic was always the point. So yeah, Barrymore shows a ton of cleavage, Diaz’ booty-shaking is frequently front and center, and Lucy Liu does a whole dominatrix fetish scene (ironically, playing a better version of G.I. Joe’s Baroness than the movie take we actually got). And it’s meant to play as “empowering” because it shows men to be foolish horndogs who can easily have their heads turned. But that’s kind of endemic to the material.

Or is it? The 4K disc contains exactly one extra, which is a special scene from the upcoming new Charlie’s Angels, and nothing about it suggests sex decoy skills. It’s an action chase scene, which garners some humor from the Angels not being absolutely perfect in their maneuvers. And it’s not a lot to go on, except to suggest that it takes as much from contemporary action style as the 2000 version did from the films of its time.

It is worth noting that the movie is progressive in its lack of slut-shaming. Dylan (Barrymore) constantly falls into the sack with guys she shouldn’t, and it’s not presented as a character flaw, but just an “Eh, crap happens” kind of attitude.

As for the upgrade: the 2000 film always had a level of deliberate artifice that’s even more pronounced now. Fake backgrounds look more fake, and props and sets look more like props and sets. Given that the movie takes very little seriously, this isn’t a huge issue. In one key scene, we’re supposed to be faked out that Matt LeBlanc (remember him?) has been killed, but pull back to reveal he’s an actor on a set! Now, in 4K, the fact that he’s on a set from the getgo couldn’t be more obvious. But since that’s true of a lot of the movie anyway now, it doesn’t matter. Meta!

The cast is packed with familiar faces, most of who were so at the time, from Kelly Lynch and Sam Rockwell as (spoiler) to Tim Curry and Crispin Glover as dubious characters, Bill Murray as Bosley, and LeBlanc and Luke Wilson as love interests. The one surprise in rewatch is a then-unknown Melissa McCarthy in a small part, looking much the same as she does now.

Overall, the film feels like it’s from a more innocent time, which of course it is – pre-9/11, the scariest stuff on the news was shark attacks. And while older critics at the time singled out Charlie’s Angels as symptomatic of the death of cinema, just like Francis Ford Coppola opining on Marvel movies now, it really is just an innocuous action movie of its time. And if you lived through said time at the right age, it’ll take you back there for an hour or two. That’s not so bad.