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A young boy raised in the wild struggles to stay where he calls home, despite his animal friends trying to convince him he'd be better off with his own kind.

For a movie that focuses so heavily on musical interludes and so little on story, it's amazing that 40 years later THE JUNGLE BOOK manages to still hold up as one of the Disney greats. It may not be in the same league as THE LION KING or ALADDIN, but I'd argue it's held up much better than some of the older (and more highly regarded) fare like SNOW WHITE or PINOCCHIO. Part of this may be bias getting the better of me, since I grew up on THE JUNGLE BOOK; seeing it again for the umpteenth time, except about ten years later, stirred up some major nostalgia.

There are three things that keep the charm and magic of this Disney classic alive: the music, the characters, and the animation. It's as simple as that.

With toe-tappingly addictive tracks like "I Wanna Be Like You" and "Bare Necessities", the musical numbers are an obvious highlight. This is primarily a credit to the voice actors, who also act as the driving force that make the abundance of characters such a treat. Baloo, a fun-loving laidback bear who befriends Mowgli (voiced by the perfectly cast Phil Harris), is easily the most beloved of the bunch, with the mischievous Kaa (a python with a penchant for hypnotizing his prey) and the unruly King Louie (an orangutan who desires the secret of making fire) coming in right behind him. Tying this all together is the lush animation, which adds an amazing amount of personality and humor to the film. It occasionally looks a little rough around the edges, but that gives it a personal touch a lot of animated pictures could benefit from; that is, if they even made real animated pictures anymore (CGI films excluded).

If I have one gripe with THE JUNGLE BOOK, it's that its second half isn't as fun as its first. Baloo drops out of the film briefly, and characters like the goofy vultures (stylized to look like British rock singers) aren't enough to make up for his absence. This is a minor issue though; one that barely constitutes as a problem since most young kids don't even finish the films they start. And with the rest of the movie being so joyously entertaining, adults aren't likely to care either.

Video:

Presented in 1.75:1 Anamorphic Widescreen. This digitally restored and enhanced transfer offers a visual experience unlike anything THE JUNGLE BOOK was capable of offering before. A true treat for fans.

Audio:

English 5.1 Disney Enhanced Home Theater Mix, Spanish/French 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround, and English Mono. The enhanced sound mix is fantastic, and the fact that they've also made available a restored version of the original mono track is an added bonus.

I find it ironic that Disney is so willing to cash-in on pointless straight-to-DVD sequels to their classic films, yet they never hesitate to give those very same classics the royal treatment with DVD releases like this. I guess that makes them "respectful" sellouts.

DISC 1

Audio Commentary (with Richard Sherman, Andreas Deja, and Bruce Reitherman):

This retrospective track offers a lot of interesting information and insight into the film, but it all comes from very odd perspectives. Richard Sherman worked on many of the film's songs, Andreas Deja is the supervising pencil animator at Disney, and Bruce Reitherman is the son of the director and voice of Mowgli.

The Lost Character: Rocky the Rhino (6:35):

Much more than just a deleted scene, this brief but still in-depth featurette gives an extremely worthwhile look at one of the characters that never made it past the storyboard stage.

Deleted Songs (21:00):

Available here are seven "audio only" tracks that never made it into the film.

Disney Song Selection:

This easy-access scene selection allows for kids to quickly hop to their favorite musical number from the film.

Also included is a piece about the

Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund

, as well as a

Music Video

entitled "I Wan'na Be Like You", performed by the teenage rock band the Jonas Brothers, and a vast amount of

Sneak Peeks

. I'm ashamed to say I actually liked the music video.

DISC 2

The Bare Necessities: The Making of The Jungle Book (46:23):

A wonderfully in-depth 5-part featurette that provides every aspect of possible interest in the making of the film. Both old and new interviews have been included, ranging from such topics as the voice work, the music, and Walt Disney's overview of the production.

Disney's Kipling: Walt's Magic Touch on a Literary Classic (15:00):

This slightly shorter but still fascinating mini-documentary looks at the transformation from novel to film.

The Lure of The Jungle Book (9:25):

A retrospective featurette with the Disney animators offering up their thoughts and stories about the film.

Mowgli's Return to the Wild (5:10):

An interesting look at the director's son, Bruce Reitherman, whose voice work as Mowgli kick-started his film career.

Frank & Ollie (3:45):

A vintage interview with two of THE JUNGLE BOOK's main animators.

Baloo's Virtual Swingin' Jungle Cruise:

A 4-part virtual DVD game for kids.

DisneyPedia: Junglemania! (14:19):

A terrific featurette for kids that allows them to learn more about the animals featured in the film.

The Jungle Book Fun with Language Games:

A couple more games for kids (in this case, allowing them to identify jungle animals), this should be fun strictly for those of a very young age.

There are also six

Art Galleries

.

Miscellaneous:

Lastly, there's a handy trifold mini-guide to the DVD.

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I may not like what Disney has become (or at least, what they used to be before Pixar saved the day), but I can't deny the level of excellence they give their treatments of classic films. This "Platinum Edition" is an exceptional DVD worthy of your collections.

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A fusion of “The Crow” and Kafka, “Dark City” trades in such grave themes as remembrance, thought control, human will and the altering of fact, but is delightful mostly in the degree to which it creates and sustains a visually startling alternate universe. Although not based on a comic book, Alex Proyas’ second emphasize repeats, to an verging on alarming extent, notions and motifs from his debut outing with “The Crow,” and his aiming for grander ideas adds a veneer of pretension that proves not all that edifying. But his skill as a visually gifted director remains unquestioned, and New In accordance should rack up thoughtful coin based on thriving support from the hard-core sci-fi/fantasy audience.

This is essentially an old film noir amnesiac yarn, set in a hostile urban environment defined by late ’40s noir (”Dark City” could easily have served as the title for just about any noir ever made). But tale is shot through with a futuristic element that vastly increases the visual opportunities beyond dark shadows on slick city streets.

Very appropriately for a picture about a desperate search through a labyrinth of time, memory and sinister manipulation, it takes a while for viewers to get their bearings. What is clear is that the Strangers, lean, bald, vampirelike men who dress in wide-brimmed hats and floor-length black coats and possess the ability to transform reality to their own purposes, have come to Earth to find a cure for their accursed mortality. So advanced are they that they can, through a process known as Tuning, will the world to a complete standstill, and can change the shape, size and very essence of material objects.

What is less clear is what any of this has to do with John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a young man who, after a break with his wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), awakens in a hotel room with his memory gone and under suspicion in a series of murders. Lamenting, in classic cliched noir fashion, that “I feel like I’m living out someone else’s nightmare,” Murdoch attracts the attention of a clearly demented genius doctor, Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), as well as a curiously sympathetic inspector, Frank Bumstead (William Hurt). Separately, they help Murdoch steer clear of the Strangers, who feel that the panicked gent somehow holds the key to their salvation.

Structured by story originator Proyas and his co-scenarists Lem Dobbs (”Kafka”) and David S. Goyer (”The Crow: City of Angels”) like a detective mystery, pic nonetheless quickly comes to resemble Kafka’s “The Trial,” with its beleaguered protagonist accused of crimes he professes no knowledge of, and a monolithic group of imposing adversaries clearly bent upon reeling him in for malevolent reasons of their own.

As Murdoch and the tale twist and turn through countless dark corners and alleys, it appears that the ominous Strangers have a collective memory, and that Murdoch has been robbed of his in order to help the Strangers try to unlock the key to the human soul.

How all this is supposed to happen remains as intricate as it is obscure, but by the final third the emphasis is on big set pieces anyway, one set on the literal edge of the world and beyond, and another located in the spectacular lair of the Strangers, a “Metropolis”-like underworld where through the excruciating transformation of mental power into physical force, Murdoch and the Strangers’ chieftain (Ian Richardson) each tries to emerge via the triumph of the will.

Along the way, Murdoch tries to patch together scraps of personal memory, mainly to figure out what happened between him and his wife. Unfortunately, the structural impression is that of a plot grid more than of a deepening story, and the principal impression of the characters, including the lead, is one of thorough weirdness rather than anything truly comprehensible.

So even if Proyas and his collaborators intended to add some intellectual meat to a one-dimensional form, they haven’t been able to provide anything extra in the areas of characterization, nuance, originality or complexity. What they have done is taken a few second-hand ideas from noir and speculative fiction and mixed them in occasionally striking ways, even if, in the end, the result isn’t all that much fun.

Visually, there is a great deal going on. Once you get over the startling resemblance of the threatening, perennially nocturnal city to the setting of “The Crow,” the differences start asserting themselves. Entirely created in the new Fox Film Studios in Sydney, the eponymous metropolis rendered with great imagination by production designers George Liddle and Patrick Tatopolous has the general feel and even the specific street sign style of ’40s New York, with Liz Keogh’s costume designs generally fitting that era as well. But the cars sometimes belong to more modern times, the low ceilings and cramped rooms evoke German Expressionism, and the superhuman powers of the Strangers endow everything with futuristic possibilities.

Within the deterministic framework of the piece, performances are solid. The distinctively handsome Sewell is mainly obliged to express the desperate bewilderment and determination of a paranoid victim, and does so better than many others have done with similarly circumscribed roles. As the detective, Hurt fits with great ease into the attitude and look of the picture, while Sutherland has some fun with what can only be called the Peter Lorre role. Connelly fills the bill as the wife with whom the beleaguered hero tries to reconnect, and Richard O’Brien and Ian Richardson are the most prominent of the memorably fashioned Strangers.

Design and technology rep the film’s strongest suit, so even when the story becomes too murky, there is generally something lively going on visually to hold the interest. Trevor Jones’ score works overtime, scarcely letting up for a moment.

By no means classic Vidor: its characters – Gable as an American anchorwoman in Soviet Russia, Lamarr as the authority of his scoop stories – are simply too soothing to animate the film. Only in the last train, where Gable and Lamarr do a bunk from Russia in a tank, closely pursued by virtually the whole of the Russian army, does Vidor successfully visualise (albeit comically: the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) the tensions that the characters set in motion. A superb connect of pastime, none the less.

Thornton made his mark as writer and actor in One Concocted Move, and his directorial debut (from his own Oscar-winning script) is similarly stirring. He gives a outstanding, hugely credible show as a retarded human beings who returns to his hometown in the The sea South after spending years in a psychiatric asylum for having murdered his watch over as a child. When he befriends a babyish slave, his elan vital takes a dramatic new reorganize. Dinghy but rarely maudlin, beautifully acted, and shot through with foggy humour, this sensitive, insightful photoplay avoids the usual stereotypes to powerful more. (And comprehend the lovely Jim Jarmusch cameo.

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Instant name recognition aside, literary adaptations have a lot stacked against them from the start. Not only do they have to live up to the source material, they have to feel necessary. Sure, Kenneth Branagh's 1996

Hamlet

was an unwieldy mess, but it didn't help that Franco Zeffirelli and Mel Gibson had done a serviceable job by it in 1990. And viewers apparently didn't feel a need to embrace yet another version of

Oliver Twist

, even one from Roman Polanski. Similarly, the beloved 1995 British miniseries version of Jane Austen's

Pride And Prejudice

casts a long shadow over the newest version, directed by Joe Wright and written by Deborah Moggach?both British TV vets making their full-length theatrical debuts. But after about half a scene, it's clear this new version will cast a pretty long shadow of its own.

The film opens?sans Austen's famous first lines?on the Bennett house, portrayed as a vibrant, lively, noisy, messy place whose everyday activity shoots up to fever pitch at the news of the imminent arrival of Simon Woods, a wealthy, single neighbor. Sensing a good?or at least financially sound?match for her eldest daughter Rosamund Pike, Brenda Blethyn sets about making sure Pike doesn't escape Woods' attention. Meanwhile, Blethyn's next-to-eldest daughter Keira Knightley meets Woods' distant friend Matthew MacFadyen, and they take an instant dislike to each other. (It doesn't last.)

From there, Wright clicks through Austen's familiar impediments to true love, but he never forgets he's making a movie, not porting a book to a new medium. He fills every corner of his widescreen compositions and keeps the camera as lively as his cast, overlapping dialogue à la Robert Altman and choreographing his ballroom sequences in ways that go well beyond the steps on the dance floor. Most importantly, the director, script, and cast (rounded out by Judi Dench and well-placed imports Donald Sutherland and Jena Malone) all recognize that Austen is about much more than pretty costumes and knowing looks. The film captures the financial stakes behind Blethyn's compulsive matchmaking, the lonely fates of unattached and "ruined" women, the games the upper classes play to keep the middle class in its place, and the persistent, understated sexual urgency beneath the polite surface of everyday life.

All the elements get dissolved in the slow-boiling romance between Knightley (striking just the right note of pre-feminist pride) and MacFadyen, whose strong, slightly puzzled-looking features register each lesson as he learns it. And he learns quickly. Wright wastes no time in squeezing the plot into his just-over-two hours running time, but the film never feels rushed, particularly when so much of it is spent watching and waiting, as the characters come to understand the world they live in?and that even with its hypocrisies, love still means more than anyone can put into words.

AT ITS BASE, "The Beautiful Country" has a powerful story to tell about the dire conditions faced by humans traveling illegally into America’s promised land. Its best aspects are the depiction of this world of scoundrels and desperate souls.

But there’s also a sickly sweet confectionary aspect to the film, with actors such as Tim Roth and Nick Nolte thrown into the cast to appeal to Western audiences and a romantic angle that features all too schematic a match (between a Vietnamese man and a Chinese hooker). At times, the movie — directed by Norwegian Hans Petter Moland — feels like a manufactured Asian "Chocolat," which drives the label "art house movie" even further into mainstream banality.

Binh (Damien Nguyen, left) befriends Ling (Bai Ling), with young Chau Thi Kim Xuan as Mai in “The Beautiful Country.” (By Roland Neveu — Sony Pictures Classics) More in Movies ‘Beautiful Country’: National Showtimes   Movie Trailers   Summer Movie Guide   New Movie Releases   More Movies in Arts & Living

The child of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier, Binh (played by newcomer Damien Nguyen) has lived his life as a "less than dust," the popular term for this reviled hybrid. As a result, Binh, who lives in Vietnam, keeps his eyes in almost perpetual aversion, for he carries the face of the enemy. He yearns to go to the United States to find out why his father left his mother.

It is a movie that moves from one long narrative chapter to another: After finding his estranged mother in Saigon, Binh learns his father lives in Houston. At great risk, in 1990, he escapes his country in an open boat. But circumstances lead him to a Malaysian refugee camp. Living in deplorable conditions, he becomes friendly with Ling (Bai Ling), who plies her trade as a prostitute to earn enough to bribe her way out of the camp.

In the hokiest of cliches, they escape when a convenient riot takes place. Binh and Ling suffer a miserable passage on a crowded ship to New York under the thumb of Captain Oh (Roth) and a human-smuggling businessman (Temuera Morrison). And Binh has a long spell in New York working as a virtual slave in Chinatown before he makes that inevitable trip to Texas. These episodes have their strong elements, but they also bog the story down, despite screenwriter Sabina Murray’s desperate attempts to shorten everything with ellipses. By the time Binh gets to Houston, it feels as if the movie (clocking in at almost 2 1/2 hours) spent too much time getting him there.

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (R, 137 minutes) — Contains obscenity, sexual situations and some violence. Mostly in English; some scenes in Vietnamese with subtitles. At Cinema Arts Theatre and Cineplex Odeon Shirlington.

Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia is best known to discriminating television fans not only for his work on the splendid HBO series “Six Feet Under,” but for a movie that was shown on Showtime, “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her.” An omnibus of five loosely interlocking stories about several women facing turning points in their lives, “Things You Can Tell” featured a cast of stellar actresses and announced a promising talent in Garcia.

“Nine Lives,” Garcia’s new film, delivers on that promise, an achievement all the more admirable for the fact that he has returned to the same format and themes of that earlier work. “Nine Lives” finds nine women in extremis , all facing various versions of mortality. In tight, sharply written scenes — each a continuous take lasting between 10 and 14 minutes — they come to terms with death, loss, connection and continuity. The moments that Garcia has chosen to observe are unforgettable, the women — played by an ensemble of actresses at the top of their respective games — indelible.

Most memorable are Robin Wright Penn as a onetime party girl who runs into a former lover at an L.A. supermarket; Kathy Baker, whose feisty character is moments away from a mastectomy; Sissy Spacek, as a wife and mother on the verge of an affair; and a supernaturally radiant Glenn Close, whose vignette, the movie’s final scene, delivers a quietly devastating blow. The beauty of “Nine Lives” is that its occasionally overlapping stories feel entirely unforced; Garcia’s is a filmmaking style of rare lyricism, compassion and discretion.

This is a reverent handling of the Alexandre Bisson work together, chosen by M-G-M as a vehicle to display the dramatic and emotional talent of Gladys George. It’s a inactive, comforting sniffle.

Script follows with devotion the familiar developments, and the dialog is as modern as the action permits. Sam Wood’s direction is conventionally sound and the production is of the best.

George’s performance is effective, and her characterization of the tipsy, defeated and maudlin old woman is faithful and moving. Warren William plays the hard-hearted husband who refuses to forgive his wife’s indiscretions; Reginald Owen is the friend, Douvel; Henry Daniell is the villain, Lerocle.

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John Beal has the prize spot of Raymond, youthful public defender of his mother, whose identity is unknown to him. His address to the court is recited with conviction and emotion.

Jan

17

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16

RATING: (POLITE APPLAUSE) Doc…

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