311 - Jungle Cruise

Disney has already turned one of its theme park rides into a box office colossus - is it time for another? They seem to think so, bringing us Jungle Cruise, an adaptation of one of the attractions from Disneyland's grand opening in 1955, the Jungle River Cruise, starring The Rock, who we still refuse to call Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Jack Whitehall, as explorers searching for the Tree of Life. The film gives the ride more than a nod and a wink, The Rock's character operating a cruise along the Brazilian Amazon, complete with the real ride's cheesy dad jokes - and there's effort made to reckon with the attraction's history of racist representation of indigenous peoples. How successfully it does so is up for debate, the film indulging in its own cultural imperialism - despite being set in Brazil, there isn't a word of Portuguese spoken; and no matter the purity of their intention, the characters are still in Brazil to take something that doesn't belong to them. We also discuss the film's feminism and sexual politics, as embodied by Blunt's and Whitehall's characters, the setting in 1916 and the use of England rather than the USA as a point of origin for its story, and consider who the film is for - Mike sees its relationship with the likes of Jumanji, Indiana Jones, Hook and The Mummy, and is sure that he'd have loved this as a kid as much as he did those. It fails to really explore the poetic potential of some of its ideas, and one too many action scenes feel like they need explosions to keep things exciting, but on the whole, Jungle Cruise is a likeable bit of popcorn fodder with three terrific performances, and chemistry to match. Recorded on 6th August 2021.

Om Podcasten

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo. "I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.