The “flyboard”, a gas-powered jetpack/hoverboard, was invented by French water-craft rider Franky Zapata, founder of Zapata racing. It can stay in the air for 10 minutes. Probably not cost effective as we speak, and wouldn’t a platoon of flying soldiers be easy to pick off by snipers?

On 7.3 I assessed the Baz Luhrmann / Elvis Presley casting situation, as reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming. Four contenders had recently screen-tested for the Presley role in Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between the iconic rock star and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and it was my view that three of them — Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller and Harry Styles — weren’t right.

My judgment was that 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seemed “the most interesting possibility among the four.” Today Fleming reported that Luhrmann had agreed and gone with Butler.

I wish I had a quarter for every time I’ve written “they’d never make this film today,” but there’s no present-tense director or producer who would or could make anything like Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) and The Four Musketeers (’74), which I regard as a single entity. Nobody.

That ace-level cast (Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch) plus that jaunty, dryly satirical Richard Lester flavoring mixed with David Watkin‘s period-appropriate cinematography, Michel Legrand‘s score plus the superb sets and costumes and half-realistic, half-slapstick fight choreography.

Actor/Comedian Greg Proops on The Four Musketeers, posted by FilmStruck on 9.5.17:

I was speaking last Friday to a critic acquaintance about The Lion King, and she mentioned something that struck me. She said that there was something dead and soulless in the eyes of certain beasts. I hadn’t been sufficiently interested to catch last week’s all-media screening, but the dead-eye thing woke me. “Really?” I said. “Now I want to see it!”

This view has been widely shared, particularly in the cases of Simba and Mufasa. Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf said that the Lion King characters are “akin to stuffed trophies mounted on the wall…they’re lifelike, yes, but somehow not alive.” Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson observed that “the ‘animals’ can’t act, and they sure as heck can’t emote.”

A few weeks ago Martin Scorsese expressed concern about the digital “dead eye” syndrome in the matter of The Irishman, which uses extensive CG to de-age Robert De Niro and other significant characters.

Scorsese’s view were shared in a 5.29 Guardian piece by Caspar Salmon: “[Scorsese] said that there was a problem with keeping his actors’ eyes expressive, adding: ‘Does [the technique] change the eyes at all? If that’s the case, what was in the eyes that I liked? Was it intensity? Was it gravitas? Was it threat? And then how do we get it back? I don’t know.”

Where is the HE community on this aspect? I still haven’t seen it.