Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

get a load of that aspect ratio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fg5iWmQjwk&

I didn’t know that The Grand Budapest Hotel would be shot in three aspect ratios:

Seitz: Is there any sort of film format that you’ve fantasized about shooting a movie in that you haven’t shot in yet?

Anderson: Yes, there is, 1.33:1

Seitz: The Academy Ratio

Anderson: The Academy ratio! Exactly.

Seitz: The shape of old movies. More squarish. Gus van Sant shot a movie in that ratio, the school-shooting drama Elephant

Anderson: I didn’t realize that was the case

Seitz: It was striking to see it in a theater, because the image was so tall. I was so hooked on movies being wide that I’d forgotten that they could be just as impressive if they were tall.

Anderson: My plan is to shoot my next movie at 1.33:1.1 That’s why I want to shoot it that way: the tallness. We considered shooting Tenenbaums that way, because the house is vertical.

Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection will be available on October 8th.

“A few months after this conversation, the director shot his eighth feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, in three different aspect ratios: 1.33, 1.85, and 2.35:1. The movie jumps through three time periods; the different aspect ratios tell viewers where they are in the timeline.”

wes, please stop

He should stick to puppets.

who has been better in the US in the last 15 years, besides Spielberg and maybe Todd Haynes? yr precious Michael Mann?

i'd actually like to see mann and anderson exchange scripts, tbh

I'd be fine with him doing a musical and become even more the American Jacques Demy.

Moonrise Kingdom was pretty good so I'm actually going to tentatively anticipate this one.

I hope I'm not giving it too much credit just from the trailer, but this looks great.

looks like a real departure!

wes anderson, never stop

this def looks like the kind of movie i would have loved to exist as a kid. i hope its good.

although the comedy stylings (from the trailer at least) kind of have a "bedroom farce" feel to them

they made a movie about brodie

nothing like a good bedroom farce, ask my ex. *rimshot*

People LOVE "departures" from established filmmakers. "Scorsese, Kundun, lol"

i would LOVE to see wes anderson's kundun

well, that seems very... wes andersonesque (which is all good in my book) !
actually, I could enjoy a movie from him every couple of years, a bit like W. Allen.
each release never being fantastic but always with something to like.

i'm p tired of the standard west anderson stock characters / tropes

these moments all feel very 'wes'

from just the trailer:
-guy gets accused, responds by running away
-guy outfitted w/ brass knuckles w/ skull and crossbones on them
-set of instructions that can only be read w/ a magnifying glass
-commander type who barks out a detailed set of instructions for when/where things need to be done (most recent iteration being ed norton's troop leader from moonrise kingdom)

i am happy that he's cast an AA lead though

Woody p much churns something out annually, and the result doesn't look like it took 6 weeks. xp

- adrian brody bops someone on nose

I'm torn between finding such stylistic consistency kind of intriguing in its own right and wishing to see an artist "confront new problems." like, why not bring a wes andersony style to a very non-wes andersony kind of story or setting? maybe that's a stupid question.

anyway, i suspect this sort of thing might look better when his career is over. it's not quite the same, but i can imagine someone thinking "ugh another Hitchcock thriller?"

Yeah when there are these artists that do variations on the same thing it's a matter of accumulation. Like after 5-10 years of the same thing it's a rut but after 15-20 years it's consistency.

yeah! like a repeating joke that goes from funny to not funny to funny again.

looks great

I'm torn between finding such stylistic consistency kind of intriguing in its own right and wishing to see an artist "confront new problems." like, why not bring a wes andersony style to a very non-wes andersony kind of story or setting? maybe that's a stupid question.

that's what he used to do, to much better results imho

i can see that. i do think filmmakers (and maybe narrative arists in general?) are kinda held up to some standard of virtuosity in lots of different styles and kinds of stories. how is this different from telling piscasso or whoever "ok nice work, but now let's see you do a fruit bowl." or is the issue more precisely that anderson's "style" is just a collection of tics and rote gestures?

Fox + Moonrise a real deepening over the likes of Darjeeling, Aquatic, most of Tenenbaums.

Did you ppl not notice all the sad adults in Moonrise, or are you just too young to take them seriously?

Darjeeling is underrated

but yeah the last two were leaps forward imho

Since I think The Life Aquatic is the best thing he's ever done, I can't agree with that. Plenty of sad adults in TLA. I think this new one looks like fun!

Agreed, and Moonrise def looked like the SOS from the trailer.

(Agreed with Shakey/Morbs, I mean.)

All of his movies have sad adults. But remind me what "sad adults" are a measure of again?

someone for me Morbs to relate to

I just thought the most acutely drawn sad adults were in the last one, and Murray in Rushmore.

fuck the sad adults imo. he should take all of these hotels, secret maps, and precocious kids and make a full on "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" style kids adventure.

The trailer makes it look like he's aiming for the 1930s motor-mouth screwball comedy style and he's not quite up to the scratch.

What do you fans of the most recent few see as improving in Anderson's work?

I liked Fox, but everything else from Life Aquatic on left me cold. Bottle Rocket and Tenenbaums are what I like most. Maybe that's the conventional take on Anderson?

To me, it feels like he's intentionally going for this blank, stage-y, mannered, school pageant feeling more and more - and the acting is getting more stilted and unnatural. I guess all that was always there - and could even make for a good movie - but I just don't feel any emotional pull from any of it. Feels like flipping through a really great coffee table book or something - just cool unto itself but nothing more.

What am I missing? Not being troll-y at all - really interested to hear what people think he's going for and why they like it.

I'm torn between finding such stylistic consistency kind of intriguing in its own right and wishing to see an artist "confront new problems." like, why not bring a wes andersony style to a very non-wes andersony kind of story or setting? maybe that's a stupid question.

anyway, i suspect this sort of thing might look better when his career is over. it's not quite the same, but i can imagine someone thinking "ugh another Hitchcock thriller?"

― ryan, Thursday, October 17, 2013 11:25 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

been thinking about this today and i think, probably, it has to do with the conventions of the genre anderson works in. that is, humor is still the counterweight against whatever new setting he's mining in his sets, but jokes don't get funny when you retell them, or just have slightly different characters mouth the same punchlines. as opposed to a thriller, or horror, where we all recognize the stylistic conventions but we still get crawly fingers up our necks every time.

i enjoyed fantastic mr. fox and moonrise kingdom, his tropes really suit themselves to the free-roaming, unbounded nature of the animation sandbox.* if he had had the ability to create a 'hotbox' type scene in any of his live action movies there would probably be one going all the way to bottle rocket. moonrise kingdom was also good in that those same tropes were a natural fit for pre-teens in that awkward phase between everything-in-the-world-actually-being-a-game and puberty.

the life aquatic and darjeeling limited, otoh, are truly dire and should be summarily erased from the face of this earth.

*the irony being that the sandbox also allows anderson to be at his most staged and least dependent on the nagging confines of the real world and real actors. brio hits it right when he says that all anderson films can be traced back to the stage play at the end of rushmore. well, except for bottle rocket maybe, which is why that remains his best film.

I really don't see a whole lot of the framing and cutting in Moonrise being 'school pageantlike' aside from a few obvious sequences (unless yer talkin' about, like, the lateral pan when Norton walks thru the camp at the beginning -- what schools do that?). A lot of the scenes involving the two kids on the run together are crafted with a lot more sophistication than that.

Normally I'd groan and barf at the same time, but his last one and "Mr. Fox" were possibly his best, so benefit of the doubt in place.

Did I imagine ed norton cutout shadow puppets used as stunt doubles for storm scene?

they made a movie about brodie

― velko, Thursday, October 17, 2013 10:11 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

finally

I wasn't referring to framing, cutting, or lateral pans as school pageant-like, Morbs - as you say, what school plays did any of that?

Referring more to an intentional stiltedness - sets that announce themselves as sets, costumes as costumes (the lobby boy with a hat that says Lobby Boy on it), and it feels like to me - acting and direction that seems like it is meant to evoke a kid's idea of acting (or maybe dialogue written to highlight that effect)

have you ever seen children act? they don't do flat line readings.

well that kind of "intentional stiltedness" can be found in some or many films by lots of filmmakers, Kubrick, Fassbender, Demy, Jerry Lewis (who had a mammoth cutaway set in The Ladies Man that WA has somewhat aped a couple times, esp the Aquatic sub).

Yeah, sometimes I'm really into that tableau framing, certainly when it lends the material some weight.

Morbius otm re: precedents for this kind of acting/line readings in film. Its a technique that serves to sort of give equal weight to everything going on in the film; rather than priveleging the actors and the capital-A Acting they are doing as the central thing attracting the viewer's attention, it brings all the other elements (the design, the costuming, the editing, the sdtk, etc. - all the highly stylized elements WA clearly spends a lot of time on) into sharper relief.

it can produce a heightened air of unreality in the proceedings but idk "realism" is overrated

wes, please stop

― 乒乓, Thursday, October 17, 2013 10:33 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so far four people in my fb timeline have shared this piece of garbage, guy has sucked so hard since he lost his writing partner owen wilson

? owen's been in all his movies except maybe MK (can't remember)

maybe owen just doesn't want to write anymore

WRITING PARTNER

amusing myself w/ picturing Anderson's opening sequence in the Korova Milkbar

OW hasn't had a writing credit since Tenenbaums, and icey is high per usual

you would have to be high to enjoy any of his post tenebaums movies folks

don't mind if I do!

iirc tho i saw the life aquatic high and it was still dumb as hell

many xposts

morbs - totally agree that other people have done "intentionally stilted" and unreal, to me it feels like it's working against him at this point. But generally, I like the look and style of Anderson movies - not a huge sticking point for me.

I don't think the acting in the new Anderson movies is child-like because it's flat exactly - more because it just doesn't feel believable, sounds like people reading lines. lines written to sound like written lines.

anyway - I was asking what you guys like, didn't really want to argue about everything I don't like

and here we are going over the auteur's entire oeuvre for the tenth time 5 months before the film comes out. bye til March.

all these stiled manchildern, now w added stiled scripts

Can we talk about how Anderson has specially tailored ill-fitting suits, a la Gene Kelly's shirts?

a la pee wee herman

Surprised Reubens hasn't made it to a Anderson movie, tbh.

guy has sucked so hard since he lost his writing partner owen wilson

― lag∞n, Thursday, October 17, 2013 4:27 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

hah for some reason i had htought darjeeling limited was co-wrote by o.w. - but no, it's fucking jason schwartzmann

i was going to say, maybe noah baumbach is a salve but he has a credit in the life aquatic

apparently this guy now has two writing credits http://i.imgur.com/AApvrJ6.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/2zXwfIx.jpg

That guy looks like he has murder credits.

His eyebrows look like they got pissed off at each other and started to fight.

Perpetually smelling a bad odor.

the scent of CQ

There's something about Anderson that reminds me of Joseph Cornell but I can't put my finger on it

don't put wes in a box

i think there's been a steady downward trend after life aquatic, which i like a great deal, but i still have a lot of time for wes anderson. i think the issue is that he stopped being able to tell convincing stories about sympathetic yet insufferable Romantics whose dreams somehow still survive their brutal conflicts with reality.

swap "convincing" in my previous post for "compelling"

i think there's been a steady downward trend after life aquatic, which i like a great deal, but i still have a lot of time for wes anderson. i think the issue is that he stopped being able to tell convincing stories about sympathetic yet insufferable Romantics whose dreams somehow still survive their brutal conflicts with reality.

Fantastic Mr. Fox does all this

he stopped being able to tell stories, yes

the newer ones just seem more emotionally dead than something like rushmore. there is a lot of desperation in a character like max fischer.

yeah the characters too

I liked moonrise kingdom, the end was dumb tho

like in royal tenenbros the characters are so charismatic and theyve got heart, then putting them in this weird fetishistic dollhouse environment just animates the whole thing

I'm mixed on everything between Rushmore and Fox, but I found Moonrise Kingdom very moving with a lot of character "depth" going on, with both the adults and kids. but i only came to this conclusion after becoming sort of obsessed with the blu-ray and watching it about 5 times. it's a masterpiece, imo.

moonrise kingdom is the only one i havet seen, i watched the first few mins and just couldnt do it

fmf was ok for a kids movie but p hokey, dont get why everyone was so pumped abt it, maybe cause we all want this dude to be good again so bad

it was the cloon

cloon is a cool dude

Love the coloring work in the trailer, and yeah naturalism a la Vie d'Adele can got to bed, i love this kind of artificiality.

go to bed. ha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSEzGDzZ1dY

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2013/11/wes-anderson-thank-you-letter-to-james-l-brooks

fmf was ok for a kids movie but p hokey

wtf @ this fresh madness

http://youtu.be/yWnKRJ4c8xY

i thought that would automatically
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWnKRJ4c8xY

anyway, i suspect this sort of thing might look better when his career is over. it's not quite the same, but i can imagine someone thinking "ugh another Hitchcock thriller?"

otm, except comparing WA to Hitchcock in any way is probably going to ruffle a few feathers.

New one looks cool, last one was fun and great. Yeah i think in 15 or 20 years when there is this body of work it will be easier to look through it and compare stuff and see some kind of development.

http://rymimg.com/lk/f/l/0a44ad03d95fd78484008ca4a665af66/3258002.jpg

Btw i can't find any clips online but I have this record and it is pretty much ground zero for WA-style chamber pop 60s harpsichord instrumental stuff like Mothersbaugh turns out.

initial Berlin reviews

The two primary strengths... are, first, Fiennes’s utterly delightful performance as the non-flamboyantly gay concierge who busies himself with the hotel, Romantic poetry and elderly, rich, insecure and blond women, and second, the set design (and yes, costumes and makeup as well, but primarily the sets). Gustave is a surprisingly complex man, and I say “surprisingly” because everyone else around him, even, to an extent, young Zero, is essentially a cartoon, albeit in the best way, comic sketches straight, as they used to say, out of Central Casting.

As for the sets, the hotel, of course, is the star (though we do visit a bakery, a prison, a museum), both in its heyday, i.e., the period of the equally star-studded Grand Hotel (1932), and in the '80s... Given the enduring nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing monuments of Cold War-era communist architecture and design, such as Berlin’s now long-gone Palast der Republik, it’s hardly surprising that Anderson would eventually pick up on it. He, production designer Adam Stockhausen and art director Stephan O. Gessler have done more than dabble here; the blocky fonts and sleek paneling beneath a sheen of oranges and browns brought to the fading grandeur of the hotel by the communists are just as aesthetically intriguing, albeit more subtly, as the 30s-era pink pastry mit Sahne interiors.

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-berlinale-2014-diary-1

intriguing, didnt realize any of it took place in the 80s. and as a fan of 80s soviet resort design i am now extremely interested!

who among us is not a fan of 80s soviet resort design?

They've all been purged from this board already

intriguing, didnt realize any of it took place in the 80s. and as a fan of 80s soviet resort design i am now extremely interested!

― socki (s1ocki), Thursday, February 6, 2014 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i believe it takes place in three time frames, with a different aspect ratio (!) for each.

even though i am a wes anderson fan (which seems to invite the worst kind of ridicule among certain other cinephiles, but I can handle it) i feel like i am approaching this film w/ caution -- just because his more narratively ambitious movies are the ones i like the least (tenenbaums, life aquatic).

Still, head-level, wide-lensed medium shots abound and the rare camera movements, if they’re not tracking a straight line, are set at 90 degrees.

i hate to admit to this, but i went through fantastic mr fox w/ a fine-toothed comb and determined that there is exactly _one_ shot that does not involve a camera angle, camera movement, or cut that is not in an increment of 90 degrees. it's rather rigorous, actually.

the reviews seem ... good?

i'm hearing that spoken in owen wilson's voice

am, I would never do that, wd you like to take my about to be vacated place in the unpaid film crix firmament?

ha, this is why i'm an "academic" (barf) and not a critic.

goddammit where the fuck was my guidance counselor

also i did that for a lecture, so I'm not completely nuts. maybe.

btw did anyone else get that matt zoller seitz (sp?) book on/with wes anderson? if so, what did you think?

I didn't bcz 1)pricey and 2) the text is apparently an interview where Wes says variations of "yep" and "i dunno"

yeah the interview is a lot like that. there are a few pages where MZS rambles on and on about his theory about this film or that film and Anderson's replies with, "yeah, that sounds right." if I was the interviewer I would have thought twice before printing that sort of thing, because whatever the actual context it makes MZS come off like a windbag.

the book is a thing to behold, though -- beautifully, elaborately designed with some lovely photos. MZS's brief critical discussions of the films aren't worth much to me, but he does observe some interesting things.

of course, me being me I had hoped he would ask WA more about the stylistic stuff--how he discovered certain techniques, why he's drawn to them, etc. but I imagine he'd be even less ready to gab about such things as he would about the films' "themes" and "meaning."

it wasn't pricey, I preordered it for like $25. it turned out to be a bargain considering the size/density of the thing.

$25 = two cups of coffee in NYC IIRC

I only drink the stuff at home and work.

Liked start of David Ehrlich's review:

"the film with which Wes Anderson finally answers his critics, and the message could not be clearer or more immaculately embossed in Futura on an insert shot of the most delicate stationary: 'Go fuck yourselves.'”

Surely the praise chorus dwarfs the naysayers at this point.

Anyway, especially after that last one, I'm out. Seen everything to date (save Darjeeling) and that's more than enough Wes Anderson for one lifetime.

Surely the praise chorus dwarfs the naysayers at this point.

probably true, but the naysayers have really dug in their heels.

they always do

knowing nothing about this film besides the trailer and having not seen a WA film since TLA i'm excited for it as a very obvious "fuck it i'm not even gonna pretend anymore" career pivot, 100% support

Excited for this. Moonrise Kingdom reignited my love for WA.

Yeah, will be seeing this ASAP.

dude on balloon juice said recently these days he feels more and more people can be divided between those whose who punch down and those who punch up.

seems to me the best Anderson are the ones about guys who punch up: Rushmore, Moonrise, to a lesser extent, Fox. I don't remember Bottle Rocket too well but maybe it classifies too in this overly reductive theory. The rest are down-punchers

I enjoyed MZS's book - it's a beautiful thing - but Anderson's not the most forthcoming interviewee. He's good on anecdotes and production details but tight-lipped on themes. It's like a guide to what not to ask. No long rambling theories to be met with a polite "Hmmm."

apparently the movie ends with a dedication to stefan zweig? this is getting too much for me.

lol
vs
jarmusch & jean eustache
von trier & tarkovsky

pouring this post out for montaigne

anonanon do you have a link to that balloon juice piece?

Bottle Rocket is surely about punching up

i hate to admit to this, but i went through fantastic mr fox w/ a fine-toothed comb and determined that there is exactly _one_ shot that does not involve a camera angle, camera movement, or cut that is not in an increment of 90 degrees. it's rather rigorous, actually.

― espring (amateurist), Friday, February 7, 2014 9:06 AM (14 hours ago) Bookmark

Well now you gotta tell us what the black sheep shot was

ogmor, it was actually just a pretty brief blog post:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/02/05/hollywood-nights/

ta!

Well now you gotta tell us what the black sheep shot was

― 龜, Friday, February 7, 2014 9:13 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if i told you, i'd have to kill you.

the shot in the trailer of harvey keitel w/russian prison tats made me realize that i'm glad a 'respectable' director is giving him work again

two in a row!

won Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin (essentially, 2nd place)

so I saw this yesterday.
it's very good. much darker and more violent than his previous films (due to the story itself and History). the 30s Mitteleuropa context is perfect for his attention to decoration, clothes, settings. and there are no big pop song/slow motion moments !
many aspects reminded me of "Mr fox" which seems to have been an important step in his way of working (as he said himself that learning to work with a storyboard was key).
the characters really seem like puppets in a framework that is much bigger and tougher than them : History and time going on.

Fiennes makes it for me. Despite the usual array of wacky supporting characters played by very famous people I thought it kind of dragged when he's not on screen

and imagining Johnny Depp in the same role is revolting

why johnny depp (and indeed it would have been terrible) ?
yeah fiennes is really good. a new member in the WA world !

I'm torn between finding such stylistic consistency kind of intriguing in its own right and wishing to see an artist "confront new problems." like, why not bring a wes andersony style to a very non-wes andersony kind of story or setting? maybe that's a stupid question.

anyway, i suspect this sort of thing might look better when his career is over. it's not quite the same, but i can imagine someone thinking "ugh another Hitchcock thriller?"

― ryan, Thursday, October 17, 2013 3:25 PM (4 months ag

NPR reporter sorta asked him about this in radio feature this morning, and he insisted all his movies were very different (pointing out varying geographical locations). Reporter moved on and didn't do a follow-up

Darjeeling is prob the only one of this guy's films I genuinely enjoyed.

"Darjeeling" is great. so is "Mr fox". actually I like all his films, more or less. "life aquatic" being the one I like the least. and there are still plenty of moments I love in it !

My wife saw the trailer for this with me and said it reminded her of "Fawlty Towers." I suppose I was impressed by her reference, especially when she corrected herself and said "Farty Towels."

Sunday NY Times feature:

The actors were offered access to a library that included (Stefan) Zweig’s work and films by directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian and Frank Borzage. They also had the option of watching an animatic (a rough film of storyboard images edited together) Mr. Anderson had made of the entire movie, as he envisioned it, with him voicing all the characters.

“I thought: ‘This guy doesn’t even need actors. The film is already made,’ ” Mr. Dafoe said.

Mr. Dafoe, who first worked with Mr. Anderson on his 2004 film “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” recalled the production of that movie as more haphazard.

“I found that he was making the world as we were shooting it,” Mr. Dafoe said. “It wasn’t clear what my character was or was going to do. I was on the set pretty much all the time, and he would fold me into things or invent things.”

On “Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Dafoe said, he was glad to have the animatic and other references to ground himself in Mr. Anderson’s domain. But Mr. Fiennes said he preferred not to study Mr. Anderson’s designs too closely. “They were helpful because you thought, ‘O.K., he has his plan,’ ” Mr. Fiennes said. “But you don’t want to act the storyboard. You want to be alive in the present moment.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/movies/wes-anderson-evokes-nostalgia-in-the-grand-budapest-hotel.html?_r=0

Borzage and Mamoulian A+

and more, on the design of the hotel miniature

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/movies/the-miniature-model-behind-the-grand-budapest-hotel.html

Yet even as Mr. Anderson has matured, the thread that connects all of his movies is the desire to create “stuff that he wants to experience,” Mr. Schwartzman said.

Back when they were shooting a memorable go-cart scene in “Rushmore,” Mr. Schwartzman recalled, “he asked one of the other kids to pull over, and he kind of commandeered his go-cart. And he’s like, ‘Let’s go!’ And we took off into the suburbs of Houston, just smiling and hooting.”

“That,” Mr. Schwartzman said, “is still there in every movie.”

I like this. A lot of people overstate his meticulous diorama-builder side but Matt Zoller Seitz's book has a lot about how adventurous he is. Writing the Darjeeling Ltd on the road with Schwartzman and Coppola sounded like a blast - possibly more fun than the movie itself. He's a strange mix of micromanaging and spontaneity.

well that seems like 2 qualities you might like to have as a filmmaker. (eg, for all his mega-planning, Malcolm McDowell improvised "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick got on the phone to buy the rights)

yeah the cliche is that you have to prepared a lot so that you are ready for inspired accidents! I think I'm paraphrasing Bresson there, actually, another very meticulous, controlling filmmaker who was nonetheless a great believer in the serendipitous.

increasingly I'm trying to avoid Wes Anderson interviews, he rarely says anything revealing and when he does I still feel like it's either obvious or I've heard it many times before. I don't know if he just doesn't like to open up or there isn't quite as much there there as I'd like to believe.

the MZS book is worth it for the design and images, but the interview is only fitfully interesting and honestly MZS's own short essays are pretty boilerplate and uninteresting.

leading dissenters so far: David Thomson, Zacharek, Dana Stevens

It's that good, huh?

Mr. Anderson has matured

yep, that's three critics i pretty much never trust

Thomson on older films is still worthwhile. Zacharek's get-with-it impatience is worthwhile when critical incense smothers a picture.

xp Yeah you're right Morbs. I overuse the word "strange". It's not that strange but I feel like his fussy side gets way more attention and the Zissou anecdotes made him sound way more macho than he comes across.

increasingly I'm trying to avoid Wes Anderson interviews, he rarely says anything revealing and when he does I still feel like it's either obvious or I've heard it many times before. I don't know if he just doesn't like to open up or there isn't quite as much there there as I'd like to believe.

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 4, 2014 2:06 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's a style over substance director, that's for sure, which isn't a bad thing. what he is best at, and what he seems most interested in, is conjuring a distinctive mood, at least recently. his first two films had richer characters than the ones from the past decade or so, and i i include moonrise kingdom in that. dignan's doomed naivety is much darker and more real than anything else in his oeuvre.

on the film 2014 programme this week, they wheeled out the old 'the style is the substance!' cliche, which sounds great and everything, but ive never found it to actually mean anything w/r/t wes anderson. but apparently this film has 'heart'. im sure it does, and i liked moonrise kingdom more than i expected to, though even there, the 'heart' of it was also ruined by wes anderson's usual stylistic tics and archness. i think critics looking for heart in his films (or political content even, which this one apparently has) might be looking in the wrong place, and also says something about critics unable to take his work as it really is. expecting real emotional resonance in a world where everyones acting is so affected and mannered seems an odd expectation. though i should really see it before i comment. i dont know why wes anderson doesnt just design doll houses for a living or directs music videos at least.

wes anderson is a good example of why set/production designers shouldnt become directors.

ok, that's way too harsh.

expecting real emotional resonance in a world where everyones acting is so affected and mannered seems an odd expectation.

Some of the most emotionally devastating movies I've seen are built on foundations of mannered acting (and I'd include The Life Aquatic on that list). Emotional dissonance is a powerful tool.

Reading reviews of Wes A films barely feels worthwhile now. The ones that rate him rate this, the ones that are annoyed by him and cry style over substance are annoyed by this, even though this is doing something very different in terms of tone and setting.

Best bit in the Seitz book is when he remembers Owen Wilson reading an early draft of the script to Tenenbaums and saying it feels like one of Max's plays. I've heard that critique a hundred times now (see also: dollhouses, dioramas, trainsets), and what it misses is how much is contained within them. However stylised the movies may be, the characters and ideas that they're representing seem deeply felt (forgive the Michikoism) to me.

his first two films had richer characters than the ones from the past decade or so, and i i include moonrise kingdom in that. dignan's doomed naivety is much darker and more real than anything else in his oeuvre.

― james franco, Thursday, March 6, 2014 7:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ive always felt this... i liked moonrise kingdom okay but i cant tell you anything about the characters, they're just wisps... whereas dignan, max fisher, bill murray in rushmore i think about all the time

i maintain owen wilson's writing was the secret ingredient

i liked moonrise kingdom okay but i cant tell you anything about the characters

when you're my age you'll understand Willis, McDormand, Murray

(i hope)

Maybe, maybe not. I already understand Tilda Swinton in every movie she's ever been in, though.

emotional undercurrents of MK took several viewings to really unfold for me--and that restraint seems to give way a real depth of unforced compassion that is really moving imo.

i understood those characters but they didnt leap out for me

i maintain owen wilson's writing was the secret ingredient

― AIDS (Hungry4Ass), Friday, March 7, 2014 10:30 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and ive always said this

he needs a little goofy insouciance to balance his formal dollhouse-ism. together i think it was a wonderful pairing.

did they have a falling out or did OW just stop around the time of his...whatever that was

it's hilarious how we're still having the same arguments about this dweeb 12 years later

nah, their last script together was Tenenbaums in 2001 and Wilson's personal problems happened long after that. I figured he just became too big of a movie star and didn't have time to be working that closely with Wes.

Obviously it's difficult to prove who was responsible for what in the early films but it does feel like something was lost. Baumbach has talent but Roman Coppola I dunno

they both bring the wrong thing to the table imo

Wilson hasn't written anything apart from his Wes collabs though so it's hard to work out exactly what he brought whereas Baumbach's style is obvious.

yeah, where it's not well documented, you can't tell shit from screenwriting credits.

glenn kenny, four stars: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-grand-budapest-hotel-2014

ive always felt this... i liked moonrise kingdom okay but i cant tell you anything about the characters, they're just wisps... whereas dignan, max fisher, bill murray in rushmore i think about all the time

as a wes anderson fan i admit this is true! i don't really expect a lot of emotional resonance from his films. i'm a bit bewildered by the critics (esp. the ones I respect, like matt zoller seitz and kent jones) that talk a lot about the depths of his films. I guess I'm just not sensitive to them. and yet, I consider myself an unabashed fan. I guess the formal dimension of his films is enough for me. and I also think they are funny, funny is very important.

actually, i should make one point: I think that formal patterns, or style if you want me to be less pretentious about it, can be the source of emotions. i'm not, like, deeply emotionally involved in the travails of max fisher (though there are some very affecting moments, it's true), but something about the way the thing builds to a release stylistically and motivically (sp?) carries an emotional charge for me. gratitude, or awe, or something like that.

i guess i'm correcting myself insofar as when most people talk about a movie's ability to bring forth emotion they aren't usually talking about the full range of emotions.

all this puts me in a weird position of actually agreeing w/ many of anderson's critics (to a point) and disagreeing with his most vocal and sophisticated boosters--even though, as I said, I'm a big fan.

I mean, I take a lot of pleasure in design, whether it's a nice dress or jacket or an extraordinary painting or just arranging stuff in my apartment in a pleasing way. those things are emotional for me, even if they aren't about love or loss etc. in any strict sense.

i mean, yeah, anderson's never going to make something like sansho dayu (who is?!), where all the formal mastery is put in the service of an absolutely harrowing and devastating and cathartic story. or even meet me in st. louis, for the same reasons (a film which shows a kind of mastery of color/mise-en-scene that anderson can't really touch). but not all films have to be the same, or aim for the same things, or aim as high.

sorry, i'll stop now.

I think you are all seriously underestimating the value of Wes Anderson films. They are great for asking people out on dates. Lighthearted but not frivolous, romantic, and an excellent bellwether for music preferences.

i mean, yeah, anderson's never going to make something like sansho dayu (who is?!), where all the formal mastery is put in the service of an absolutely harrowing and devastating and cathartic story. or even meet me in st. louis, for the same reasons (a film which shows a kind of mastery of color/mise-en-scene that anderson can't really touch). but not all films have to be the same, or aim for the same things, or aim as high.

― espring (amateurist), Friday, March 7, 2014 2:32 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think a lot of this criticism comes, though, from the fact that some people, myself included, do think he hit a really interesting balance, something very affecting and personal, early in his career, and we've been waiting for that same feeling ever since

I think you are all seriously underestimating the value of Wes Anderson films. They are great for asking people out on dates. Lighthearted but not frivolous, romantic, and an excellent bellwether for music preferences.

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Friday, March 7, 2014 1:39 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

unless your date is a wes andeson h8er, then you fucked up, son.

They are great for asking people out on dates. Lighthearted but not frivolous, romantic, and an excellent bellwether for music preferences.

Fellini movies are also great for these same reasons, imo.

if someone asked me to a fellini movie i'd decline :(

unless maybe it was i vitteloni

Fellini's films don't leave much time for drinks and fucks afterwards.

Yeah, but during…

That's like fucking after two helpings of lasagna.

i would engineer Nights of Cabiria as your date movie

i think most of the famous ones would work ok, except 8 1/2

ok I have actually gone on a date to see Nights of Cabiria at the Castro

loooong time ago, before I was married

in case any of you are keeping track

How about La Strada?

La Dolce Vita is nice too.

i think some of you wd draw the line at the final one w/ R Benigni

I like Rushmore fine, and its the only one of his films to even sort of understand class instead of drool on it, but everything that I seemed cramped and bored about that film has gotten worse and worse. Moonrise kingdom was so formally constipated and numb it actually sort of me. The plot seems to be advanced by the display of beautiful objects rather than any sort of affective convolution. static and thin. It was exactly the sort of boring film that can only think of tilda swinton as a succession of still images and so she seems to exacerbate the flatness.

The trailer for this was about as much as I could bear I think

Hi plax

I saw a report on another forum that this film is already having issues re: proper projection at screenings.

oh man i can imagine

as a total aspect ratio hardass even that sentence gives me a bit of a panic attack

i wonder, do they have anamorphic files for DCP? does this one switch between anamorphic and non? b/c to assure that the aspect ratios wouldn't be botched, they could have just encoded in one ratio and make the black bars on either side part of the file.

it'd be weird if the different parts of the film were encoded differently, i.e. they actually required the projector/DCP setup to switch between anamorphic and non, 1.33 and 2.25, etc. during projection.

I think that formal patterns, or style if you want me to be less pretentious about it, can be the source of emotions

Sirk, Naruse, Ozu, Hou, Minnelli -- they excelled in formal patterns, as ruthless at times as Anderson. My problem with his work, Rushmore and Fantastic Mr. Fox excepted, is I don't like the particular emotion he stylizes, if that makes sense.

and what ids that singular emotion, do you think?

s1ocki, out of respect to you, honeybunch, i am not changing my dn to 'aspect ratio hardass'

switching between anamorphic and non would be impossible with 35mm platter setups, since you either put an anamorphic lens on the projector or not. (if you had a two-projector set up, which multiplexes never did, you could alternate reels anamorphic/non. i know one experimental film that does this, or rather, it is a dual projection, and one of the projectors is projecting an anamorphic reel and the other in academy ratio. but that's a crazy and awesome exception.)

i'm just talking to myself but whatever

anything that requires the teenager sweeping the floors to periodically change something during projection is doomed to fail.

did he shoot this digitally?

i wonder if there are any 35mm prints of this being struck and if so where they are playing.

imdb sez:

Negative Format 35 mm (Kodak Vision3 200T 5213)

he seems like one of those guys who will shoot on film until he can't anymore. but of course i assume all post production was digital.

Ozu maybe but sirk and especially Minnelli have none of the his fussy stiffness and almost contemptuous disinterest in their characters.

Ozu maybe but sirk and especially Minnelli have none of the his fussy stiffness and almost contemptuous disinterest in their characters.

― plax (ico), Friday, March 7, 2014 2:45 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jeez, have a cuppa tea or something. herbal tea.

you'd think he was the coen brothers or something

fussy stiffness /= formal patterns

An obsession w/a particular moral pattern congeals into fussy stiffness thou.

fussy stiffness /= formal patterns

Oh no I know. But these films are fussy and stiff.

moral = formal but lol it still works

I don't get the 'disinterest' accusation, he was clearly interested in at least 5 primary characters in MK, and I assume he was even in the films that didn't work as well for me.

you'd think he was quintin tarantella or something

re: 35mm prints--I wonder how many, if any, are being struck? Just for ref, here in Houston (where we get the film next week), I'm pretty sure the only remaining theater doing genuine film projection is our MFA (which is old school two-projector).

it's not disinterest for me either. he has a weird kind of respect for his characters, for their reservedness and for the slight embarrassing disjunctions between their self-presentations and reality. I like that he seems to allow them the dignity of holding up appearances, so to speak. feels compassionate, as I said above, and not about exposing or dilineating their inner life.

yeah something like 92% of american screens are now digital-only. and the ones that aren't are most likely to be small mom-and-pop places that--chances are--wouldn't show this film anyhow. but there are a handful of high-profile theaters in major metro areas that are still capable of projecting 35mm. for that reason--and sometimes at a filmmakers' insistence--a few 35mm prints are often, if no longer typically, struck.

I should also add that plenty of overseas markets have still not transitioned fully, or even very extensively, to DCP/digital projection. one example is Greece, who because of their financial situation didn't have the capital to do a major transition during the Great Recession. so that becomes another reason studios still strike prints (though my guess is that such prints would be struck in Europe, or wherever the country may be).

so p.s. if you want to see a movie on 35mm just visit greece!

XPOST

fwiw we have a cinematheque here that shows 90% of films (admittedly over half of which are revivals) in 35mm. but our film festival shows fewer and fewer films on 35m--this year it's maybe just 5%. that's not because we don't have 35mm projection--I think we have four 35mm venues on/near campus (!)--but because distributors just don't bother to strike prints for festival screenings anymore. so it's all a mix of DCP, Blu-Ray, digiBeta...

the jacques demy series going around is all DCP, which is depressing. but I guess that's part for the course.

honestly it makes it easier to make the decision not to attend a screening. esp. when i know those films will be coming out on Blu-Ray later this year.

sorry, thread derail. back to GBH.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LTP0NOojjXM/S4MEuwS0oPI/AAAAAAAAA6M/HqxMxMc1a2w/s320/gbh080223nottma6ob6.jpg

a friend of mine's film was struck on 35mm to capitalize on the smaller theaters that still hadnt converted (in 2011 i think), it was actually a super good strategy as it got a lot of play

They are great for asking people out on dates. Lighthearted but not frivolous, romantic, and an excellent bellwether for music preferences.

this is true, but i wish he didnt strive to turn the frivolousness of his movies into a kind of bathos (eg - the death in darjeeling or what happens to richie in tenenbaums) and just kept them at a light, fluffy level rather than try to engage with something serious. i know some people think his archness/irony-on-my-sleeve is a cover for genuine sincerity and compassion but i think its more like he is naturally arch and twee and ___ (you know all the adjectives for him by now) and always feels he has to throw in something 'serious' or more meaningful when im not sure that really fits his style. the 'richie' incident in tenenbaums just seemed jarring iirc.

*pathos

i thought the stuff in darjeeling was a little bit powerful

I can tell you he's generally better at it than Jerry Lewis was with the bits of bathos he would throw into, say, The Nutty Professor or The Errand Boy.

how is jerry these days?

also, we shall not mention the day the clown cried, right? that appears to have been a colossal failure to attempt a mix of humor and bathos in a rather inhospitable context.

I haven't read the script. Apparently it is in no way intended as a comedy.

but thanks for the automatic mention

honestly it makes it easier to make the decision not to attend a screening. esp. when i know those films will be coming out on Blu-Ray later this year.

yeah even though the image you get with 4k projection is amazing, psychologically i cant shake the feeling that it's just an upscaled version of the home theater experience. so it feels less urgent to pay to see stuff in the theater these days. whereas the projected film experience is/was one that you don't get anywhere else but a theater, usually, so if i get a chance to see something cool projected on film, i jump at it

For aspect ratio hardasses (taken from another forum):

The DCP is framed at 1.85 with pillarboxing and letterboxing for the 1.37 and 2.35 ratios, respectively.

yeah even though the image you get with 4k projection is amazing, psychologically i cant shake the feeling that it's just an upscaled version of the home theater experience

i have the same feeling, or the feeling when im watching a digital projection, that its basically just an advanced version of blu ray (and sometimes in rep cinemas, im sure it has been an actual blu ray disc!), but there is still something to be said for watching a film in a cinema on a big screen, not a TV, and without home interruptions. its still better, if not as special. also, sometimes when cinemas are showing an old film on DCP (or blu ray or whatever), you can tell the transfer hasnt been done all that well, or the blu ray doesnt blow up that well, which can be a bummer.

but there is still something to be said for watching a film in a cinema on a big screen, not a TV, and without home interruptions.

watching in a darkened theater forces me to pay attention to the film... i get distracted a lot more easily at home. also there's the audience factor

yes, heathens

easier to take notes while vacuuming, right, Morbsy?

vacuuming? is that a verb?

watching in a darkened theater forces me to pay attention to the film... i get distracted a lot more easily at home. also there's the audience factor

― AIDS (Hungry4Ass), Saturday, March 8, 2014 9:47 AM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is why i always prefer the theater no matter what kind of projection there is. it locks me into the film. i've found watching with headphones is a similar experience.

yeah even though the image you get with 4k projection

90% of the time when you go out to see a movie these days you are seeing 2K, not 4K

ahh you cant tell the difference if you sit far enough back anyway~

whats your source on that btw

variety

the 4k projections are usually the ones the big theater chains advertise as "ultimate digital Xperience" or something and often charge more for.

though it's all in constant flux, so my info might be months out of date. but my understanding is that most DCPs still ship in 2K.

4k projections are indeed rare and are always advertised as such

the idea that the industry is pushing 4k tvs now is just preposterous to me

don't worry, nobody will buy them

if you go see something in IMAX in a real big theater there's a good chance you are seeing something in their proprietary system which approximates 4k by using two 2k projectors

of course, there are still a few IMAX 70mm setups around, but they are disappearing very fast

welcome to the new age welcome to the new age

Btw i can't find any clips online but I have this record and it is pretty much ground zero for WA-style chamber pop 60s harpsichord instrumental stuff like Mothersbaugh turns out.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, November 14, 2013 1:59 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ysi?
https://catalog.swem.wm.edu/Record/542918

the 4k projections are usually the ones the big theater chains advertise as "ultimate digital Xperience" or something and often charge more for.

― espring (amateurist), Sunday, March 9, 2014 3:41 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

the regal i go to always has this SONY 4K thing before their trailers but maybe that doesnt mean anything. i remember reading a couple years back that AMC was working on getting 4k projectors in like 90% of its theaters. but that doesnt mean they're showing 4k dcps, and im not sure i could tell the difference anyway. i will say that a lot of the time when i sit in the first few rows at the multiplex im often puzzled why the picture looks kinda crappy to me... if they're showing something just barely better than blu ray then that would explain it

Hmm, Goldblum's in this.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiXhsf3CQAE_qUW.jpg

I came out of this feeling as if I'd just stuffed myself with truffles and marzipan - albeit the finest truffles and marzipan. Hit and miss broad, slapstick-y humour and crazy capering over pathos, but lightheaded fun.

truffles do NOT make me lightheaded

re 2k/4k, I know that all the latest projectors are 2k/4k compatible (which is the standard) and thus CAPABLE of projecting in 4k (or "upconverting" to 4K from a 2K DCP, just like your Blu-Ray player upconverts from a DVD). the thing I don't know is whether many movies are actually being shipped in 4k.

I'd like to say I'd notice the difference but who knows. it depends on the source material and what happened in digital post. plenty of films (most of 'em) these days _shoot_ in 2K or less, so there would be no gain by showing them in anything higher (unlike blowing 35mm up to 70mm; that's the difference b/t analogue and digital). to keep this relevant to the thread, I believe FANTASTIC MR FOX was shot in something like 2k.

pretty soon we'll also just be watching our 80-inch 4k TVs at home anyway, while a contraption pumps nutrients into our veins and we adjust the 3d glasses screwed into our temples.

I believe FANTASTIC MR FOX was shot in something like 2k.

that would be weird as it is stop-motion and probably shot with still cameras capable of going much, much higher than 2k

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/a6/3d/b7/a63db7978ec18c6fdd1608205f0de25b.jpg

xp

pretty soon we'll also just be watching our 80-inch 4k TVs at home anyway, while a contraption pumps nutrients into our veins and we adjust the 3d glasses screwed into our temples.

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 4:44 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

I believe FANTASTIC MR FOX was shot in something like 2k.

that would be weird as it is stop-motion and probably shot with still cameras capable of going much, much higher than 2k

― socki (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 3:47 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know it was shot w/ still cameras but i thought they restricted it to 2k (or sometime equivalent to that) for file management reasons--i.e. storage space. anyway, it looks beautiful.

Were they storing the files on a x486 or something?

4k image files are fucking huge, imagine at least 12 of them per second of film.

http://www.aja.com/assets/support/files/1177/en/aja_2k_whitepaper.pdf

Apparently 12MB of data per frame (??!!)

I should've guessed WA wouldn't exactly shoot in JPG.

http://www.aja.com/assets/support/files/1177/en/aja_2k_whitepaper.pdf

Apparently 12MB of data per frame (??!!)

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 4:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait, that's 2k, not 4k... 4k would be something like 12.2 MB squared--or about 148.84 MB.

so that's...

- 1,786.08 MB (approx 1.786 GB) per second
- 107,164.8 MB (approx--what?--107 GB per minute)
- 9,323,337 MB for an 87-minute film (9.3 TB)

not counting all the frames that don't make it into a finished film. I imagine there are many times as many of those as there are frames that made it to the finished film. let's charitably assume a 5:1 ratio. (might be more like 100:1 for all I know.)

so that would be...
- 55,940,022 MB or nearly 56 TB. that's a lot of storage space in 2007 or whenever that film was made/completed.

maybe my math is completely wrong.

also I'm assuming they are animating on "2"s, meaning 12 frames per second. but actually some of t he film was on the "1s", meaning the full 24 frames per second. you can do the math on that.

also 12 MB seems low even for 2K, I've had 2k-resolution TIFF files that were way more than that.

i think david fincher said that one of the big problems for films now is file management. major motion pictures now have big "file management" teams subdivided into all kinds of categories. i'm sure that's even true of grand budapest hotel, although at least it was _shot_ in 35mm which likely means the ratio of shot to used footage is probably much lower than on fincher's digital films where it's out of control.

this is also a major problem for archivists btw. they have to triage: do you "archive" the finished digital file (which can be numerous TBs) and that's it, or do you also preserve all the ouutakes, un-CGI'd files, etc. etc.? if so, how do you make a rationale for what to preserve and why? since no archive, indeed no institution, can maintain unlimited digital storage for an indefinite time. (since they are likely to want multiple backups, and files would have to be "transitioned" to new storage/new formats every few years.)

sorry if this is boring to people. i find this stuff crazy interesting.

Kind of blows my mind whenever that kind of thing goes on, that a company would just throw out master original files and stuff after funding a movie for hundreds of millions of dollars.

For instance, they could do an HD remaster of Final Fantasy VII, which was the most expensive game ever developed at the time, if they had simply kept the original models and stuff. For some reason all the background art was saved in native NTSC resolution and nothing else. So you have years and years of work put into this thing that can only display at 320 x 240 until the end of time.

your math is wrong! i shoot RAW images on my DSLR. the image is much bigger than 4K. they are 20mb.

(4k is approx 8 megapixels, my camera shoots 18)

Yeah, but does your camera shoot sound?

how do I shot sound

your math is wrong! i shoot RAW images on my DSLR. the image is much bigger than 4K. they are 20mb.

― socki (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 6:30 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(4k is approx 8 megapixels, my camera shoots 18)

― socki (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 6:31 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not my math, it's the link so-and-so posted.

but yeah someone should look into this. one way to ask this would be: how big is a 2k DCP?

or I could just look again at my "making of fantastic mr fox" book when I get home. there might be something on the studio daily website too.

Well, that link was kinda pulled at random. Seems like there may be different industry standards (and this was 2006) and that was for 10-bit and it doesn't sound like there is an alpha channel, so yeah it probably be closer to 20MB and that's just counting the initial shots. A final render (with effects, color timing, and compositing) would easily double that. At any rate yeah it's probably super expensive to store all of that, and digital storage isn't exactly long-lasting at this point. You are much better off making a film print imo.

This thread really became a big sister to the Pono one, eh? On that tip...

http://www.indiewire.com/article/movie-theaters-receive-special-instructions-on-how-to-project-the-grand-budapest-hotel

Heard an interview with him on NPR, and man, what a weird accent he has, especially for a Texas guy. It's as if he was raised in Texas but modeled his speech after Woody Allen, then spent several years overseas unlearning English. Just impossible to place.

He's worked very hard to erase his Texas signifiers.

Kind of wonder if that's part of why he only did the one film w/Bob Musgrave (Bob with the car from Bottle Rocket). Now that's an accent!

Just impossible to place.

when it comes to "placelessness," motherfucker's all about it as far as his films are concerned. assiduously avoids local signifiers to the point where he shot one scene of tennenbaums with kumar pallana standing strategically to block the statue of liberty.

He's worked very hard to erase his Texas signifiers.

― Interior. Ibiza Bar (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, March 13, 2014 10:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think his parents are native to Texas, and he grew up in a kind of upper-crusty bubble. he just has a generic american UMC suburban accent to me.

i always liked the texas stuff in his early movies. i know this makes me sound like a broken record, but it was different, and it balanced the dollhouse aspects in an interesting way. i guess it also added to a "me and my buddies" aspect, him casting friends and stuff, that i thought was really cool.

he just has a generic american UMC suburban accent to me.

Man, no way. There is nothing generic about the way he speaks these days.

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/289423863/wes-anderson-we-made-a-pastiche-of-eastern-europes-greatest-hits

he just has a generic american UMC UHB suburban accent to me.

Fixed

i always liked the texas stuff in his early movies

yeah said this several times before but one of the best things about Rushmore is that it just nails central Houston in the fall/winter.

that is, nails it around the edges of max's fantasy life.

I'm already kind of sick of this movie, and I it doesn't even open here for a few weeks. i hope it brings the funny.

Man, no way. There is nothing generic about the way he speaks these days.

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/289423863/wes-anderson-we-made-a-pastiche-of-eastern-europes-greatest-hits

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, March 14, 2014 8:29 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, he's always sounded like that to me.

Didn't say he's changed, just never noticed how not Texas, and actually sort of neurotic NYC, his accent was.

yeah, he hangs out with Noah Baumbach a lot

i'm listening to the interview and, wow, you all are really projecting a lot of stuff onto this dude's voice. especially compared to terry gross, who pretty much has the weirdest, most mannered way of speaking of anyone.

he sounds like a fruit but otherwise theres nothing weird about him

i thought this was good btw

a ~star~ fruit

I loved this -- impressive to look at, fun to watch, full of almost Zucker-Bros-worthy gags, everyone in the film looks like they had a good time making it. Maybe my favorite Wes Anderson since Rushmore. Not destined to be remembered as a "great" film, but very clever and totally enjoyable.

I thought the comedy was very hit and miss, and the only character with any substance at all was Ralph Fiennes'. But yeah, it was good fun and it looked fabulous.

i fell asleep twenty minutes in.

i thought this was wes anderson's worst movie by far. both visually and in terms of the characters, there were no glimpses of realism to temper the cloying whimsicality. the wes anderson-izing the SS as the "ZZ" was in bad taste, although i did lol at the fact that they called their cigarettes "zigarettes". in general i feel something like betrayal wrt movie.

he sounds like a fruit but otherwise theres nothing weird about him

h4a, clean it up

I thought the comedy was very hit and miss

yes. saw this in a large, full, Glasgow cinema where the audience were almost WILLING the film to be funnier than it actually is - huge stretches of it, particularly the prison and 'chase' material, fell dismally flat. i don't know if owen wilson is the answer, but anderson def needs a co-screenwriter can punch up/polish his gags.

i agree that the ZZ stuff is p lame, and seems to be part of a final third 'grab for seriousness' that the film really can't support - tarantino handles this kind of stylistic clash between cineaste fantasy, farcical comedy and genuine terror so much more deftly/inventively in Inglorious Bastards, imho

it also took the film a LONG while to recover from the horrible framing story at the start.

i agree w/all of that ward, though it was still funnier than his previous 4 movies & it went down smooth enough for me compared to those. ralph fiennes death is weird because i mean, it would evoke zero sadness if we saw him being dragged off the train and shot in the head yet the movie cuts around it like it'd be unbearable for us to watch. when really its more like if Dos Equis killed off the most interesting man in the world. guess its a semi-funny metagag that in the train scenes fiennes is playing schindler now instead of goth

wanderson's limits as a writer of dialogue showed really strong in this, especially when f murray abraham & fiennes are saying things. i wonder if the glibness of anderson's voice is an acknowledgement of those limits, like he knows he has to work around the crudeness. he gets some good effects out of it, i laffed solidly at a lot of adrien brody's lines. owen wilson showing up was great and reminded me that for all the good actors that are in these things hes one of the few who can be naturally funny performing in the Wes Anderson Style

"where the audience were almost WILLING the film to be funnier than it actually is"

This exactly, every hipster doofus in the theatre laughed at the most mundane things throughout. Oh my god look a cut scene to bob balaban...this is the funniest thing ive ever seen..

Give me a break. dull, boring and his schtick is getting old.

Why wld you go to a movie just to boo it

same reason they read Armond White

i went hoping to like it as i did most of his other movies.

i did laugh when ed norton first appeared. bob balaban can suck dicks in hell though

Why wld you go to a movie just to boo it

― sonic thedgehod (albvivertine), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:48 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same reason they read Armond White

― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 10:20 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...

every hipster doofus in the theatre laughed at the most mundane things throughout.

this has happened every time I've seen a movie of his in the theater since Rushmore. it's quite bizarre, like a pavlovian thing.

Maybe his movies give people delight on a level unavailable to you?

say that in deadpan and I guarantee it would bring the house down.

bob balaban can suck dicks in hell though

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51a%2BxVJdaZL._SX342_.jpg

no maybe they are just such Wes Anderson fanboys that they would laugh at anything he does.

Why would you go to a movie just to get blown?

Maybe his blowjobs give people delight on a level unavailable to you?

can be the best option if it's Django Unchained

s1ocki, you don't have to be theatrically apoplectic abt posts where i'm not criticizing you, sweetz.

...

trying to imagine the level of drunkenness/dementia I'd have to demonstrate to let Bob Balaban blow me.

"apoplectic"

Pocket gay Balaban c. '69 could get it.

Joe Buck did it for cash

(Soto, remember his other johns incl Barnard Hughes)

Sylvia Miles dressed as Bob Balaban wouldn't be much better

"I have the self control to make sure I don't enjoy myself too much at a 'hipster' film"

FWIW I did think Jude Law kind of sucked as the writer and that made the whole opening of the movie drag.

Bob Balaban's kinda cute!

feel like its really hard for anyone to suck or excel in these movies

yer bananas, Willis in MK was a top-3 career perf

and Murray should've won all the awards for Rushmore

Also just wanna say that this film seemed to have a lot of Zhivago references and/or resonances, and that pleased me because I am a Zhivago stan.

that'll be good cuz i had a refresher viewing of DrZ last summer (did u go at BAM Harvey then, Hurting?)

I did yeah. It was packed. Go early if you're seeing it there so you can actually sit toward the center -- the aspect ratio + their seating arrangement made the film feel a little odd from the side seats.

I didn't think it was an especially deep film or anything but I thought it was a 100% enjoyable and fun film.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/wes-anderson-and-the-old-regime/

And now on top of everything, instead of his usual indirect evocation of that older, deeper, darker, harder, unfathomable past in remembered songs and storybook allusions, as part of the nostalgia kit Anderson characters seem to carry about like fashionable messenger bags, he announces with this new film that he’ll present that lost world to us outright.

He doesn’t do it, of course. But even his semblance of doing it is horrible, like a waking nightmare.

i quite liked this piece but i disagree with the notion that all of wes anderson's movies are rotten to the core, just this one. nostalgia is obviously a big thing for wes anderson, and all of his memorable characters have been self-centered eccentrics redeemed by a quixotic nobility, or a refusal to see the world as others see it, in the gray light of reality. the past for the tenenbaums or for zissou is the unattainable and has no positive value in its own right; i don't think anderson really idealizes the past the way this critic seems to think he does. this is probably part of why his past two films, which have actually been set in these previous, fetishized decades, don't work (imho).

like really, who would want to watch a movie that was actually set in max fischer's fantasia, when men were men and all the rest? i wouldn't, but that is sort of what this film is.

what

this writer sounds like a total asshole

After viewing The Grand Budapest Hotel, I realized I had had it with Anderson’s fancy boxed chocolates. Either they’ve gotten toxically moldy over time, or they were always disgusting and I was too disgusting myself to notice it. To put it bluntly, I’ve decided I hate Wes Anderson, and that at some level, I’d like to think I’ve always hated him. I wish I could come up with a quick, clever way to sum up my hatred and be done with it, like Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who ends his furious pan of The Grand Budapest Hotel with the snappy line, “That’s Wes Anderson: He can’t see the forest for the twee.”

I thought that piece was obnoxious and dumb.

The film makes pretty obvious that the "nobler past" it purports to reflect on is imaginary -- there's even a line about it in the film -- something about the past that Ralph Fiennes pined for actually being over long before he was born (i.e. never existed, is how I took it).

i think the writer recognizes that with her invocation of jameson at the end and this notion of historical amnesia. there is this issue of the inversion of the past and the future, with the former usurping the latter as the screen on which we can project our fantasies of the good life. nostalgia isn't politically neutral; imagining utopia as something that was had and then lost is an easy way of thinking to slip into as it is deeply embedded in the judeo-christian tradition, but radical or even progresssive thinking probably needs to begin from the point that the past is something we need to wrestle with and free ourselves from.

idk. wes anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers and i don't really agree with the author of that piece, as i noted earlier, but i think she raised some important questions about how, exactly, the past functions in his films. this pervasive sense of loss inhabits every detail of his good films, which lends them a sense of depth even though they can be pretty superficial, even farcical, by most other measures. here he tries to represent the past directly and the whole thing becomes a total farce.

jacobin writer doesn't like nostalgia for pre-stalinist europe, funny

you'd think a Jacobin would like nostalgia for a pre-Napoleonic Europe though

i'd be into a wes anderson movie set during the french revolution

Rohmer sort of made a WA movie set during the Terror.

i love that movie!

I did too, especially how Rohmer directed the man playing Robespierre to act like Brian Cox playing Robespierre.

the lady and the duke is fantastic

One of the things I love about Zhivago is that it successfully captures the tension between past vs. future utopianism, conservatism vs. progressivism, collectivism vs. individualism etc. -- neither pro-tsarist nor pro-stalinist, and yet the main character's self-obsession and desire to live outside political reality is his tragic downfall.

Not much to say right now except Fiennes is brilliant, this is just behind the Rushmore/Fox/Moonrise upper tier, it hums along like a fine 1920s European watch, and you haters who prefer Tarantinhole or DiCapsese deserve what you get. Also the world needs more cat-killing jokes.

When you're right you're right Morbs.

not this time though.

there were no glimpses of realism to temper the cloying whimsicality

Treeship, v little "cloying" here.

Except Ken Loach and a couple others, fuck 'realism.'

i dunno morbs. this film was pretty goofy, whereas in the past anderson has managed to make films that were moving as well as stylish and funny.

it's not that there are too many fantasy elements in this -- i love the life aquatic, for instance, and there are claymation sea creatures in that one -- it's just that they kind of take over everything in this film until there is nothing else left. the characters exist in a world where real feelings like longing, loss, disappointment -- the usual anderson standbys -- just don't seem plausible. i mean, there are nazis here and they don't even cause a ripple in the adorable facade, which in some scenes is literally painted on a literal screen. which is part of the goal here, clearly, i just am not into it.

people thought this *dragged*?? holy shit.

this fell a little flat for me, but then i was half-dazed by a cold. however, i think there's definitely some that emotional gravitas that Treeship is missing, but it's even more understated than usual. it's in Gustav's goodbye to the hotel, or in the very brief allusion to his life before the hotel which seems to emerge only in his flashes of profanity.

i get a kick out of this, has to be said

http://nose.fr/fr/marques/the-grand-budapest-hotel/l-air-de-panache

ugh

i mean, there are nazis here and they don't even cause a ripple in the adorable facade

well I couldn't disagree more. It's compromised long before the Nazis show up.

If anything it functions partly as a critique of vintage "Mitteleurope Hollywood"

it's very possible i am missing something and i'll try to go to another screening of this during the week. anderson's early films are classics as far as i'm concerned, and whenever a new one comes out i am always hoping for these poignant moments, like the sequence of bottle rocket that kicks off with dignan saying "they'll never catch me man, because i'm fucking innocent" (maybe my favorite line in cinema). in contrast, the whole stretch from darjeeling through this one just seems cheesy.

What is Mitteleurope Hollywood? xp Going to see this on your recommendation.

Basically all the '20s/30s comedies/musicals set in mythical kingdoms (Lubitsch, Mamoulian, even the odd Bob Hope vehicle). Tho France doesn't fit geographically, it's of a piece with Lubitsch saying he preferred Paris, Hollywood to Paris, France.

Geoffrey O'Brien's Film Comment feature critique is well worth a read (not online).

do you really think anderson is "critiquing" the willful political naivete of these films instead of just reproducing it? where's the critique? i don't think he so simplistic as to believe in the golden age gustave pines for, but the past for anderson very often functions as a locus of hope, and nostalgia is championed insofar as it allows his eccentric characters to survive without being spiritually crushed by their immediate environment. i think we're supposed to take the narrator at his word, and admire gustave for his archaic, gentlemanly ways that were out of sync with the "slaughterhouse" of modernity. there didn't seem to be a deeper irony at play here with this.

"Nostalgia is championed insofar as it allows his eccentric characters to survive without being spiritually crushed by their immediate environment." This is a good defense of the movie, and it's also an excellent motivation for Anderson's candy-coated formalism and an excellent motivation for filmmaking in general; it shows a good understanding of what made 30s hollywood great. Just because we're supposed to take the narrator at his word that we should (you say) admire Gustav and his gentlemanly ways, that doesn't preclude Anderson from creating a parallax view of history and filmmaking through his film, from making an analytical/critical frame. Of course his bias is in defense of and celebration of and admiration of those films populated with sophisticated eurotrash rakes and other 30s Hollywood cosmopolitan archetypes, or even just in defense of style, but I think the appeal of Anderson for most of his audience is also mostly for his style and his larger-than-life, broadly-drawn archetypes, and not for emotional, social, or relational honesty.

Have you seen the operettas and other "mitteleuropa Hollywood" films morbs is referring to? Many of them are really quite sublime, and "real feeling" and inconvenient political realities aren't too much to sacrifice for a little sublimity, I think. I get that the appeal of some Anderson movies is that they can carry emotional weight in spite of their high twee style, but sometimes emotions are just another cinematic trick.

Fiennes is well cast (an average actor with a talent for malice), the first 40 minutes are his best live action since Rushmore until the escapes and caper begin, after which I didn't give a damn.

I didn't mean "critique" in the sense of anti anti anti; call it engaging with or probing Europe-set glamor neverlands if you like. (The dark side in Hollywood might be rep'd by Ophuls' film of Zweig's bleak romance Letter from an Unknown Woman.) The candy in that coating is pretty tart this time out, with a little strychnine. Ultimately it's about a father figure, a refugee, and sacrifice. A tragedy camouflaged as an elaborate windup toy.

(ooh prob put that on Lettrboxd)

I wasn't moved because the Gustave-Zero relationship is a pallid rehash of Max-Blume.

That's awfully reductive.

There are some general similarities, plenty of differences. Blume is not a master of anything the way Gustave is, and G and Zero are never mortal enemies.

I would argue Zero is the complete opposite of Max in almost every conceivable way.

The distancing devices actually created a meaningful synthesis between Anderson's preoccupations and Zweig's melancholy. The trouble for me was in the escape/caper sections; it distracted from their relationship and turned the movie into Spot The Actor (Harvey Keitel in tats! Owen Wilson as a German named Chuck!).

With this film and The Wind Rises, are we seeing a revival of early 20th century German-language literature or something? I look forward to PTA attempting Joseph Roth.

sorry, I missed what the German connection is in TWR (aside from, you know)...

The cameo names didn't really bother me. That's entertainment. (tho it's strange Lea Seydoux is getting billed in the full-page ads; she's onscreen for maybe a half minute)

Thomas Mann (the protagonist meets Hans Castorp in the sanitarium ho-ho).

Kudos to the production design too: The Grand Budapest in '68 looked like photos I've seen of similar pre-Iron Curtain structures in desuetude.

fun drinking game: bring a flask to the theater with you and take a pull every time you hear a fellow moviegoer say "every single shot is set up so well" or "his style is so unique" or "i can't believe that was harvey keitel!" on the way out

The woman saying to her grim unsmiling husband, "It was an arty film; they do things differently" sent me across the street for a gin and tonic.

such a snob aren't you alfie boy

heavens! hoi polloi having opinions!

I wish!

Gin and tonic? That called for an Alaska.

Morbs OTM

Criticisms of Anderson often feel like cinematic rockism: Where's the realism? Where are the deep emotions? Surface v substance. Fun v depth. Dollhouse/chocolate box metaphors mandatory.

Morbs, which 30s movies should I check out to help me appreciate GBH's relation to cinematic history?

All of them.

Criticisms of Anderson often feel like cinematic rockism: Where's the realism? Where are the deep emotions? Surface v substance. Fun v depth. Dollhouse/chocolate box metaphors mandatory.

oh I agree but this film doesn't sustain the charm of its first 40 minutes

i wish he would do a spy movie or a heist movie or hard sci fi or something

― ⚓ (gr8080), Monday, March 12, 2012 2:29 AM (2 years ago)

i guess i need to see this again but about 3/4 of the way through this i was like "oh this is his adventure movie, nevermind"

lol Jacobin Mag hard to take those grad students with shiny chips on their shoulders seriously

i like wes anderson pretty well as you folks likely know, but i think if you're trying to redeem one of his films by saying it's a "critique" you're barking up the wrong tree. that seems really willful to me.

i think i'll see the raid 2 before i see GBH. two kinds of formalism, my allegiance is increasingly w/ the former.

though i know it's a false dichotomy

Also the world needs more cat-killing jokes.

feel better about skipping this now

I enjoyed the overall lack of gravitas, and I don't think the presence of Nazi-like figures automatically requires gravitas -- what about Indiana Jones?

Dr. Jones is accorded more reverence than Churchill in some quarters these days.

God, the way some people clock their mortality in new wrinkles or grey hairs, I do in accidental Morbsisms.

morbidity is the soul of wit

this might be his best since bottle rocket/rushmore i think. fiennes is totally perfect because he does the whole arch thing so well, but can do it with some warmth, its never totally sneery, which is just the kind of actor WA needs i think. this might be the tightest plotting WA has ever done too i think, or at least the least indulgent. i think he might be figuring out how to still be true to his voice without getting too carried away - there seemed to be less in-jokiness, which was nice and made me very grateful. hopefully by his next film, he will figure out how to write characters, not just poses (but i still greatly dislike his sense of humour and the whole 'arent i so smart' tone of everything so maybe hes just not for me - its not that i expect 'depth', theres just something hollow and self-congratulatory/smug about WA, even though i adore how his movies look).

4:3 is the all time greatest aspect ratio though - i wish more films used it. it doesnt allow the eyes to wonder.

it's not ENTIRELY or even MOSTLY a critique, but i think a bit of that is there.

first script he wrote himself

theres just something hollow and self-congratulatory/smug about WA

i can certainly see how his films might come off as rather complacent in some respects--i think he just about always walks right up to the line of condescending to his characters and their fragile self-constructed worlds...however, that's precisely why his OTT formalism is so necessary: it's self-implicating. any other stylistic approach would be smug.

just something hollow and self-congratulatory/smug about WA

but enough about Woody Allen...

it's not ENTIRELY or even MOSTLY a critique, but i think a bit of that is there.

― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Monday, March 24, 2014 5:08 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, I'll have to see it I guess. but similar claims made for other of anderson's films tend to ring hollow

(and I'm a fan)

"critique" is too loaded a term for he's doing, perhaps. it definitely implies a "realism" to be set in opposition to the constructed fantasies--something he seems to rather pointedly avoid doing, especially in the last few films.

in fact maybe that's the most interesting thing about his movies. the cracks in the facade are never really obvious intrusions of "the real" (of either historical or emotional sorts) but still within the logic of the constructed fantasy, the way things tend not to hold together even in their own terms.

something like a lack of internal consistency.

"Critique" is any dialogue between source and interpreter. This synthesis of Zweig and Andersonalia is itself a critique of Zweig, thirties Shangri-La-type fantasias, caper films, etc.

I kind of want to see this buy that image of the purple bellhops in the elevator that is bright blood red just makes me think too much of Kubrick and the bathroom in the Shining. I sort of would rather rewatch a bunch of Kubrick films instead.

except the mediocre Shining.

first script he wrote himself

Well this Hugo Guinness person gets a co-story credit.

but enough about Woody Allen...

shouldn't you be off championing Rocky and Patton?

dude, you're as boring as fuck

thank you

bye again, "academic"

i can certainly see how his films might come off as rather complacent in some respects--i think he just about always walks right up to the line of condescending to his characters and their fragile self-constructed worlds...however, that's precisely why his OTT formalism is so necessary: it's self-implicating. any other stylistic approach would be smug.

― ryan, Monday, March 24, 2014 6:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is interesting

Self-implicating is key. I don't think he condescends at all because he sees himself in Max or Gustave. He likes to show how his self-reinventing characters (I can't remember if it's in the movie but I get the impression Gustave wasn't born with that accent or ease among the rich) are both heroic and sometimes self-defeating. I wish he'd done The Great Gatsby because it's perfect for him: the allure of beauty and new identities to keep pain at bay, and the fragility of those strategies. You don't see Gustave's world shattered but you see the aftermath.

Because he won't ever offer interviewers a psychological reading of his work, it's fun teasing one out. There are so many clues as to how he thinks and why he makes the movies he does but you have to assemble them yourself from slivers of autobiography. For example, he's said that the kids' baggage in Moonrise Kingdom was inspired by the way that as a kid he would cling to certain items as "talismans". He's unusually interested in exploring the psychological impulse that drives film directors' world-building and in the way people use art and artefacts to navigate the world.

This is definitely getting at why I love Anderson's films.

you have to assemble them yourself from slivers of autobiography.

I'm not really focused on this, with hardly any filmmakers or artists. Don't most kids have talismanic objects in their lives?

I can't remember that far back. Nothing's coming to mind.

i was pretty into my pacifier

My point isn't that it's unusual but that Anderson specifically named things from his own childhood that inspired the way the kids behaved in Moonrise. It's a minor example but I mentioned it wrt condescension vs self-implication and whether he's just archly pushing figurines around or exploring patterns of behaviour that are important to him. Moonrise is based on a romance he wanted to have when he was that age.

His characters don't really seem any more superficial or contrived than pretty much any character in any movie on a random day at the multiplex.

Average Hollywood movies suck though. They're worse than average television shows nowadays.

whoa

Someone should start a thread on that.

i'll take yr word for it, i don't watch either

fascinating

lock board

I'm not just going to sit around and allow average Hollywood movies to be traduced in this manner. It's a dream factory that brings joy to countless millions, Treeship.

not countless, they count them all the time.

but enough about Woody Allen...

shouldn't you be off championing Rocky and Patton?

― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Monday, March 24, 2014 11:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my comment was just a bad pun on their common initials, WA, and they both have reputations for being self-indulgent filmmakers. but you used it as yet another occasion to toss a literal-minded and witless barb. i have no idea why "academic" is in quote marks in your response, what that's supposed to mean, or why i should care. but you're incorrigible. goodbye indeed.

btw i should be less dismissive of films, both ones i've seen and ones i haven't, here and elsewhere. for my lapses I apologize to everybody. seriously. it's an easy habit to indulge and i need to work harder at avoiding it. god bless.

ok, sorry -- i let my assumptions carry me away now & then.

im not at all fussed whether moonrise was autobiographical or not, my problem with WA is that his films are just plain shallow. it would be okay if the sheer vivacity or joi de vivre/charm/panache etc of them was really high (why has WA not made a musical? i cant think of a better director to make one), but its not, because it gets polluted by his inability to not be smug/knowing/smirking - i find it too distancing (i keep thinking of him as being a posh tarantino, both want you to see what theyre doing, except QT wants everyone to love it and be in on the joke, WA invites you to be in on the joke and condescend those who dont get it). i seriously LOVE looking at his movies but more or less hate everything else about them. and he really should stop the mammoth-all-star-lineup approach to casting now, as it just got silly in this new one, as if he forgot how many surplus actors he had at his disposal until the final reel). he doesnt have to be mr. depth of the human soul, but he clearly cares about how people dress and walk and how their environments appear more than anything else. i dont see the point in people trying to convince themselves this is not the case so they can like his movies better.

how people dress and walk and how their environments appear = the depth of the human soul

his (mis)use of all-star casts has reached Woody Allen levels of noxiousness.

what, exactly, is smug and knowing? idgi

really? when is the last time Dafoe or Goldblum had parts this good?

when was the last time Dafoe had a part this ephemeral? Could've been any Dial-a-Thug.

WA invites you to be in on the joke and condescend those who dont get it

I think this is a huge reach, and if anything I think you have Anderson and Tarantino switched in the comparison.

^^^^^^^^

i mostly disagree. tarantino's films feel very generous to me, he's nothing if not an audience pleaser (I mean this in the best possible way) and his films are mostly very emotional albeit not in the conventional ways. Anderson still seems tied, in a lot of ways, to the Indie distancing devices and, sometimes, unreadability. even though he's very very popular right now, I feel like tarantino is definitely more of a "mass" filmmaker.

i'm a big fan of both btw.

No, this movie doesn't condescend to its audience.

To answer your question, Morbs: Spider-Man or the one in which he played Nosferatu.

xpost - not when they all walk and talk in such an overwhelmingly mannered way! most of his characters seem to be afflicted with the same mannerisms, diction, similar vocal inflections, etc (and yes i know QT gets this criticism too, so maybe thats another parallel). odd how such a twee director is so polarising.

goldblum and dafoe were both really enjoyable, yes. but the feeling i often get watching WA is that yes, the casts are all having tons of fun ('hes so great with actors! no wonder they keep returning and working for scale!' etc), but its like youre meant to buy into the idea of all these famous actors having a ball, and im sure they are, its just never *quite* as much fun when youre watching on the other side of the screen (for me at least).

i mean obv not all of taratino's films function in the same way all the time. but his recent films (well, the last two) feel like very mass-audience, emotionally generous things to me.

even though django is simultaneously a riff on a sub-subgenre that about 0.1% of its audience is closely familiar w/.

yes if anything the recent Tarantino films pander to audience sensibilities, particularly when it comes to vigilantism.

i would use a different word than pander but yeah

mattresslessness

I like your sn.

QT vs WA is an interesting topic. maybe throw PTA in there too.

hard to decide who has the better ironic fast-zoom...

what do you mean by "ironic" in this case?

QT vs WA is an interesting topic. maybe throw PTA in there too.

― ryan, Tuesday, March 25, 2014 6:03 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let's toss in JT, SM, and QAZ

PTA has had the opposite trajectory to WA in terms of the quality of his films. He keeps getting better.

I sort of hate Magnolia and I count the Master as one of the best films I've ever seen.

i'm with you there, although magnolia is one of those films i "admire" to a degree even while I don't enjoy it. I think There Will Be Blood is a bad movie but a bad movie made by a really skilled filmmaker.

otm

Rushmore is on one of the HBOs right now. still so good. better than anything QT or PTA ever did imo.

Alfred, Dafoe is basically doing nosferatu again here, and he's so sepulchral he may have lain in the tomb since Last Temptation. Hardly a stock thug! Also, Fiennes "an average actor," wow.

I don't get comparing someone as precise as Anderson to a warped 50-year-old adolescent who makes 4-hour hommages to 90-minute drive-in grinders from his childhood.

(btw Alfred, Spider-Man and Shadow of the Vampire are 12 and 14 years old, so my point stands.)

maybe it doesn't really hold up, but I think it's an interesting comparison because they both seem make movies about or set in a kind of extended adolescence. QT is pretty precise! (just less interesting to me.)

what do you mean by "ironic" in this case?

i should say 'funny' rather than ironic, but yeah, i compare WA's fast zooms to those QT does in django (im especially thinking of the shot where the camera zooms into dicaprio's face). both use fast zooms quite self consciously for jokey effect.

i dont see the point in people trying to convince themselves this is not the case so they can like his movies better.

There's no pretence required. Anderson's not my cousin. I don't have to like his movies.

tarantino is a REMARKABLY precise director by any standard. until the last film, i guess.

both use fast zooms quite self consciously for jokey effect.

yeah I'd say they have the quality of citations. similar thing to when Anderson switches to rough hand-held camerawork for the "Serpico" adaptation in Rushmore--the camera style is itself a kind of punchline, since he briefly adopts New Hollywood '70s-style "realism." I also think that //some// of Anderson's zoom and long-lens shots (the more meandering ones; esp. in Darjeeling Ltd, which I think is pretty underrated) have the effect of kind of deliberately mussing up his very carefully controlled camerawork in general. in a way the mussing up is the exception that proves the rule. i hope he does that in GBH.

but I don't mean to imply that everything tarantino does is basically a citation, as some would have it. although it's inevitably informed by his knowledge of cinema history, he does have his own style, and it's a beautiful widescreen style IMO. tarantino can be super-indulgent and he has scenes and even a film or two that don't work, but overall I think he's, uh, a more complete filmmaker than anderson, esp. in the way he puts together his narratives.

i mean that truthfully/honestly but I guess I'm also baiting dr. morbius who seems to break out in hives when people salute tarantino.

que sera sera, IB was the last thing i will ever see by him.

...but you reserve your right to shit all over the next few films in pithy ILX posts, I assume.

Never say never. You've sworn off ILXing a few times, right? xp

haven't we all, though :sigh:

we're not all drama queens like the Good Doctor tho

bye

http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsH/57382-14682.jpg

I may be dead before he finishes another! ta da!

anyway, why havent u cineastes read that Geo O'Brien piece on GBH in Film Comment yet, cheapskates?

i'll have to check that out. i should subscribe to that magazine but I hate their layout. btw that picture of francis is meant to be waterbabies.

i'm kind of picky about layouts and small type.

liberries carry it too

libraries are free idiot

so your cheapskates insult is denied

i'll take my francis pic like a compliment

there seems to be something fundamentally misconceived about QT's last two films and their approach to historical trauma. this is a quality of all his films, but there's something utterly totalizing (and thus maybe oppressive?) about them. it's like cinema consumes literally everything in its path and turns it into bad movies. WA on the other hand seems pretty much the opposite, in a way that appeals more to me these days: self-consciously limited or contained, or at least very carefully observing what is or is not "in" the movie.

QT's film is what it is: a revenge fantasy set in a universe of WWII counter-factuals.

i think one could take offense at him trying to (ahem) whitewash his fantasies of vengeance by placing them in seemingly manichean moral universes (which are themselves fantasies born of the movies). this bothered me more in DU than in IB, but maybe the latter is just the better movie. i dunno.

yeah DU just being sorta bad def makes that stuff harder to swallow.

i wouldn't say it was bad, i enjoyed it too much for that. it's just clumsy compared to his best films.

anyway, let's keep this thread OT shall we?

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/26/the-grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-takes-the-43-challenge/

good, thanks.

I think well of many of his films, particularly the most recent ones, and I appreciate anyone who takes on a challenge of narrowing his range of creative choices. Once you narrow that range, it turns out there’s a host of new possibilities that make themselves apparent. Call it the Ozu strategy: refine your means and you discover nuances nobody else notices.

btw I notice in the last two films he's increasingly adopting the hanging-by-yr-fingertips Hitchcock trope (which of course has been repeated often by others).

that's a nice quote. OFF TOPIC: i think it gets at what i was complaining about with QT above. I wish he'd "narrow" his range rather than expand it to a point that makes it grotesque.

I don't know that you're talking about the same thing in terms of "range"

tarantino's stylistic range has always been way more expansive than anderson's (by design, in anderson's case).

no i think he's kept a rather limited bag of stylistic devices and applied them to wider contexts--like thrusting everything into the griding maw of tarantinoisms.

i mean it's "expansive" in one sense and kind of suffocating in another.

you're right tho that "range" means something different in that quotation thought. perhaps a better way of explaining myself it is to say that i think QT's style works better in a less "historical" or epic register.

QT is the straight adolescent and WA is the queer adolescent and it gets better

that's one racist family

I think the term is "queerdolescent"

Wonder if WA will ever sell out like Tim Burton and then gets hired to make CGI remakes in his symmetrical twee style.

I'm always hopeful, but that trailer really gives me pause.

no i think he's kept a rather limited bag of stylistic devices and applied them to wider contexts--like thrusting everything into the griding maw of tarantinoisms.

― ryan, Wednesday, March 26, 2014 5:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmmm. what commercial filmmaker would you say has a more varied/heterogenous style?

WA's been offered at least one potential blockbuster and turned it down because he wouldn't be able to have final cut and didn't think he'd be a good fit for a mainstream movie. I can't see him taking the Burton route.

what was it?

He wouldn't say. I'm nosy. I always want to know what people have turned down.

pain & gain

it's the SNL sketch that writes itself.

It's curious that only one critic I've read asserts that M. Gustave is a gay man who exclusively (perhaps) sleeps with old dowagers because it's profitable/what's available. You're never going to see this pigeonholed as a queer movie, yet I think WA is one of the queerest hetero filmmakers (along with Cronenberg).

I'm happy you noticed it. I forgot to include it in my review but, yes, Gustave coded queer to me.

Well, hence he doesn't tot brush off Brody's malevolent heir calling him a "fucking faggot" and has a joke about how no one's ever called him straight before. Fiennes says "darling" v breezily too.

I wrote off Brody's slurs as a shortcut to establishing his villainy, not Gustave's sexuality. But then again, you know me, always trying to rub out all record of the Pangborn template from history like the ZZ officer I am.

http://arnesflix.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/franklin-pangborn-bank-dick-portrait.jpg?w=750

Gustave is closer to a Herbert Marshall character, no matter the Kinsey scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3P_jYLmnX4

loved Stinky on Abbott & Costello

hmmm. what commercial filmmaker would you say has a more varied/heterogenous style?