I'm happy you noticed it. I forgot to include it in my review but, yes, Gustave coded queer to me.
― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 27 March 2014 13:44 (ten years ago) link
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.
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 27 March 2014 13:48 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Eric H., Thursday, 27 March 2014 13:56 (ten years ago) link
http://arnesflix.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/franklin-pangborn-bank-dick-portrait.jpg?w=750
― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 27 March 2014 14:03 (ten years ago) link
Gustave is closer to a Herbert Marshall character, no matter the Kinsey scale.
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 27 March 2014 14:05 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3P_jYLmnX4
― Eric H., Thursday, 27 March 2014 14:13 (ten years ago) link
loved Stinky on Abbott & Costello
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 27 March 2014 14:19 (ten years ago) link
hmmm. what commercial filmmaker would you say has a more varied/heterogenous style?
Oh you're right I think. I'm mis-using "style" to refer to something else I can't put my finger on.
― ryan, Thursday, 27 March 2014 17:06 (ten years ago) link
well i am using style in maybe a kind of parochial sense, to mean like audio-visual style, not a broader sense of "overall approach" including tone, narrative, etc.
― espring (amateurist), Friday, 28 March 2014 17:52 (ten years ago) link
i forget sometimes that these words have broader or just different meanings to different people.
yeah but it's too often used in hand-wavey fashion like I was doing.
― ryan, Friday, 28 March 2014 18:10 (ten years ago) link
saw this a second time today - was oddly better as this time i was already reacclimatised to all the usual wes-isms. and i got to enjoy all the little attention to detail (even if im still not sure what its really all in service of). and its also just nice to savour all the design again - i want WA's painter's number. if WA never does a musical, he should at least direct a fairy tale at some point. if catherine breillat can do bluebeard, theres no reason WA cant do something similar. realised while watching that its no wonder he gets such raves from actors - most of them are just left to do whatever they want (which is why fiennes is so good here, because he does so much more than that) or act as pastiches (which i imagine is loads of fun on set, though not exactly taxing). also noticed that this film has quite a bit of ageism, and 'urgh, old people having sex' sentiments running through much of its start.
― StillAdvance, Sunday, 30 March 2014 21:04 (ten years ago) link
this was very good
― akm, Saturday, 5 April 2014 03:47 (ten years ago) link
I enjoyed this but I am perplexed by his homage to Zweig. This is far more Hrabal or Hasek than Zweig.
― già, ya, déjà, ja, yeah, whatever... (Michael White), Monday, 7 April 2014 15:13 (ten years ago) link
biggest global grosser of his to date (Tenenbaums domestically, for now)
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Monday, 7 April 2014 22:03 (ten years ago) link
in the American top five!
― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 April 2014 22:05 (ten years ago) link
most of them are just left to do whatever they want
Is this true? I thought I'd read that WA tends to direct his actors very closely. Everything else about his direction tends to eschew improvisation and hew closely to his vision.
― già, ya, déjà, ja, yeah, whatever... (Michael White), Monday, 7 April 2014 23:54 (ten years ago) link
yeah him and hackman didn't get along because of that, i think inadvertantly it ended up helping that film w/ royal set apart from everyone else acting like a wes anderson action figure
― balls, Tuesday, 8 April 2014 01:17 (ten years ago) link
willem dafoe said he made an animatic for this one with all the characters posing exactly the way he wanted them to and told him basically "do that"
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 9 April 2014 16:00 (ten years ago) link
or maybe he said "you dont have to do that"
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 9 April 2014 16:02 (ten years ago) link
i guess that would make a difference
A grand Michael Wood LRB essay on the film:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/michael-wood/at-the-movies
― Alba, Saturday, 12 April 2014 11:25 (ten years ago) link
s1ocki, a master of caricature and distortion
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 12 April 2014 12:48 (ten years ago) link
okay i finally saw this and i thought it was pretty great, so... there!
― socki (s1ocki), Sunday, 13 April 2014 03:44 (ten years ago) link
having slept on it, i woke up thinking about how, shall we say, de-semiticized WA's vision of late mitteleuropa is. for a movie ostensibly about the cultural catastrophe of nazism, and which ends with a dedication to stefan zweig, the movie had not a whiff of jewishness to it, nor the slightest implication that jewishness had anything to do with what would be lost. (besides maybe naming the baker mendl). i'm... not sure how i feel about that
― socki (s1ocki), Sunday, 13 April 2014 14:03 (ten years ago) link
since nobody wants to talk about that, i'll also mention that i found this movie really funny in a way i haven't with WA in a long time. feels like he got some of that wit i had attributed mostly to owen wilson back and that's great.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:16 (ten years ago) link
i'm trying to judge how I should associate Jeff Goldblum with a whiff of Jewishness.
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:27 (ten years ago) link
he probably comes the closest i guess—but a(n ostensibly) jewish lawyer character, besides being a cliche, isn't really a worthy tribute to stefan zweig imho
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:34 (ten years ago) link
It's funny, I think of Kovacs as a Jewish name but apparently it's a common Hungarian name generally; it's just that the Hungarians I know in the US tend to be Jewish.
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:39 (ten years ago) link
you're looking at one
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:42 (ten years ago) link
(semi-hungarian.)
I kinda liked that cuz in the '80s Goldblum played Ernie Kovacs in a TV movie.
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:47 (ten years ago) link
(tho EK was a goy)
anyway, I think the short answer to your misgivings, s1ocki, is along the lines of "this is not that movie," and the audience will be thinking about it anyhow. but i'm glad you liked it!
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:52 (ten years ago) link
isn't really a worthy tribute to stefan zweig imho
The best selling author in Germany who was so assimilated the only thing that made him conspicuously Jewish was anti-semitism?
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:52 (ten years ago) link
Anyway, I reiterate what I said upthread; this reminded me far more of the wry humor of the Czechs than of Zweig's earnestness.
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 14:54 (ten years ago) link
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:52 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
yes, and who was forced to flee precisely because of his jewishness, who saw that entire world collapse around him, along with the idea that the jews of the austro-hungarian empire ever could really "assimilate," and who killed himself in exile?
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:03 (ten years ago) link
to portray the viciousness of the nazis, to portray the cultural destruction they wreaked, and to specifically put in a cultural world so conspicuously defined by jews—assimilated or not—who were all forced by those nazis into exile, best-case-scenario, or more likely, shipped off to the camps—while making it all about the loss of courtesy and fine manners and delightful things, it just seems like a blind spot to me
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:06 (ten years ago) link
I'm not saying it isn't... but its his way to keep everything in murky one-foot-in-myth land.
This made me remember that Jerry Lewis DID release a film -- a comedy -- with 'real' Nazis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Way_to_the_Front%3F
(Well, WA does have the ZZs kill the homosexual hero at the end.)
― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:18 (ten years ago) link
there are a few bum notes in this, and one of them is the way they keep the hotel running after the conclusion of the main plot—so are they basically serving the nazis at that point? it felt not super thought out.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:25 (ten years ago) link
it just seems like a blind spot to me
Fair enough. It's a very WA blind spot, though, isn't it?
but its his way to keep everything in murky one-foot-in-myth land.
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't read them as Nazis, per se, but as broadly representing the fascistic nationalist parties of the era between the wars, pehaps because the latter-day GBH seemed like it was in a Warsaw Bloc country.
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:31 (ten years ago) link
Given WA's nostalgic streak, I wouldn't be surprised that the sacrificing of the elegance of the belle epoque GBH to a utilitarian well-meaning bureaucratic aesthetic that puts a warning or directive sign on everything possible was exactly one of the points he was trying to make.
slocki, have you read 'The World of Yesteryear'?
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:36 (ten years ago) link
i have—it's one of my favourite memoirs.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:43 (ten years ago) link
i also recommend george clare's "last waltz in vienna," which, even more than the zweig, portrays the creeping menace of nazism as it encroaches on a life the jews thought perfectly secure.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:44 (ten years ago) link
this paragraph by cynthia ozick in a recent review of a kafka biography, which i read the day after i saw GBH, resonated for me:
The persistence of “transcend” is still more troublesome. What is it that Kafka is said to “transcend”? Every actual and factual aspect of the life he lived, everything that formed and informed him, that drew or repelled him, the time and the place, the family and the apartment and the office—and Prague itself, with its two languages and three populations fixed at the margins of a ruling sovereignty sprawled across disparate and conflicting nationalities. Kafka’s fictions, free grains of being, seem to float, untethered and self-contained, above the heavy explicitness of a recognizable society and culture. And so a new and risen Kafka is born, cleansed of origins, unchained from the tensions, many of them nasty, of Prague’s roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew, its ambient anti-Semitism and its utopian Zionism, its Jewish clubs and its literary stewpot of Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Weiss. In this understanding, Kafka is detached not from the claims of specificity—what is more strikingly particularized than a Kafka tale?—but of a certain designated specificity.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:45 (ten years ago) link
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:52 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i mean, if you were to make a movie about this milieu before the rise of the nazis, yes, you could ignore the context. after wwii, it's unignorable. you can't talk about stefan zweig, knowing what happened, without acknowledging the swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation.
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:49 (ten years ago) link
LWiV is excellent. So is 'A Nervous Splendor' and 'Thunder at Twilight' and the pertinent sections of Clive James' 'Cultural Amnesia.'
Have you ever read Schnitzler or Joseph Roth?
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:51 (ten years ago) link
i have read both a nervous splendor and thunder at twilight! and those sections of clive james. and schnitzler and roth.
we're on the same page here michael!!!
― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:53 (ten years ago) link
swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation
More than anything, I think the Nazis' relentless rejection of an assimilation many Jews thought to be quite successful was what lead him to kill himself.
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:53 (ten years ago) link
Or more that the Nazis could get away with convincing the Germans this was a good thing.
― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, 16 April 2014 15:54 (ten years ago) link