Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best WA since FMF

you're only dissing one film there, but i don't believe so anyway

Me and my gal both dug it a lot. Of the zillions of details to enjoy, my favorite was the late-'60s Soviet iteration of the hotel.

Glenn Kenny has my favorite take on the film as a whole:

All of this material is conveyed not just in the standard Wes Anderson style, e.g., meticulously composed and designed shots with precise and very constricted camera movements. In "Hotel" Anderson's refinement of his particular moviemaking mode is so distinct that his debut feature, the hardly unstylized "Bottle Rocket," looks like a Cassavetes picture by comparison. So, to answer some folks who claim to enjoy Anderson's movies while also grousing that they wish he would apply his cinematic talents in a "different" mode: no, this isn't the movie in which he does what you think you want, whatever that is.

What he does is his own thing, which in terms of achievement is on a similar level of difficulty to what Nabokov kept upping the ante on in his English-language novels: to conjure poignancy and tragedy in the context of realms spun off from but also fancifully, madly removed from dirt-under-your-fingernails "reality."

Only thing I'd add is that complaints about the fussiness of his style tend to gloss over the rawness and physicality of the stories. He does design these snowglobe worlds, but then he fills them with messy, awkward people and events. People get hurt a lot in his movies, in black and blue ways.

Thing that annoyed me the most: Saorse Ronan's character dying in a great epidemic after the war, which is clearly meant to invoke the Spanish Flu, which was after WWI not II. I thought it really suffered from dabbling in such a vague and badly defined 'europeanness'. Not as bad as the 'indianness' of Darjeeling, but still just so bloody turisty.

it's not a history doc, i'm fine w/ remixing the facts in such dreamscapes

(ie, i'm not sure an On Her Majesty's Secret Service luge chase could've happened in '30s Europe)

Well, so am I. I just don't think it works in this case.

Thing that annoyed me the most: Saorse Ronan's character dying in a great epidemic after the war, which is clearly meant to invoke the Spanish Flu, which was after WWI not II. I thought it really suffered from dabbling in such a vague and badly defined 'europeanness'. Not as bad as the 'indianness' of Darjeeling, but still just so bloody turisty.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:56 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you not mind then that he completely fudges the dates of World War II as well? the whole thing is deliberately off-kilter from actual history, I think that's part of joke so to speak.

i think this is canny of him btw.

there are a lot of hollywood movies of the 1930s (esp. mid-late 1930s) that are ostensibly looking back on the period before/during/after World War I but which are obviously also looking forward to the war that's coming up (which after a certain point everyone knew was going to happen). the way that GBF plays with the timeline evokes that sense of temporal vertigo.

even Grand Illusion did.

yeah, that's a good point, I was thinking of Hollywood movies.

also G.I. ref for ski chase.

Wait, how is he fudging the timeline? This is an imagined country, I just figured they had a semi-fascist takeover of their own. I was annoyed at how vague Edward Norton's character was, however. He seemed like he should have given so much more to the thematics of the film.

i'm just saying if you are imagining the film to be taking place during WWII, as you seem to do (since you were expressly annoyed that the reference to the spanish flu was anachronistic), then the dates simply don't track. the whole thing is a deliberate mishmash of European history, a kind of fantasia of European history. in that context it seems weird to object that one particular element seems anachronistic.

I did not say that. I said it was the thing that annoyed me 'the most'. And no, the film does not take place during wwii, but in the period leading up to it. I'm not complaining that it is anachronistic, I'm complaining it is facile because it's too vague.

huh? you said that it annoyed you b/c it was something that happened during WWI, not WWII. i said that it's weird that this would annoy you but (implicitly) the other anachronisms didn't.

I said it was what annoyed me the most. Some of the other anachonisms work, some don't. I get that he is creating a fantasia, meant to evoke the loss of a certain Europeanness, but I just don't think he manages to do so very well. It's too vague. And part of it is how he doesn't really get into the whole social dimensions of it, like, who is defending what and who is attacking what. What values are he defending? Well, sort of aristocratic values, but he makes sure to have the villain be the rich guy. Instead, it's just some sort of cosmic catastrophe that hits Europe, and putting the flu into it really helps with that.

yeah i wouldn't worry about it too much. in some ways i think it is all a red herring anyway--I don't think Anderson has anything to say about Europe in the 20th century. he's just toying with the settings and style and motifs of some films he likes. i know a lot of his biggest fans would disagree with me--certainly plenty of critics found this film deeply resonant as a reflection on WWII or something--but I think they are barking up the wrong tree.

if you just presume the film exists, like "inglourious basterds," in movieville, then I think some of the objections you might have would grow fainter.

or stronger, who knows?

He, I love Inglourious Basterds, and find it to be very insightful about WWII... But that's another debate.

Yeah, most Anderson-films don't have anything to say about their subjects. But Moonrise Kingdom was so great about childhood - the final rendition of Cuckoo slays me every time - and critics were so positive, that I couldn't help but expect more out of this. It just felt empty to me, but also a bit too serious to be as empty as it was.

I thought it really suffered from dabbling in such a vague and badly defined 'europeanness'. Not as bad as the 'indianness' of Darjeeling, but still just so bloody turisty.

the whole thing is deliberately off-kilter from actual history, I think that's part of joke so to speak.

to start with I found the way Zubrowka lurches around Europe from the Alps to the Baltic and everywhere in between kind of offputting, but eventually it all just added to the dreamlike charm

but yeah, it did make me retrospectively uncomfortable abt Darjeeling Ltd, that it was probably at least as made-up as this and as a white person maybe I should feel bad about watching other white people's made-up ideas of India and not even stopping to think how made-up they are

fair but then of what % of all movies about anywhere could the same be fairly said, and not as if Anderson sells documentary

I think that when the three main characters of a film are doing silly made-up versions of the country's religious dances, then it's probably time to pause...

Man, I didn't like Darjeeling.

it was probably Anderson's most beautiful film, cinematographically

Not big on Darjeeling, but it did give us this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycmVoOay4Vs

Morbs I did like MK but in the end it just whelmed me

Man I don't know shit about Europe except that they must eat a lot of fancy pastries

Darjeeling Limited was so bad and it might have been beautiful cinematographically but I watched it on a 5" airplane screen

The secret to this film and maybe WA films in general is having a strong plot be the motor of the film so he doesn't spend too much time trying to draw out the quirks in his character sketches

If I'm bothered by Wes Anderson's recent movies, it's not due to the trivialization of "exotic" cultures. That's certainly there, whether he's portraying an Indian village, an Eastern European hotel, or a summer camp in Maine. He always treats culture as an arrangement of nostalgic (thus stereotypical) bric-a-brac. This may be a problem in certain contexts, but I'm more troubled - and sometimes intrigued - by the strange emotional vacancy that seems to have defined his work since The Darjeeling Limited.

The Grand Budapest Hotel seems the apex of this trajectory, at least so far. The film's primary themes are fairly heavy, including memory, loss, and civility as a thin, beautiful skin protecting us from the fundamental horrors of human nature. A constant thrum of tragedy sounds beneath the antic and fancifully detailed surface, but overall, the film seems somehow to insist that none of it really matters, that all things are finally equal. People come and go, love blossoms and dies, even the spread of fascism becomes an incidental bit of picaresque detailing. Everything is reduced to design, a dazzling kaleidoscope of secondhand imagery, often more literary than cinematic in its inspiration.

As his viewpoint characters have flattened into recording ciphers (compare the aggressively two-dimensional, almost pathologically affectless young protagonists of Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel with the vibrant, full-blooded human specificity of Rushmore's Max Fischer), some essential spark seems to have dimmed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It allows the comedy to encompass tragic extremes without sinking to grotesquerie or bathos. More than anything, it suggests the way one might read "sophisticated, adult" novels as a precocious adolescent, enthralled by the evocation of a complex world unknown, but unable to fully grasp the deeper resonances in play. Or perhaps it's just elegantly offhand, could call it either way.

contenderizer, do you blog? i'd read it.

i basically agree w/ you, although I wouldn't characterize the characters (ha!) as "ciphers" as much as types--an amalgam of outwardly observed traits.

that's ok by me, and the relative emotional vacancy (which I should say is our POV on it, other people have been moved by GBH) is sort-of OK by me too, insofar as I've come to appreciate his films mostly for their style and wit.

nah, dun blog. thanks tho! agree completely on appreciating his films mostly for their style and wit. i anticipate each new wes anderson picture with more simple happiness than the work of any other major american director, and my eyes are never in the least disappointed. one thing i especially enjoyed about the grand budapest hotel was its verticality. just before watching the film, i'd read an interview with anderson (or part of one) wherein he talked about the pleasure and challenge of working with "the academy ratio", its implicit exhortation to stack rather than space compositions. the jailbreak sequence is a wonderful exercise in sustained vertical movement and invention, something i might not have consciously noticed had not the interview inclined me in that direction.

yeah that whole sequence is A+. you've seen this?: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/26/the-grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-takes-the-43-challenge/

i haven't. nice analysis and a great blog, overall (by the looks of it). expect i'll spend quite a bit of time catching up/exploring.

Sitting through this was possibly more brutal than sitting through The Wolf of Wall Street. I hated the trailer and stayed away for many weeks, so maybe I'd already made up my mind--I'd like to think not. Trying to bring in lofty sentiments towards the end about a world that has passed seemed really desperate. If Wes Anderson has a second idea beyond this at this stage of his career, I'm missing it:

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/images/uploads/2014/03/wesacentred3569_0.jpg

Abraham straightening the painting was a good self-deprecating joke--I think it was a self-deprecating joke--and I wondered if Keitel was trying to look like Jean Genet. That's all I got out of this.

Hoberman on this and Gray's The Immigrant as "Jew-ish" movies:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/175356/immigrant-grand-budapest-hoberman

i said it first!!

me otm

out on Blu-ray etc today

I have find the shrinking of the home-viewing lead depressing

lol they wouldn't even give it to the theater i work at until this weekend (projecting it next tuesday), so brb gonna drive from big-box store to big-box store destroying inventory. p sure the combination of long waits and torrents is why every limited-run-cinema patron in this alleged college town is 96 years old.

I really liked it more than I thought I would. One of my favorites.

Hoberman on this and Gray's The Immigrant as "Jew-ish" movies:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/175356/immigrant-grand-budapest-hoberman

― son of a lewd monk (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 11, 2014 9:22 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks for this, i often forget to check hoberman's blog for his new pieces.

shrinking time between release windows -- the wait for this on blu-ray is like a lifetime compared to how quickly the studios turn around movies that didn't do well at the box office. you often see those on video within two months of their theatrical debut. and for niche distributors, the lag is often nonexistent. esp. when you don't live in NY/LA, it's common for my local video store to get a movie before the local art cinema or cinematheque.

I was pretty into this! Way sillier than anything else he's done and the violence and swearing helped counteract the affectedness. Fiennes was great and I laughed a lot.

More than anything, it suggests the way one might read "sophisticated, adult" novels as a precocious adolescent, enthralled by the evocation of a complex world unknown, but unable to fully grasp the deeper resonances in play. Or perhaps it's just elegantly offhand, could call it either way.

"you FUCKERS"

the film is set in a Ruritania/Syldavia/Freedonia, a pastiche of a pastiche of Europe.

... Moldavia

http://www.bridalwave.tv/soap-weddings/dynasty-royal-wedding.jpg

"select cities" theatrical rerelease tomw

if this wins the oscar i'll eat my hat, and love it.

Unused storyboard from GBH:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HQKB2qtahCs/UDJAa0G7WWI/AAAAAAAACa8/Bd0h5r4quYE/s320/003.jpg

i liked this p well, has great timing & the editing is obv superb…it never seems to get old 2 me for heady and verbose characters & scenes to then include base anger and/or profanity coming a bit from left field -ie 'look at these assholes' from darjeeling ltd idk i always lol

they made a movie about brodie

― velko, Thursday, October 17, 2013 11:11 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol @ this btw

if theres anyone i think would be good at silent movies, or at least someone who id like to see make modern silents, just so i didnt have to endure the terrible, self consciously WACKY performances/dialogue, its wes anderson.

was weirdly thinking about GBH recently before all the nominations (it should win for set design, cinematography, costume and makeup), and thinking that ralph fiennes should actually win an award for getting some actual humanity and warmth in there.

hope this doesnt win for best writing btw.

Yeah I didn't care for this really but even I think Fiennes was great

this is a wes anderson movie ok so it could have been an enjoyable movie from setting and plot and cast even but for the relentlessness of everything

the bits with obvious miniatures e.g. cable cars or some of the fake-looking and presumably fake interiors e.g. tilda's gaff looked less cutesily crude than cheap and tossed off

(xp) otm.

Unfortunately at was at my mother's house when I saw this film and so had my mother scowling (comically) at the screen and saying, "What's this supposed to be about?" or similar before eventually dozing off.

the bits with obvious miniatures e.g. cable cars or some of the fake-looking and presumably fake interiors e.g. tilda's gaff looked less cutesily crude than cheap and tossed off

wildly disagree with this

making the artifice adorable