Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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!

You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it.

The line about how Gustav's age ended before he was even born but that he "certainly maintained the illusion with remarkable grace" seems more than a little self-referential/on-the-nose re: Anderson.

Keep your hands off my lobby boy!

My favorite Ralph Fiennes performance, and he's wonderful in Anderson's Roald Dahl shorts. (Great in Schindler's List and Spider too, but Grand Budapest Hotel is the one I'll be watching most.)