Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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