Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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