Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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

Yet even as Mr. Anderson has matured, the thread that connects all of his movies is the desire to create “stuff that he wants to experience,” Mr. Schwartzman said.

Back when they were shooting a memorable go-cart scene in “Rushmore,” Mr. Schwartzman recalled, “he asked one of the other kids to pull over, and he kind of commandeered his go-cart. And he’s like, ‘Let’s go!’ And we took off into the suburbs of Houston, just smiling and hooting.”

“That,” Mr. Schwartzman said, “is still there in every movie.”

I like this. A lot of people overstate his meticulous diorama-builder side but Matt Zoller Seitz's book has a lot about how adventurous he is. Writing the Darjeeling Ltd on the road with Schwartzman and Coppola sounded like a blast - possibly more fun than the movie itself. He's a strange mix of micromanaging and spontaneity.

well that seems like 2 qualities you might like to have as a filmmaker. (eg, for all his mega-planning, Malcolm McDowell improvised "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick got on the phone to buy the rights)

yeah the cliche is that you have to prepared a lot so that you are ready for inspired accidents! I think I'm paraphrasing Bresson there, actually, another very meticulous, controlling filmmaker who was nonetheless a great believer in the serendipitous.

increasingly I'm trying to avoid Wes Anderson interviews, he rarely says anything revealing and when he does I still feel like it's either obvious or I've heard it many times before. I don't know if he just doesn't like to open up or there isn't quite as much there there as I'd like to believe.

the MZS book is worth it for the design and images, but the interview is only fitfully interesting and honestly MZS's own short essays are pretty boilerplate and uninteresting.

leading dissenters so far: David Thomson, Zacharek, Dana Stevens

It's that good, huh?

Mr. Anderson has matured

yep, that's three critics i pretty much never trust

Thomson on older films is still worthwhile. Zacharek's get-with-it impatience is worthwhile when critical incense smothers a picture.

xp Yeah you're right Morbs. I overuse the word "strange". It's not that strange but I feel like his fussy side gets way more attention and the Zissou anecdotes made him sound way more macho than he comes across.

increasingly I'm trying to avoid Wes Anderson interviews, he rarely says anything revealing and when he does I still feel like it's either obvious or I've heard it many times before. I don't know if he just doesn't like to open up or there isn't quite as much there there as I'd like to believe.

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 4, 2014 2:06 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's a style over substance director, that's for sure, which isn't a bad thing. what he is best at, and what he seems most interested in, is conjuring a distinctive mood, at least recently. his first two films had richer characters than the ones from the past decade or so, and i i include moonrise kingdom in that. dignan's doomed naivety is much darker and more real than anything else in his oeuvre.

on the film 2014 programme this week, they wheeled out the old 'the style is the substance!' cliche, which sounds great and everything, but ive never found it to actually mean anything w/r/t wes anderson. but apparently this film has 'heart'. im sure it does, and i liked moonrise kingdom more than i expected to, though even there, the 'heart' of it was also ruined by wes anderson's usual stylistic tics and archness. i think critics looking for heart in his films (or political content even, which this one apparently has) might be looking in the wrong place, and also says something about critics unable to take his work as it really is. expecting real emotional resonance in a world where everyones acting is so affected and mannered seems an odd expectation. though i should really see it before i comment. i dont know why wes anderson doesnt just design doll houses for a living or directs music videos at least.

wes anderson is a good example of why set/production designers shouldnt become directors.

ok, that's way too harsh.

expecting real emotional resonance in a world where everyones acting is so affected and mannered seems an odd expectation.

Some of the most emotionally devastating movies I've seen are built on foundations of mannered acting (and I'd include The Life Aquatic on that list). Emotional dissonance is a powerful tool.

Reading reviews of Wes A films barely feels worthwhile now. The ones that rate him rate this, the ones that are annoyed by him and cry style over substance are annoyed by this, even though this is doing something very different in terms of tone and setting.

Best bit in the Seitz book is when he remembers Owen Wilson reading an early draft of the script to Tenenbaums and saying it feels like one of Max's plays. I've heard that critique a hundred times now (see also: dollhouses, dioramas, trainsets), and what it misses is how much is contained within them. However stylised the movies may be, the characters and ideas that they're representing seem deeply felt (forgive the Michikoism) to me.

his first two films had richer characters than the ones from the past decade or so, and i i include moonrise kingdom in that. dignan's doomed naivety is much darker and more real than anything else in his oeuvre.

― james franco, Thursday, March 6, 2014 7:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ive always felt this... i liked moonrise kingdom okay but i cant tell you anything about the characters, they're just wisps... whereas dignan, max fisher, bill murray in rushmore i think about all the time

i maintain owen wilson's writing was the secret ingredient

i liked moonrise kingdom okay but i cant tell you anything about the characters

when you're my age you'll understand Willis, McDormand, Murray

(i hope)

Maybe, maybe not. I already understand Tilda Swinton in every movie she's ever been in, though.

emotional undercurrents of MK took several viewings to really unfold for me--and that restraint seems to give way a real depth of unforced compassion that is really moving imo.

i understood those characters but they didnt leap out for me

i maintain owen wilson's writing was the secret ingredient

― AIDS (Hungry4Ass), Friday, March 7, 2014 10:30 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and ive always said this