Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

like really, who would want to watch a movie that was actually set in max fischer's fantasia, when men were men and all the rest? i wouldn't, but that is sort of what this film is.

what

this writer sounds like a total asshole

After viewing The Grand Budapest Hotel, I realized I had had it with Anderson’s fancy boxed chocolates. Either they’ve gotten toxically moldy over time, or they were always disgusting and I was too disgusting myself to notice it. To put it bluntly, I’ve decided I hate Wes Anderson, and that at some level, I’d like to think I’ve always hated him. I wish I could come up with a quick, clever way to sum up my hatred and be done with it, like Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who ends his furious pan of The Grand Budapest Hotel with the snappy line, “That’s Wes Anderson: He can’t see the forest for the twee.”

I thought that piece was obnoxious and dumb.

The film makes pretty obvious that the "nobler past" it purports to reflect on is imaginary -- there's even a line about it in the film -- something about the past that Ralph Fiennes pined for actually being over long before he was born (i.e. never existed, is how I took it).

i think the writer recognizes that with her invocation of jameson at the end and this notion of historical amnesia. there is this issue of the inversion of the past and the future, with the former usurping the latter as the screen on which we can project our fantasies of the good life. nostalgia isn't politically neutral; imagining utopia as something that was had and then lost is an easy way of thinking to slip into as it is deeply embedded in the judeo-christian tradition, but radical or even progresssive thinking probably needs to begin from the point that the past is something we need to wrestle with and free ourselves from.

idk. wes anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers and i don't really agree with the author of that piece, as i noted earlier, but i think she raised some important questions about how, exactly, the past functions in his films. this pervasive sense of loss inhabits every detail of his good films, which lends them a sense of depth even though they can be pretty superficial, even farcical, by most other measures. here he tries to represent the past directly and the whole thing becomes a total farce.

jacobin writer doesn't like nostalgia for pre-stalinist europe, funny

you'd think a Jacobin would like nostalgia for a pre-Napoleonic Europe though

i'd be into a wes anderson movie set during the french revolution

Rohmer sort of made a WA movie set during the Terror.

i love that movie!

I did too, especially how Rohmer directed the man playing Robespierre to act like Brian Cox playing Robespierre.

the lady and the duke is fantastic

One of the things I love about Zhivago is that it successfully captures the tension between past vs. future utopianism, conservatism vs. progressivism, collectivism vs. individualism etc. -- neither pro-tsarist nor pro-stalinist, and yet the main character's self-obsession and desire to live outside political reality is his tragic downfall.

Not much to say right now except Fiennes is brilliant, this is just behind the Rushmore/Fox/Moonrise upper tier, it hums along like a fine 1920s European watch, and you haters who prefer Tarantinhole or DiCapsese deserve what you get. Also the world needs more cat-killing jokes.

When you're right you're right Morbs.

not this time though.

there were no glimpses of realism to temper the cloying whimsicality

Treeship, v little "cloying" here.

Except Ken Loach and a couple others, fuck 'realism.'

i dunno morbs. this film was pretty goofy, whereas in the past anderson has managed to make films that were moving as well as stylish and funny.

it's not that there are too many fantasy elements in this -- i love the life aquatic, for instance, and there are claymation sea creatures in that one -- it's just that they kind of take over everything in this film until there is nothing else left. the characters exist in a world where real feelings like longing, loss, disappointment -- the usual anderson standbys -- just don't seem plausible. i mean, there are nazis here and they don't even cause a ripple in the adorable facade, which in some scenes is literally painted on a literal screen. which is part of the goal here, clearly, i just am not into it.

people thought this *dragged*?? holy shit.

this fell a little flat for me, but then i was half-dazed by a cold. however, i think there's definitely some that emotional gravitas that Treeship is missing, but it's even more understated than usual. it's in Gustav's goodbye to the hotel, or in the very brief allusion to his life before the hotel which seems to emerge only in his flashes of profanity.

i get a kick out of this, has to be said

http://nose.fr/fr/marques/the-grand-budapest-hotel/l-air-de-panache

ugh

i mean, there are nazis here and they don't even cause a ripple in the adorable facade

well I couldn't disagree more. It's compromised long before the Nazis show up.

If anything it functions partly as a critique of vintage "Mitteleurope Hollywood"

it's very possible i am missing something and i'll try to go to another screening of this during the week. anderson's early films are classics as far as i'm concerned, and whenever a new one comes out i am always hoping for these poignant moments, like the sequence of bottle rocket that kicks off with dignan saying "they'll never catch me man, because i'm fucking innocent" (maybe my favorite line in cinema). in contrast, the whole stretch from darjeeling through this one just seems cheesy.

What is Mitteleurope Hollywood? xp Going to see this on your recommendation.

Basically all the '20s/30s comedies/musicals set in mythical kingdoms (Lubitsch, Mamoulian, even the odd Bob Hope vehicle). Tho France doesn't fit geographically, it's of a piece with Lubitsch saying he preferred Paris, Hollywood to Paris, France.

Geoffrey O'Brien's Film Comment feature critique is well worth a read (not online).

do you really think anderson is "critiquing" the willful political naivete of these films instead of just reproducing it? where's the critique? i don't think he so simplistic as to believe in the golden age gustave pines for, but the past for anderson very often functions as a locus of hope, and nostalgia is championed insofar as it allows his eccentric characters to survive without being spiritually crushed by their immediate environment. i think we're supposed to take the narrator at his word, and admire gustave for his archaic, gentlemanly ways that were out of sync with the "slaughterhouse" of modernity. there didn't seem to be a deeper irony at play here with this.

"Nostalgia is championed insofar as it allows his eccentric characters to survive without being spiritually crushed by their immediate environment." This is a good defense of the movie, and it's also an excellent motivation for Anderson's candy-coated formalism and an excellent motivation for filmmaking in general; it shows a good understanding of what made 30s hollywood great. Just because we're supposed to take the narrator at his word that we should (you say) admire Gustav and his gentlemanly ways, that doesn't preclude Anderson from creating a parallax view of history and filmmaking through his film, from making an analytical/critical frame. Of course his bias is in defense of and celebration of and admiration of those films populated with sophisticated eurotrash rakes and other 30s Hollywood cosmopolitan archetypes, or even just in defense of style, but I think the appeal of Anderson for most of his audience is also mostly for his style and his larger-than-life, broadly-drawn archetypes, and not for emotional, social, or relational honesty.

Have you seen the operettas and other "mitteleuropa Hollywood" films morbs is referring to? Many of them are really quite sublime, and "real feeling" and inconvenient political realities aren't too much to sacrifice for a little sublimity, I think. I get that the appeal of some Anderson movies is that they can carry emotional weight in spite of their high twee style, but sometimes emotions are just another cinematic trick.

Fiennes is well cast (an average actor with a talent for malice), the first 40 minutes are his best live action since Rushmore until the escapes and caper begin, after which I didn't give a damn.

I didn't mean "critique" in the sense of anti anti anti; call it engaging with or probing Europe-set glamor neverlands if you like. (The dark side in Hollywood might be rep'd by Ophuls' film of Zweig's bleak romance Letter from an Unknown Woman.) The candy in that coating is pretty tart this time out, with a little strychnine. Ultimately it's about a father figure, a refugee, and sacrifice. A tragedy camouflaged as an elaborate windup toy.

(ooh prob put that on Lettrboxd)

I wasn't moved because the Gustave-Zero relationship is a pallid rehash of Max-Blume.

That's awfully reductive.

There are some general similarities, plenty of differences. Blume is not a master of anything the way Gustave is, and G and Zero are never mortal enemies.

I would argue Zero is the complete opposite of Max in almost every conceivable way.

The distancing devices actually created a meaningful synthesis between Anderson's preoccupations and Zweig's melancholy. The trouble for me was in the escape/caper sections; it distracted from their relationship and turned the movie into Spot The Actor (Harvey Keitel in tats! Owen Wilson as a German named Chuck!).

With this film and The Wind Rises, are we seeing a revival of early 20th century German-language literature or something? I look forward to PTA attempting Joseph Roth.

sorry, I missed what the German connection is in TWR (aside from, you know)...

The cameo names didn't really bother me. That's entertainment. (tho it's strange Lea Seydoux is getting billed in the full-page ads; she's onscreen for maybe a half minute)

Thomas Mann (the protagonist meets Hans Castorp in the sanitarium ho-ho).

Kudos to the production design too: The Grand Budapest in '68 looked like photos I've seen of similar pre-Iron Curtain structures in desuetude.

fun drinking game: bring a flask to the theater with you and take a pull every time you hear a fellow moviegoer say "every single shot is set up so well" or "his style is so unique" or "i can't believe that was harvey keitel!" on the way out

The woman saying to her grim unsmiling husband, "It was an arty film; they do things differently" sent me across the street for a gin and tonic.

such a snob aren't you alfie boy

heavens! hoi polloi having opinions!

I wish!

Gin and tonic? That called for an Alaska.

Morbs OTM

Criticisms of Anderson often feel like cinematic rockism: Where's the realism? Where are the deep emotions? Surface v substance. Fun v depth. Dollhouse/chocolate box metaphors mandatory.

Morbs, which 30s movies should I check out to help me appreciate GBH's relation to cinematic history?

All of them.