Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

xpost - not when they all walk and talk in such an overwhelmingly mannered way! most of his characters seem to be afflicted with the same mannerisms, diction, similar vocal inflections, etc (and yes i know QT gets this criticism too, so maybe thats another parallel). odd how such a twee director is so polarising.

goldblum and dafoe were both really enjoyable, yes. but the feeling i often get watching WA is that yes, the casts are all having tons of fun ('hes so great with actors! no wonder they keep returning and working for scale!' etc), but its like youre meant to buy into the idea of all these famous actors having a ball, and im sure they are, its just never *quite* as much fun when youre watching on the other side of the screen (for me at least).

i mean obv not all of taratino's films function in the same way all the time. but his recent films (well, the last two) feel like very mass-audience, emotionally generous things to me.

even though django is simultaneously a riff on a sub-subgenre that about 0.1% of its audience is closely familiar w/.

yes if anything the recent Tarantino films pander to audience sensibilities, particularly when it comes to vigilantism.

i would use a different word than pander but yeah

mattresslessness

I like your sn.

QT vs WA is an interesting topic. maybe throw PTA in there too.

hard to decide who has the better ironic fast-zoom...

what do you mean by "ironic" in this case?

QT vs WA is an interesting topic. maybe throw PTA in there too.

― ryan, Tuesday, March 25, 2014 6:03 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let's toss in JT, SM, and QAZ

PTA has had the opposite trajectory to WA in terms of the quality of his films. He keeps getting better.

I sort of hate Magnolia and I count the Master as one of the best films I've ever seen.

i'm with you there, although magnolia is one of those films i "admire" to a degree even while I don't enjoy it. I think There Will Be Blood is a bad movie but a bad movie made by a really skilled filmmaker.

otm

Rushmore is on one of the HBOs right now. still so good. better than anything QT or PTA ever did imo.

Alfred, Dafoe is basically doing nosferatu again here, and he's so sepulchral he may have lain in the tomb since Last Temptation. Hardly a stock thug! Also, Fiennes "an average actor," wow.

I don't get comparing someone as precise as Anderson to a warped 50-year-old adolescent who makes 4-hour hommages to 90-minute drive-in grinders from his childhood.

(btw Alfred, Spider-Man and Shadow of the Vampire are 12 and 14 years old, so my point stands.)

maybe it doesn't really hold up, but I think it's an interesting comparison because they both seem make movies about or set in a kind of extended adolescence. QT is pretty precise! (just less interesting to me.)

what do you mean by "ironic" in this case?

i should say 'funny' rather than ironic, but yeah, i compare WA's fast zooms to those QT does in django (im especially thinking of the shot where the camera zooms into dicaprio's face). both use fast zooms quite self consciously for jokey effect.

i dont see the point in people trying to convince themselves this is not the case so they can like his movies better.

There's no pretence required. Anderson's not my cousin. I don't have to like his movies.

tarantino is a REMARKABLY precise director by any standard. until the last film, i guess.

both use fast zooms quite self consciously for jokey effect.

yeah I'd say they have the quality of citations. similar thing to when Anderson switches to rough hand-held camerawork for the "Serpico" adaptation in Rushmore--the camera style is itself a kind of punchline, since he briefly adopts New Hollywood '70s-style "realism." I also think that //some// of Anderson's zoom and long-lens shots (the more meandering ones; esp. in Darjeeling Ltd, which I think is pretty underrated) have the effect of kind of deliberately mussing up his very carefully controlled camerawork in general. in a way the mussing up is the exception that proves the rule. i hope he does that in GBH.

but I don't mean to imply that everything tarantino does is basically a citation, as some would have it. although it's inevitably informed by his knowledge of cinema history, he does have his own style, and it's a beautiful widescreen style IMO. tarantino can be super-indulgent and he has scenes and even a film or two that don't work, but overall I think he's, uh, a more complete filmmaker than anderson, esp. in the way he puts together his narratives.

i mean that truthfully/honestly but I guess I'm also baiting dr. morbius who seems to break out in hives when people salute tarantino.

que sera sera, IB was the last thing i will ever see by him.

...but you reserve your right to shit all over the next few films in pithy ILX posts, I assume.

Never say never. You've sworn off ILXing a few times, right? xp

haven't we all, though :sigh:

we're not all drama queens like the Good Doctor tho

bye

http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsH/57382-14682.jpg

I may be dead before he finishes another! ta da!

anyway, why havent u cineastes read that Geo O'Brien piece on GBH in Film Comment yet, cheapskates?

i'll have to check that out. i should subscribe to that magazine but I hate their layout. btw that picture of francis is meant to be waterbabies.

i'm kind of picky about layouts and small type.

liberries carry it too

libraries are free idiot

so your cheapskates insult is denied

i'll take my francis pic like a compliment

there seems to be something fundamentally misconceived about QT's last two films and their approach to historical trauma. this is a quality of all his films, but there's something utterly totalizing (and thus maybe oppressive?) about them. it's like cinema consumes literally everything in its path and turns it into bad movies. WA on the other hand seems pretty much the opposite, in a way that appeals more to me these days: self-consciously limited or contained, or at least very carefully observing what is or is not "in" the movie.

QT's film is what it is: a revenge fantasy set in a universe of WWII counter-factuals.

i think one could take offense at him trying to (ahem) whitewash his fantasies of vengeance by placing them in seemingly manichean moral universes (which are themselves fantasies born of the movies). this bothered me more in DU than in IB, but maybe the latter is just the better movie. i dunno.

yeah DU just being sorta bad def makes that stuff harder to swallow.

i wouldn't say it was bad, i enjoyed it too much for that. it's just clumsy compared to his best films.

anyway, let's keep this thread OT shall we?

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/26/the-grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-takes-the-43-challenge/

good, thanks.

I think well of many of his films, particularly the most recent ones, and I appreciate anyone who takes on a challenge of narrowing his range of creative choices. Once you narrow that range, it turns out there’s a host of new possibilities that make themselves apparent. Call it the Ozu strategy: refine your means and you discover nuances nobody else notices.

btw I notice in the last two films he's increasingly adopting the hanging-by-yr-fingertips Hitchcock trope (which of course has been repeated often by others).

that's a nice quote. OFF TOPIC: i think it gets at what i was complaining about with QT above. I wish he'd "narrow" his range rather than expand it to a point that makes it grotesque.

I don't know that you're talking about the same thing in terms of "range"

tarantino's stylistic range has always been way more expansive than anderson's (by design, in anderson's case).

no i think he's kept a rather limited bag of stylistic devices and applied them to wider contexts--like thrusting everything into the griding maw of tarantinoisms.

i mean it's "expansive" in one sense and kind of suffocating in another.

you're right tho that "range" means something different in that quotation thought. perhaps a better way of explaining myself it is to say that i think QT's style works better in a less "historical" or epic register.