Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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.

QT is the straight adolescent and WA is the queer adolescent and it gets better

that's one racist family

I think the term is "queerdolescent"

Wonder if WA will ever sell out like Tim Burton and then gets hired to make CGI remakes in his symmetrical twee style.

I'm always hopeful, but that trailer really gives me pause.

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.

― ryan, Wednesday, March 26, 2014 5:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmmm. what commercial filmmaker would you say has a more varied/heterogenous style?

WA's been offered at least one potential blockbuster and turned it down because he wouldn't be able to have final cut and didn't think he'd be a good fit for a mainstream movie. I can't see him taking the Burton route.

what was it?

He wouldn't say. I'm nosy. I always want to know what people have turned down.

pain & gain

it's the SNL sketch that writes itself.

It's curious that only one critic I've read asserts that M. Gustave is a gay man who exclusively (perhaps) sleeps with old dowagers because it's profitable/what's available. You're never going to see this pigeonholed as a queer movie, yet I think WA is one of the queerest hetero filmmakers (along with Cronenberg).

I'm happy you noticed it. I forgot to include it in my review but, yes, Gustave coded queer to me.

Well, hence he doesn't tot brush off Brody's malevolent heir calling him a "fucking faggot" and has a joke about how no one's ever called him straight before. Fiennes says "darling" v breezily too.

I wrote off Brody's slurs as a shortcut to establishing his villainy, not Gustave's sexuality. But then again, you know me, always trying to rub out all record of the Pangborn template from history like the ZZ officer I am.

http://arnesflix.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/franklin-pangborn-bank-dick-portrait.jpg?w=750

Gustave is closer to a Herbert Marshall character, no matter the Kinsey scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3P_jYLmnX4

loved Stinky on Abbott & Costello

hmmm. what commercial filmmaker would you say has a more varied/heterogenous style?

Oh you're right I think. I'm mis-using "style" to refer to something else I can't put my finger on.

well i am using style in maybe a kind of parochial sense, to mean like audio-visual style, not a broader sense of "overall approach" including tone, narrative, etc.

i forget sometimes that these words have broader or just different meanings to different people.

yeah but it's too often used in hand-wavey fashion like I was doing.

saw this a second time today - was oddly better as this time i was already reacclimatised to all the usual wes-isms. and i got to enjoy all the little attention to detail (even if im still not sure what its really all in service of). and its also just nice to savour all the design again - i want WA's painter's number. if WA never does a musical, he should at least direct a fairy tale at some point. if catherine breillat can do bluebeard, theres no reason WA cant do something similar. realised while watching that its no wonder he gets such raves from actors - most of them are just left to do whatever they want (which is why fiennes is so good here, because he does so much more than that) or act as pastiches (which i imagine is loads of fun on set, though not exactly taxing). also noticed that this film has quite a bit of ageism, and 'urgh, old people having sex' sentiments running through much of its start.

this was very good

I enjoyed this but I am perplexed by his homage to Zweig. This is far more Hrabal or Hasek than Zweig.

biggest global grosser of his to date (Tenenbaums domestically, for now)

in the American top five!

most of them are just left to do whatever they want

Is this true? I thought I'd read that WA tends to direct his actors very closely. Everything else about his direction tends to eschew improvisation and hew closely to his vision.

yeah him and hackman didn't get along because of that, i think inadvertantly it ended up helping that film w/ royal set apart from everyone else acting like a wes anderson action figure

willem dafoe said he made an animatic for this one with all the characters posing exactly the way he wanted them to and told him basically "do that"

or maybe he said "you dont have to do that"

i guess that would make a difference

A grand Michael Wood LRB essay on the film:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/michael-wood/at-the-movies

s1ocki, a master of caricature and distortion

okay i finally saw this and i thought it was pretty great, so... there!

having slept on it, i woke up thinking about how, shall we say, de-semiticized WA's vision of late mitteleuropa is. for a movie ostensibly about the cultural catastrophe of nazism, and which ends with a dedication to stefan zweig, the movie had not a whiff of jewishness to it, nor the slightest implication that jewishness had anything to do with what would be lost. (besides maybe naming the baker mendl). i'm... not sure how i feel about that

since nobody wants to talk about that, i'll also mention that i found this movie really funny in a way i haven't with WA in a long time. feels like he got some of that wit i had attributed mostly to owen wilson back and that's great.

i'm trying to judge how I should associate Jeff Goldblum with a whiff of Jewishness.

he probably comes the closest i guess—but a(n ostensibly) jewish lawyer character, besides being a cliche, isn't really a worthy tribute to stefan zweig imho

It's funny, I think of Kovacs as a Jewish name but apparently it's a common Hungarian name generally; it's just that the Hungarians I know in the US tend to be Jewish.

you're looking at one