Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

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

(semi-hungarian.)

I kinda liked that cuz in the '80s Goldblum played Ernie Kovacs in a TV movie.

(tho EK was a goy)

anyway, I think the short answer to your misgivings, s1ocki, is along the lines of "this is not that movie," and the audience will be thinking about it anyhow. but i'm glad you liked it!

isn't really a worthy tribute to stefan zweig imho

The best selling author in Germany who was so assimilated the only thing that made him conspicuously Jewish was anti-semitism?

Anyway, I reiterate what I said upthread; this reminded me far more of the wry humor of the Czechs than of Zweig's earnestness.

The best selling author in Germany who was so assimilated the only thing that made him conspicuously Jewish was anti-semitism?

― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:52 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, and who was forced to flee precisely because of his jewishness, who saw that entire world collapse around him, along with the idea that the jews of the austro-hungarian empire ever could really "assimilate," and who killed himself in exile?

to portray the viciousness of the nazis, to portray the cultural destruction they wreaked, and to specifically put in a cultural world so conspicuously defined by jews—assimilated or not—who were all forced by those nazis into exile, best-case-scenario, or more likely, shipped off to the camps—while making it all about the loss of courtesy and fine manners and delightful things, it just seems like a blind spot to me

I'm not saying it isn't... but its his way to keep everything in murky one-foot-in-myth land.

This made me remember that Jerry Lewis DID release a film -- a comedy -- with 'real' Nazis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Way_to_the_Front%3F

(Well, WA does have the ZZs kill the homosexual hero at the end.)

there are a few bum notes in this, and one of them is the way they keep the hotel running after the conclusion of the main plot—so are they basically serving the nazis at that point? it felt not super thought out.

it just seems like a blind spot to me

Fair enough. It's a very WA blind spot, though, isn't it?

but its his way to keep everything in murky one-foot-in-myth land.

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't read them as Nazis, per se, but as broadly representing the fascistic nationalist parties of the era between the wars, pehaps because the latter-day GBH seemed like it was in a Warsaw Bloc country.

Given WA's nostalgic streak, I wouldn't be surprised that the sacrificing of the elegance of the belle epoque GBH to a utilitarian well-meaning bureaucratic aesthetic that puts a warning or directive sign on everything possible was exactly one of the points he was trying to make.

slocki, have you read 'The World of Yesteryear'?

i have—it's one of my favourite memoirs.

i also recommend george clare's "last waltz in vienna," which, even more than the zweig, portrays the creeping menace of nazism as it encroaches on a life the jews thought perfectly secure.

this paragraph by cynthia ozick in a recent review of a kafka biography, which i read the day after i saw GBH, resonated for me:

The persistence of “transcend” is still more troublesome. What is it that Kafka is said to “transcend”? Every actual and factual aspect of the life he lived, everything that formed and informed him, that drew or repelled him, the time and the place, the family and the apartment and the office—and Prague itself, with its two languages and three populations fixed at the margins of a ruling sovereignty sprawled across disparate and conflicting nationalities. Kafka’s fictions, free grains of being, seem to float, untethered and self-contained, above the heavy explicitness of a recognizable society and culture. And so a new and risen Kafka is born, cleansed of origins, unchained from the tensions, many of them nasty, of Prague’s roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew, its ambient anti-Semitism and its utopian Zionism, its Jewish clubs and its literary stewpot of Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Weiss. In this understanding, Kafka is detached not from the claims of specificity—what is more strikingly particularized than a Kafka tale?—but of a certain designated specificity.

The best selling author in Germany who was so assimilated the only thing that made him conspicuously Jewish was anti-semitism?

― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:52 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, if you were to make a movie about this milieu before the rise of the nazis, yes, you could ignore the context. after wwii, it's unignorable. you can't talk about stefan zweig, knowing what happened, without acknowledging the swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation.

LWiV is excellent. So is 'A Nervous Splendor' and 'Thunder at Twilight' and the pertinent sections of Clive James' 'Cultural Amnesia.'

Have you ever read Schnitzler or Joseph Roth?

i have read both a nervous splendor and thunder at twilight! and those sections of clive james. and schnitzler and roth.

we're on the same page here michael!!!

swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation

More than anything, I think the Nazis' relentless rejection of an assimilation many Jews thought to be quite successful was what lead him to kill himself.

Or more that the Nazis could get away with convincing the Germans this was a good thing.

i agree!

i grew up with my parents telling me "you might not think of yourself as jewish, but never forget that's how the world sees you."

I can't imagine Zweig as much of Zionist, though. All he writes about is European culture and its great moments. Telling him he couldn't be a Jew and a European basically broke his heart.

I knew a lady from somehwat similar circumstances. She was born in Lodz to a well-to do Jewish family in the textile business. She and her husband survived Auschwitz and moved to New York where they started an entirely new life and a good one at that. Several years before her death, she finally went back to Poland with her daughter and her daughter told me that the starngest thing about the trip wasn't her mother's relative stoicism faced with reminders of all that horror and sadness but how much fun her mom had, 60 years after leaving the country, speaking Polish to people from her hometown.

not entirely to the point, but an interesting story:

my grandmother was born in st petersburg in, i believe, 1910. she moved with her family to poland after the revolution and lived there through the war, with a detour to hide out in siberia. 60-70 years later, her nurse, russian, told us that she spoke with a 19th-century, czarist-era russian dialect.

(she was also constantly talking about how ashamed she was of her bad polish.)

19th-century, czarist-era russian dialect

This is so cool.

I knew an old lady in France who pronounced faisait and faisaient differently and who deplored the way mdoern French people said various things. From a sociological and linguistic point of view, it was always a hoot to talk to her.

there's also the way that yiddish is basically middle high german + hebraicisms, or quebec french for that matter...

No wonder I can't understand them...

Quebec is so weird to me, I wanna go there

Kovacs is like the "Smith" of Hungarian last names.

to portray the viciousness of the nazis, to portray the cultural destruction they wreaked, and to specifically put in a cultural world so conspicuously defined by jews—assimilated or not—who were all forced by those nazis into exile, best-case-scenario, or more likely, shipped off to the camps—while making it all about the loss of courtesy and fine manners and delightful things, it just seems like a blind spot to me

I think those concerns are valid. I guess I just don't care, insofar as I think any "political" consequences of this film are pretty much nil (and that's where I part with the fire-breathing Jacobin writer who pissed all over the film). the Jacobin-type stuff reminds me of how a friend described a film professor we know as "seeking the revolution in a blockbuster film." maybe I too-easily dismiss the political meaning of popular films, but I just fail to see what the stakes are. will we forget the Holocaust because Wes Anderson?

I don't think Anderson is really all that (to use a word I usually despise) "deep." what he's said about prewar Europe and Hollywood's "mittle-europa" and Zweig has never really passed the threshold of platitude and basic (obvious) observation. that he makes such an entertaining film partly out of these materials is why he's Wes Anderson and we're not.

morbs, there are tons of Nazi comedies. in fact it's a veritable subgenre. I mean, Hogan's Heroes etc.