Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (2023)

Cinematic Tableaux To Make Life Worthwhile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye-K5uveOHA

This looks good and might even be great but posting just to say that it is really amazing how he moves steadily deeper and deeper into his thing with each movie. Don't think he's ever even attempted to pivot from the stereotype of a Wes Anderson movie, just embraces it progressively more wholeheartedly. you go, auteur

If they don't make this a double bill with Oppenheimer someone dropped the ball.

xp Yes. Wouldn't have it any other way.

looks good, seems like it's in the mode of the ones i like most

OMG that looks so amazing

Was surprised this was coming so soon after the last one, but then I remembered The French Dispatch sat for awhile due to the pandemic.

This looks good!

looks good, Anderson has to be one of the only people that could find new angles for teal and orange these days.

Curiously, this is his first without Murray since Rushmore and he also still has his Henry Sugar movie for Netflix scheduled for later this year, too.

Public explanation for Murray's absence was catching COVID after he had been cast.

Ah OK. My literal first thought was "No Bill Murray, no credibility."

I like the Wes Anderson cinematic universe, I'm aware of the haters and I think they have valid objections but ... it's still a deeply appealing thing to me personally.

Anderson captures something specific about the Gen X experience of growing up in the '70s/'80s surrounded by cultural/pop cultural detritus of the Boomer generation. I read my dad's Spin & Marty comics, listened to his '50s/'60s rock and pop albums, spent hours reading a circa 1960 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. Anderson's reference points hit home for me, because I think that for him as well as me they are received pieces of a past era or eras. He's not evoking the eras themselves, he's evoking the idea and sense memory of those eras as processed through physical artifacts and the nostalgia of our parents. Or something like that. I feel where he's coming from, I guess.

i watched Royal Tenenbaums and it's pretty striking how he used to make movies about people not these midcentury dollhouses

You act like this is a bad thing!

Sorry, j/k, I feel somewhat similar, although tipsy’s argument hits home.

yeah I mean I appreciate his set design and the aesthetics, it's all very impressive (tipsy excellent post you really get at what's cool about it) but they all leave me cold in a way

his last couple left me cold in that way but everything up thru moonrise kingdom hits

to me the Wes Anderson appeal is sadboi feelings crossed with high adventure settings. royal tennenbaums fails to deliver on the second so my least fave Anderson.

Ah OK. My literal first thought was "No Bill Murray, no credibility."

Think you're probably gonna have to get used to no Bill Murray in the future, from what I've been hearing.

due to health or bad behavior?

his last couple left me cold in that way but everything up thru moonrise kingdom hits

Recently re-watched Grand Budapest and it held up, one of my favorites

The latter:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/11/bill-murray-settlement-inappropriate-behavior-being-mortal

And on an Aziz Ansari set, jeez

This one looks good. Anderson’s style has evolved in an interesting way at least for me, just because it’s so much his own and so starkly different from what anyone else is doing. If anyone else tried to copy him it would be a total disaster. I’ve got total respect for his thing, just bc he’s clearly not aiming for awards despite being a “prestige” filmmaker, he’s just telling the odd and sometimes complicated stories he wants to tell. The mix of deadpan humor and slapstick and well earned pathos/tragedy works well for me, and despite the films seeming artificial I find them a lot more moving than most of the flicks out there that really strive for something more realistic.

The dollhouse approach produced The Grand Budapest Hotel, his best live action film since Tenenbaums.

it's fun to see actors from outside his world come in and see how they fit or not...like Bruce Willis being my favorite thing in Moonrise

I likewise thought Ralph Fiennes too brittle for Andersonland.

I liked (Charged)GBH the best out of the current era. French Dispatch was dogshit.

spent hours reading a circa 1960 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia

This was me ages 8-12 (80-84 or so), exact year as well (I remember it said JFK had just been elected).

Ha, funnily enough I recently ordered a two-volume set of World Book Encyclopedias specifically about the British Isles, originally published in 1968; my folks had it when I was young and I remember poring over it quite a bit in the late 70s/early 80s. Oddly enough, they don't remember owning it at all, and it does indeed provide a very specific 'this is how I learned' vibe for me, though it's just an artifact now in many ways.

Skipped The French Dispatch, so enough time has elapsed that I'm looking forward to a return to Wesland.

tipsy's observations are 100% OTM. I guess the contemporary equivalent would be teens listening to their parents' CD copies of Rumours?

I agree with ums - Anderson always had tendencies, but his characters stopped being even remotely lived and became wholly something out of the imagination of a precocious 12 yo.

curious that WA's output has ramped along with progress in AI

Ten iconic directors shoot the World Cup. More experiments with Midjourney & AI.

1. Wes Anderson pic.twitter.com/sxGSaVi63I

— Mason London (@masonlondon) March 27, 2023

lol at the Michael Bay one

Wes always seems to be finding the new Michael Cera

think my problem now is that UK adverts have adopted his aesthetic so heavily that I'm unable to enjoy his work for what it is

I liked (Charged)GBH the best out of the current era. French Dispatch was dogshit.

UK adverts have adopted his aesthetic

Boots ads are pastel now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iHT_pxHtHY

no need for AI to see Wes Anderson fitba coverage

I like his trailers better than his movies, honestly 3 minutes of this guy is really all I need

I liked (Charged)GBH the best out of the current era. French Dispatch was dogshit.

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 29, 2023 12:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

french dispatch would be a good name for a street punk band

I like his trailers better than his movies, honestly 3 minutes of this guy is really all I need

Btw this is not a unique observation, but watching the recent Fire of Love documentary (about two quirky French volcanologists, narrated by Miranda July) was extremely Anderson-esque. Down to the red hats. He had to have seen some of that footage, right?

yeah the red hats got me thinking the same thing

the hats are a Jacques Cousteau thing, as in TLAWSZ

Hope Davis is everywhere nowadays

I have a friend who leads a marine biology group on St. Martin and they very consciously copy the whole Life Aquatic look and vibe (obviously originally from Cousteau, but I'm positive they were inspired by the Anderson film)

This looks good and might even be great but posting just to say that it is really amazing how he moves steadily deeper and deeper into his thing with each movie. Don't think he's ever even attempted to pivot from the stereotype of a Wes Anderson movie, just embraces it progressively more wholeheartedly. you go, auteur

I generally agree with this but I can think of one big exception: at one point a stereotypical Wes Anderson movie would have had wall-to-wall needle drops of 60s/70s pop songs. He really tapered that off starting with Darjeeling. (Could be related to the fact that that was his last human-populated movie ostensibly set in the present day?) I'm sure a lot of people think of this as a positive step in his progression, but man, I'd like to see him go back to that well at least a little more often. He's never topped the "A Quick One" sequence in Rushmore as far as I'm concerned.

first impression from Belgian newspaper's reviewer at Cannes: "a collection of great looking tableaux, but doesn't grab you"

Who'da thunk?

Reviews of this one seem to be mostly vv positive

Think I might try to see, since I’ve been sitting him out for so long.

yeah I'm still watching it, I don't always agree with movie reviewers :-)

"a collection of great looking tableaux, but doesn't grab you" is EXACTLY what The French Dispatch was.

Richard Lawson said it was his favorite since Moonrise Kingdom, which made me perk up bc that was the last one I liked, too. (Actually, I haven't seen Isle of Dogs, but Grand Budapest and French Dispatch both left me cold.)

"a collection of great looking tableaux, but doesn't grab you" is EXACTLY what The French Dispatch was.

The thing I liked about the trailer was Last Train To San Fernando

Yeah, Moonrise Kingdom, as with Fantastic Mr. Fox before it, re-ignited my waning interest in Wes Anderson

this one looks the closest in style and tone to moonrise kingdom, at least from the trailer. that's the foundation of my excitement