A thread for Wes Anderson's "The Fantastic Mr. Fox"

I'm also still annoyed because I read a review of an animation (Lilo & Stitch IIRC) that said 'the drawings might look crude and flat to the post-Pixar viewers'. wtf, srsly.

I miss movies with hand drawn animation.

you're looking forward to the princess and the frog

Ponyo was nice.

rubbish

this was good.

you're looking forward to the princess and the frog

If Disney never made another princess movie they would still have done way too many.

except that 'enchanted' was awesome.

this was really rubbish

Sadly this week's New Yorker article isn't online, with its comparisons to Hemingway and Howard Hawks.

man i already hate this movie

actors and directors are often a little distant and weird but not actively awful. DPs, PAs, assistant directors, editors, mid-level producers, grips....those people are really doing Important Work and they don't want to hear about it, they're Fucking Busy Right Now.

― omar little, Sunday, October 11, 2009 5:04 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

stuntmen are the chillest dudes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tNUP_gW_C0

Interesting that the big Wes drop-off occurred after Owen Wilson stopped co-writing. The last couple are proof that character quirks are really no sub for story, or at least that Noah Baumbach and b-list Coppolas are no sub for Wilson.

I enjoyed this. Maybe because it mined, sometimes literally, the same vein as The Royal Tenenbaums. Could do without the Jarvis Cocker song and puppet, it was plenty self indulgent enough already without him joining in.

Incidentally this was the emptiest screening I've ever been to with only 7 people, including myself, and this on the night they reduce tickets to £4 each.

Best movie I've seen this year, probably (out of the two dozen or so).

Plot incoherent in places, but I'll agree it's one of the year's best. I have a crush on Kristoferson.

For some bizarre reason I went along to this thinking it was directed by Wes Craven. Kept waiting for the nasties to happen.

haha my friend was thinking that too, she told me as the credits began, and i'm like, wait, you sat through this whole movie and didn't realize it was like every other wes anderson movie all of which i know you have seen?? lols. i think it was a case of knowing-but-not-knowing. half-knowing. anyway.

i liked it a lot.
probably more than other wes anderson movies. or at least found it funnier than the others. (yet still weird and sad and existential and all that of course.) i couldn't stop laughing at the way the foxes eat.

I have a crush on Kristoferson.

Ha, me too. I kept wondering why everyone kept calling Ash "different" when it seemed totally obvious that Kris was the "different" one.

I enjoyed the cuss out of this.

i'd really like to see this. has it been doing well at box office?

seeing this tonight tbh

xpost apparently not very

(Meanwhile, wtf at The Blind Side tracking to top $150m?)

saw it thursday, thanksgiving eve, the day after it opened in seattle. theater was mostly empty for the 8 pm show at a downtown multiplex, but i guess that's to be expected under the circumstances. FUCKING GREAT! easily my favorite of the handful of films i've seen this year, and while anderson's clearly running familiar paces, he's doing so in fine style. found it much more engaging and satisfying than the life aquatic or the darjeeling limited. up there with rushmore and the royal tenenbaums (which yeah it strongly resembles), and that's extremely high praise as far as i'm concerned. expect that it won't be a big u.s. theatrical hit, but that it'll enjoy a long and successful shelf life afterward.

my kid wants to see this but it looks way too talky and plotty to me, so I'd better hold off until dvd.

is rather talky & plotty, also a bit emotionally heavy. appropriateness probably depends on the age/kid.

i don't know if any kids will actually like this movie. it was cute, though, i was entertained.

It's about as talky and plotty as any kids' film.

Took my kid (age 5) this afternoon. He liked it pretty well, although he didn't quote the movie too much afterward, which lends credence to the overly talky element. It moves along at a pretty good pace and is pretty action packed. Not emotionally heavy at all as far as we were concerned. None of the peril was too real, I guess. A much more entertaining choice for the kids than Wild Things Are.

i took a nearly 4 and nearly 6 y/o, it was fine. if anything its just too overtly meta-- the theme is "who am i and how do i authentically express that without endangering or estranging my loved ones." and its not like the theme lurks somewhere in the background, it's express.

i liked it, the kids had fun. there were fewer real moments of great delight than some of the better recent pixar stuff for me tho.

i dunno about this guys, something about it rubbed me the wrong way... just how WA seems to need to really consciously put his stamp on everything... it's getting so tiring

i was into it for the first half or so and then at some point it just lost me... i was spending more time staring at the wallpaper and stuff than caring about the story

also this trend of grown-up directors making children's book movies where every character acts like an emotionally tortured wacky indie rocker is just too much already.

I think you'd have to really be stretching to say every character in FMF acts like an emotionally tortured wacky indie rocker. iirc, only the two teen boys act that way because, well, it may be because they're teen boys and would obviously be expected to act like emotionally tortured wacky indie rockers.

i.e. I'm not prepared to lump this in with Spike Jonze's thing I haven't seen

i dunno, when mrs. fox says "i should have never married you," i mean i guess the off-the-cuffness and the contrast to the storybook visuals is supposed to give it a surprising emotional oomph but it left me cold.

if it helps eric i haven't seen the spike jonze thing either haha

yeah, i had no problem late-arriving on that particular movie

also the way he shoots conversations with each character looking straight into the camera in the middle of the frame bugs the hell out of me

i found it weird that he's taken on a totally new medium and genre and subject and method of filmmaking and yet it still feels weirdly unambitious... like he's just content to do his thing with the fonts and the beach boys and the nice outfits and make sure we all know it's a wes anderson movie

this trend of grown-up directors making children's book movies where every character acts like an emotionally tortured wacky indie rocker is just too much already.

― 311 is a joek (s1ocki), Sunday, November 29, 2009 6:04 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark

what, two frickin movies? how is that a played-out trend?

would agree in theory that wacky indie kids' flix should suck, but this was way better than yr (perfectly fair) capsule description makes it sound. then again, i never became disconnected from the story & characters.

thought the "i should never have married you" line worked very well. not as a big emo stomach kicker, but as a rather poignant and honest moment. no big deal, but nice.

The Wes Andersonisms didn't really move the entire thing one way or the other for me. I simply thought it was at least as good as a Wallace & Gromit movie. And that was enough.

ya tbh i'm not sure exactly WHAT bothered me about this movie that i should have in theory really liked! just trying to unpack it a little. i certainly didn't hate it, and i enjoyed probably about 50% of it... but then it just lost me somehow...

Plus, the movie seemed in on the joke that despite the kid's whining the Fox household reminded me of the Huxtables, i.e. the husband loved his frostier wife more than hanging out with his child.

might wanna consider that wa's stylistic hallmarks could be more than wallpaper applied to things in order to remind us that he is he. an artistic reflection of his interests, taste and pov, f'rinstance.

tbh, i'd like to see a bit more variety in that regard myself, cuz it's true that he doesn't seem to be growing/exploring/experimenting much as a filmmaker (beyond the obvious technical challenge of making a stop-motion film), but i don't think his surface style is disconnected from deeper content.

ya i guess it just bugs me that his particular "trademarks" don't always serve the film first and foremost... like i just felt a bit overwhelmed by them. and it didn't really feel dahl-ish at all, which it didn't HAVE to, but that would have been nice.

i can't help but think of tarantino, or michael mann, who are also always revisiting their obsessions and their stylistic fixations but who still seem to do something new or surprising or fresher every time.

i haven't seen this movie yet but i get the impression sometimes that wes should just be a set designer or something and leave the story to someone else

but this was one of my favorite books as a kid, so i will be seeing it

Do you want him to grow and experiment as a filmmaker (I think he is in Fox, btw, insofar as he acknowledges that the animated film puts his limitations in their most attractive context)?

Most mainstream Hollywood stuff is so awful that I understand looking at Anderson, PTA, Coppola, Jonze, and so on as figures around whom equal parts provocative ideas and twaddle cohere, but the pressure to look at this crew as Great Filmmakers is oppressive.

It is admittedly a thematic step backwards after the end of Darjeeling, in which he seemed to finally acknowledge that his stylistic attitude was at a dead end.