Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (2023)

Also: you're making a mistake not watching Fantastic Mr. Fox, still his best.

Ned is, that is.

I wouldn’t call it an emotional breakthrough. More a matter of consolidating his strengths. Much like the freight rain celebrated in the song that plays over the titles, it is notable for its speed. The beats are perfectly spaced for a screwball comedy. He has also forgone trying to portray 3-dimensional characters, with the exception that proves the rule being the Schwartzman character, and even there the attempt at depth becomes part of the joke, with the director of the “play outside the play” critiquing his performance. Anderson films at their best are pure escapism. The only genuine emotion that should exist in the film is regret that the fun will have to end at some point, and the most effective emotional moments are allusions to that realization.

I think he did that in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Yeah he started moving in that direction. Just feel like this one went a bit further.

It helps that he also jettisoned the requirement to have a coherent plot.

Anderson films at their best are pure escapism

My sister's review was succinct: she fell asleep.

Tbf, she also said, "Shit sandwich."

lol this thread will blessedly reach consensus -- or sanity.

will NEVER lol

see?

i think i made my peace with wes anderson when i was watching the french dispatch and it dawned on me that ALL his movies are kid movies! not to sell him short. a decent kid movie is still just as hard to make as any normal movie. and i'll still take his kid movies over tim burton's kid movies. or YA movies, whatever. YA people are still kids. movies for brainy kids whose parents read the new yorker. kid movies that parents can be bemused by. it struck me that all the dialogue in his movies sounds like a play that a kid wrote at their country day school and who then got to get everyone to perform it instead of Our Town. which is probably why i'm most fond of rushmore because it stays true to that vibe so well without making me feel like an idiot for sitting through ridiculous fairy tale acting and hammy dialogue readings. do i wish that the snicket generation had more depth and darkness a la roald dahl? no, not really. i'll just read roald dahl and watch guillermo del toro movies. #hellboy4ever

French Dispatch had a lot of pubes for a kids movie.

This was ... even worse than The Whale. My college years are truly over.

Nah. We're as one on that thing.

I enjoyed myself!

i’m about to do that thing where someone watches a film & then critiques it by inventing their own version of it BUT i would have loved this if there weren’t for the whole meta layers of it being a TV broadcast of a play or whatever. all the parts that were the “play” felt to me like a top notch version of the stuff that he does really well in his signature way. i connected emotionally with those scenes, in particular many interactions between the kids, the kids and the adults, and the scenes with scar jo & schwartzman’s characters. all the black and white cranston stuff was distracting at best imo, that whole aspect felt unnecessary to me. i think it would have been a wonderful little film without those diversions. maybe even his best since fantastic mr fox — it’s hidden in there somewhere — but with what it is in reality i can’t get there

Yeah, I kinda agree. Need a rewatch, but from a first viewing it feels like that framing is there entirely because Anderson wanted to play in that format/era, not because it ties in to the rest of the film emotionally or thematically. The balcony scene was good tho.

The framing is the product of roman coppola imo

We saw it yesterday, I liked it more than my wife did, neither of us loved it. The deliberate distancing of all the meta layers, combined with the murmury flatness of the performances, had what I assume was their intended effect — conveying the emotional deadening and sublimation that can come with grief and pain. But also obviously the effect of keeping the viewer's emotional engagement low too. I thought ScarJo handled all that well and still managed to convey some emotional depth. Schwartzman was (as the movie itself notes) more of a collection of mannerisms. Again, clearly intentional, but a bit too clever. Still, what I liked: the intricacy of the setting, as always; the kids were all pretty good, the three little girls especially; Tom Hanks kind of surprised me, a nice little performance; the alien stuff was pretty well handled.

Overall for me, a mid-level Anderson.

I've been surprised at the number of critics I respect praising his emotional maturity or something. I thought he achieved whatever that means in 2014 or even 1998?

Yeah I felt like GBH was the biggest move there, in terms of a "mature style." French Dispatch and Asteroid City aren't exactly regressions, but they're more interested in formal experimentation it seems to me. Which is fine, he's always been interested in narrative form and different layers of storytelling, I don't begrudge him following his own curiosity. Just not as engaging for me as a viewer, even though I admire the mechanics. He doesn't seem like he's phoning it in or anything, he's putting a lot of effort and thought into it.

As entertaining and engaging most of his movies are, GBH might be the only movie of his I've ever really given any thought to. Often I find his modestly Brechtian artifice and, yeah, mechanics maybe too successful.

GBH is maybe his most "political" film in that it seems to be saying something about the position of the artistic/aesthetic life in the face of totalitarianism or fascism. I think that The French Dispatch is reaching for something similar but gets overwhelmed by all the silliness, while GBH strikes a better balance.

I've had a chance to watch GBH once a semester (most recently last Wednesday) with my students, and it hasn't bored me yet: those witty tilts and pans, the wedding cake look of the hotel, and, for once, a relationship between a POC and a white man interrogated in a Wes Anderson film. And Ralph Fiennes gives probably the best central performance in any Anderson joint

I feel the emotional core of GBH loses a lot once you read enough Stefan Zweig to see how much of it is pastiche.

On the contrary! That sense of loss drifts through the hotel lobby like a stagnant breeze.

“actors playing actors playing people” is generally my impression of the characters in wes anderson movies, and he obviously turned that to 11 in this one…but I was surprised to find myself enjoying this as much as I did, it’s charming and well-paced, and anderson’s control over the camera is undeniable. but for me there’s always this tenderness I’m missing in his movies

le nerd est nerdy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynyFwKXSwB8

What kind of an accent is he putting on there?

Enjoyed this a lot, thought that he didn’t handle the framing device well

https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/why-is-wes-anderson-s-star-studded-asteroid-city-crashing-onto-digital-after-3-weeks-in-theaters/ar-AA1dFTzy

I'll probably still drag myself out to a theatre in the next couple of weeks. As you can tell, I expect to and even want to hate this.

I liked this quite a bit, but definitely agree that the framing device felt fumbled a little bit. I did like the scenes with Adrien Brody living on set, but even those felt tacked on just because. Would have just as happily lived in the actual Asteroid City for the entire film.

I know I’m getting old, but the rapid fire robotic monotone line delivery was so ott in this that some of the dialogue was lost on me

While I do like the majority of WA films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore have always seemed in a class by themselves to me bc unlike the films that came after, they still appear to take place on a planet that is recognizably similar to our human homeworld of Earth, which counts for a lot in my book re: “emotional maturity”

Yeah, I like those less for basically the same reason. What I want from my Anderson is deep melancholy within a super stylized boy's adventure setting. So Moonrise Kingdom is my fave, I have a lot more patience for Life Aquatic than most, and Tennenbaums does nothing for me.

While I do like the majority of WA films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore have always seemed in a class by themselves to me bc unlike the films that came after, they still appear to take place on a planet that is recognizably similar to our human homeworld of Earth, which counts for a lot in my book re: “emotional maturity"

I agree completely; Rushmore (my favorite film when I was in high school) has what I love about Anderson but it’s still at the level of whimsy rather than full-on. I still enjoy his later work but do wish he’d do his equivalent of an Ed Wood—i.e., a return to a more subdued film.

I think I've seen Bottle Rocket significantly more than any of his other films.

Never really understood the appeal of Bottle Rocket tbh.

I don't either.

It's a funny, low-stakes heist movie. Very quotable and more charming than most '90s indie films of that ilk.

Yeah, Rushmore is the first Wes Anderson™️ movie for me, tho I like Bottle Rocket just fine

The chase scene at the end where Owen Wilson's is haplessly fleeing the cops while "2000 Man" plays on the soundtrack is the most Wes Anderson™️ scene in it — and I love it. But definitely true that Rushmore is where his style/shtick really comes together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx0slK4FfE

It's a funny, low-stakes heist movie. Very quotable and more charming than most '90s indie films of that ilk.

Rushmore his peak purely because of

"These are OR scrubs"
"O r they?"

I was surprised that Steve Carell was in this movie when Jason Schwartmann seems to be doing a Steve Carell impression throughout - so it made a lot of sense when I read that the Steve Carell role was supposed to be Bill Murray before he caught Covid / "caught" "Covid"

Rushmore his peak purely because of

Schwartzman: "What's that supposed to mean?"
Cox: (mockingly) "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Were you in the shit?"
"I was in the shit."

My fave bit in Bottle Rocket is when Owen decides they should all wear band-aids across their noses, just to throw off witnesses.

"Why are you all wearing Band-Aids?"

"Exactly."

Also, " they'll never catch me, because I'm fucking innocent" pops into my head a lot.

Tbf, I saw Bottle Rocket first, when it came out, so there may be some sentimental attachment. I also don't really think of his output as something I could honestly rank; for better or for worse, they are all very much of a piece. But I do like the first two movies a lot because they are kinda about odd people trying to find their place in the (more or less real) world, rather than affected weirdos living in their own stylized worlds. I suppose Moonrise Kingdom fits this mold as well.

Almost goes without saying, but the poignancy of Rushmore was all about the overwhelming desire to live in an aesthetically perfect snowglobe pocket universe, and the ties that bind to a sadder, more complicated world outside. Asteroid City seemed like his most determined attempt to disavow any outside - almost a Derridean dedication to Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. It's all theatre, all the way down. Particularly the scene where Augie says "I need some air" and is told "you won't find it", and ends up escaping the theatre to the balcony where he meets the Margot Robbie wife character who was written out, on her break from another play. There's a vertiginous thrill from the infinite meringue nest of fictional frames - reminded me of At Swim-Two-Birds! - but I found it suffocating.