Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Clint Eastwood, American Sniper
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game
Showing posts with label WES ANDERSON. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WES ANDERSON. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Monday, October 14, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Top Ten of 2012
The constant fixation has completed, for the time being. Here are my picks for the ten best motion pictures of 2012:
10) SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS
Martin McDonagh's razor sharp gangster absurdest comedy brings out the very best in the famed playwright-- rapid fire dialogue, acute characterizations and a mocking self absorption all funneled into a witty and acidic crime-laced world filled with that kind of violent brio that would make a young Quentin Tarantino proud to steal from for ages. A tongue in check meta Adaptation. crossed with Pulp Fiction, McDonagh's buildhas s nicely from his first feature, 2008's In Bruges, telling the story of a struggling Los Angeles screenwriter (Colin Farrell) who becomes engaged in crooked folk and the most oddball assortment of characters in any feature from 2012 after the misbegotten theft of an idiosyncratic gangster's beloved Shih Tzu. What could have easily been thrown away as a creative writing assignment is the virtue and the strange zesty soulfulness of the cast. Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, and Christopher Walken, all at their most unhinged, make Seven Psychopaths a joyful generous comedy of manners, each divisive and succinct, playing off one another, unpredictably and impenetrably, creating a delightfully warped dadaism to McDonagh's self aware violent hymn.
9) THE MASTER
The arc of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's cinematic career is one of the most savory in recent memory. Brash and electric when first thrust upon the scene as one of America's most exciting to watch, first he seemed to be mirroring Robert Altman's approach with the grand ensemble films like Boogie Nights and Magnolia. A shift seemed to occur after his last film, There Will Be Blood, and most certainly in his polarizing, galvanic, unsettling and gargantuan staging of The Master. At first roused upon as that movie that speaks (or mocks, or what have you) the early formation of the Church of Scientology. Anderson's ambition, as with There Will Be Blood, was far greater than a reductive tagline or concept. Instead, The Master, speaks of a culture, a lost America in search of salvation, or a cause, or something tangible. The filmmaker has never quite been so reserved before, nor as chillingly oblique, but even while the film may keep itself forever at a heady distance from its audience, there's a wonderment and poetry to be utterly savored. As teacher and student, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix bring out the very best in each other, and as the film charts their relationship-- the film changes, morphs and alternates between a grand performance achievement, something akin to the likes of what it may have felt like to witness Marlon Brando for the first time-- and a deeper and chillier mediation of life and religion.
8) ZERO DARK THIRTY
Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Marc Boal are back for more fun in the Middle East, following their Oscar-winning small wonder that could in 2009's The Hurt Locker, and return with a loftier bit of war of terror business in their staging of the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden, again exacting a thrillingly sharp view of the danger seekers who put their lives at sake for the safety of others. Sprawling, nervy and ambitious, Zero Dark Thirty is a chillingly masterful stroke of journalism with a savvy and sharply adept (non) character study of Maya, a top level CIA agent who holds a huge part in the eventual outcome. Playing with a tough-minded grace by Jessica Chastain, she maintains the thorny disparate narratives, in and out players, and the dead-end clues with pluck and intelligence. And while the masterful execution of Zero Dark Thirty is immense and wonderfully wrought, the tenacity and stoicism of Maya bring the film an emotional rawness and tenderness, far more interesting than the films alleged views on torture or the debatable liberties taken with may have actually occurred.
7) WRECK-IT-RALPH
There may have been little to look forward to on the onset to this animated feature about an alienated video game villain who wants to be a hero, but the joyous and inventive Wreck-It-Ralph, perhaps by playing to ones lesser-than expectations, is one of the most generously playful and moving films I saw in a movie theater in all of 2012. Witty, surprising and magnificently executed, simultaneously playing on the feverish novelty and nostalgia of arcade games, while creating something thrillingly alive at the same time. Even with the patented be-true-to-oneself message that tries to ever cloy at it's sides, director Rich Moore, his animators, and ideally cast vocal stars gently subvert any triteness with warped bits of silliness, an inspired, carefully layered screenplay that splices video game arcania with even niftier displays of the heart, and jubilant, free-associative meditation of redemption. A video game villain in a group therapy session filled with villains of yore exclaiming the virtues of being bad may be most favorite scene of any feature this past year.
6) LOOPER
Rian Johnson's ultra slick science fiction odyssey was the niftiest bit of slight of hand in 2012-- an ambitious and unassuming morality play that uses the sometimes stale device of time travel in a marvelously wrought and inventive way. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis are both wonderful, playing younger and older Joe, a once steely reserved professional whose life was changed by a particularly defining incident that ties the marvelously contrasted whole together. Filled with endless creativity, imagination and style, Johnson-- the man behind the indie genre busters Brick and The Brothers Bloom-- rises to graces (hopefully the grandest) of heftier Hollywood properties with a deft eye for scope, graceful notes for storytelling, and an incisive voice and bridges all those qualities into the most unique and original genre film of last year.
5) LINCOLN
The surprising things about Steven Spielberg's epic biography feature of our 16th president is that firstly, it's not really a biography feature. Missing is a great man treatise of the episodic passages of Abraham Lincoln's life. Instead we focus on one chapter-- his journey to get the 13th Amendment passed, and thus ending slavery. The second surprising part is how, and I mean this as a wondrous compliment, unlike a Spielberg film his Lincoln really is. Scripted, poetically and bountifully by Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a stirring, wonderfully entertaining master play of politics, with a sprawling ensemble that points to the most decidedly performance driven feature of all of Spielberg's career, as well as his most visually subdued-- brilliant but held back, letting the actors and their words capture the show. In that regard, the film still needed its Lincoln, and Daniel Day-Lewis, capturing the idea of this man in enough inventive little details to ruminate on for a lifetime, is jaw-dropping astounding as master and commander. What springs is an uncommonly good film that while tackling one of the single most important moments in our nations history, captures the idea, the mythology and the politics all shrouded around a grander notion of Abraham Lincoln. For whatever reason-- perhaps goading from Kushner, or Day-Lewis, or thoughts of his own legacy, Spielberg made the more surprising and the better film.
4) FRANKENWEENIE
Director Tim Burton, whose warpy imagination has for too long now been branded by an industry that has little interest nor canny sensibility to do with it, did something quietly amazing in 2012. Adapting his own live action short film, the same one that cost him his early gig at Disney, into a stop motion animated feature. No matter that it tanked at the box office, this sweetly demented riff on monster movies and the lure of mans best friend was what Burton needed to do-- either as atonement for his recent output or creative recharging-- and what his long suffering fans hoped for year now. Shot in gorgeous black and white, and made with the mystifying visual sense and style that made Burton such an electric artist to begin with, Frankenweenie was one of the most hopeful and buoyant cinematic experiences in all of 2012-- a religious experience for film nerds who came of age in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
3) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
Benh Zeitlin's astoundingly original and mythic tale of the denizens of "The Bathtub" and the intrepid young warrior named Hushpuppy engulf the cinematic imagination that delightful and intangible way of reminding the power and artfulness in which movie are capable of-- to absorb and the thrill the senses at the excitement of seeing something for the very first time. Even the most jaded aficionados must have recoiled with that sense at some point during Beasts of the Southern Wild, which at its simplest details a lifestyle on the fringes-- in this case off the levees of Louisiana, left with nothing to do but surrender in the awe and scope of this grandly, yet scrappy tale of survival and mysticism. Young Quvenzhane Wallis may have just been six when she made this film, but her charisma, drive and determination nets a performance that transcends mere accolades, and like the film, strikes the heart, just as the film creates an ever optimistic hopefulness for American independent filmmaking.
2) LES MISERABLES
Do you hear the people sing? Well yes, and their singing live in Tom Hooper's moving and sincere epic telling of the beyond popular musical, itself derived from the immortal work by Victor Hugo. The endless gripping and drubbing of the film has done nothing to alter my take, my love and lust for this delectable movie musical. Unapologetically wearing its heart on its sleeve and made with a go-for-broke brio that singes right into the immortal cinematic soul, Hooper's Les Miserables is firstly a grand performance piece with star Hugh Jackman baring all as the graceful lead of Jean Valjean, a fugitive imprisoned who seeks a redemptive life and Anne Hathaway's searingly emotional Fantine, a true miserables, glides in with a heavenly voice and immortalizes a classic song that long ago had faded into novelty. What's most astonishing about Les Miserables, and may be a clue as to what get people all worked up at it, is the way Hooper and his team boldly go for the gut, making a riveting, thought long ago defunct emotional epic. Les Miserables on a technical standpoint, or on a mere bits and pieces dissection may be the one film on this list that I have the most issues with, but I stand that in all strives in making the film more interesting and magical.
1) MOONRISE KINGDOM
A perfect melding of material with its artist. Wes Anderson, eternally besieged as the precocious maker of the preciously gilded and inventively art-directed. The rules of the game continue with Moonrise Kingdom, but the surprise and the delight of his best feature film since 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, is that there's an enchanting and lovingly melancholic undertone. A tale of young, adolescent love and quirky at-odds grown-up in a vacuum of 1960s nostalgia, Moonrise Kingdom is engrossing and witty, but with the surprising tugs of something more, something deeper and ultimately something far more personal that Anderson has ever shared with us on screen before. What's left and what's taken away is the best movie of 2012.
Martin McDonagh's razor sharp gangster absurdest comedy brings out the very best in the famed playwright-- rapid fire dialogue, acute characterizations and a mocking self absorption all funneled into a witty and acidic crime-laced world filled with that kind of violent brio that would make a young Quentin Tarantino proud to steal from for ages. A tongue in check meta Adaptation. crossed with Pulp Fiction, McDonagh's buildhas s nicely from his first feature, 2008's In Bruges, telling the story of a struggling Los Angeles screenwriter (Colin Farrell) who becomes engaged in crooked folk and the most oddball assortment of characters in any feature from 2012 after the misbegotten theft of an idiosyncratic gangster's beloved Shih Tzu. What could have easily been thrown away as a creative writing assignment is the virtue and the strange zesty soulfulness of the cast. Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, and Christopher Walken, all at their most unhinged, make Seven Psychopaths a joyful generous comedy of manners, each divisive and succinct, playing off one another, unpredictably and impenetrably, creating a delightfully warped dadaism to McDonagh's self aware violent hymn.
The arc of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's cinematic career is one of the most savory in recent memory. Brash and electric when first thrust upon the scene as one of America's most exciting to watch, first he seemed to be mirroring Robert Altman's approach with the grand ensemble films like Boogie Nights and Magnolia. A shift seemed to occur after his last film, There Will Be Blood, and most certainly in his polarizing, galvanic, unsettling and gargantuan staging of The Master. At first roused upon as that movie that speaks (or mocks, or what have you) the early formation of the Church of Scientology. Anderson's ambition, as with There Will Be Blood, was far greater than a reductive tagline or concept. Instead, The Master, speaks of a culture, a lost America in search of salvation, or a cause, or something tangible. The filmmaker has never quite been so reserved before, nor as chillingly oblique, but even while the film may keep itself forever at a heady distance from its audience, there's a wonderment and poetry to be utterly savored. As teacher and student, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix bring out the very best in each other, and as the film charts their relationship-- the film changes, morphs and alternates between a grand performance achievement, something akin to the likes of what it may have felt like to witness Marlon Brando for the first time-- and a deeper and chillier mediation of life and religion.
Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Marc Boal are back for more fun in the Middle East, following their Oscar-winning small wonder that could in 2009's The Hurt Locker, and return with a loftier bit of war of terror business in their staging of the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden, again exacting a thrillingly sharp view of the danger seekers who put their lives at sake for the safety of others. Sprawling, nervy and ambitious, Zero Dark Thirty is a chillingly masterful stroke of journalism with a savvy and sharply adept (non) character study of Maya, a top level CIA agent who holds a huge part in the eventual outcome. Playing with a tough-minded grace by Jessica Chastain, she maintains the thorny disparate narratives, in and out players, and the dead-end clues with pluck and intelligence. And while the masterful execution of Zero Dark Thirty is immense and wonderfully wrought, the tenacity and stoicism of Maya bring the film an emotional rawness and tenderness, far more interesting than the films alleged views on torture or the debatable liberties taken with may have actually occurred.
There may have been little to look forward to on the onset to this animated feature about an alienated video game villain who wants to be a hero, but the joyous and inventive Wreck-It-Ralph, perhaps by playing to ones lesser-than expectations, is one of the most generously playful and moving films I saw in a movie theater in all of 2012. Witty, surprising and magnificently executed, simultaneously playing on the feverish novelty and nostalgia of arcade games, while creating something thrillingly alive at the same time. Even with the patented be-true-to-oneself message that tries to ever cloy at it's sides, director Rich Moore, his animators, and ideally cast vocal stars gently subvert any triteness with warped bits of silliness, an inspired, carefully layered screenplay that splices video game arcania with even niftier displays of the heart, and jubilant, free-associative meditation of redemption. A video game villain in a group therapy session filled with villains of yore exclaiming the virtues of being bad may be most favorite scene of any feature this past year.
Rian Johnson's ultra slick science fiction odyssey was the niftiest bit of slight of hand in 2012-- an ambitious and unassuming morality play that uses the sometimes stale device of time travel in a marvelously wrought and inventive way. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis are both wonderful, playing younger and older Joe, a once steely reserved professional whose life was changed by a particularly defining incident that ties the marvelously contrasted whole together. Filled with endless creativity, imagination and style, Johnson-- the man behind the indie genre busters Brick and The Brothers Bloom-- rises to graces (hopefully the grandest) of heftier Hollywood properties with a deft eye for scope, graceful notes for storytelling, and an incisive voice and bridges all those qualities into the most unique and original genre film of last year.
The surprising things about Steven Spielberg's epic biography feature of our 16th president is that firstly, it's not really a biography feature. Missing is a great man treatise of the episodic passages of Abraham Lincoln's life. Instead we focus on one chapter-- his journey to get the 13th Amendment passed, and thus ending slavery. The second surprising part is how, and I mean this as a wondrous compliment, unlike a Spielberg film his Lincoln really is. Scripted, poetically and bountifully by Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a stirring, wonderfully entertaining master play of politics, with a sprawling ensemble that points to the most decidedly performance driven feature of all of Spielberg's career, as well as his most visually subdued-- brilliant but held back, letting the actors and their words capture the show. In that regard, the film still needed its Lincoln, and Daniel Day-Lewis, capturing the idea of this man in enough inventive little details to ruminate on for a lifetime, is jaw-dropping astounding as master and commander. What springs is an uncommonly good film that while tackling one of the single most important moments in our nations history, captures the idea, the mythology and the politics all shrouded around a grander notion of Abraham Lincoln. For whatever reason-- perhaps goading from Kushner, or Day-Lewis, or thoughts of his own legacy, Spielberg made the more surprising and the better film.
Director Tim Burton, whose warpy imagination has for too long now been branded by an industry that has little interest nor canny sensibility to do with it, did something quietly amazing in 2012. Adapting his own live action short film, the same one that cost him his early gig at Disney, into a stop motion animated feature. No matter that it tanked at the box office, this sweetly demented riff on monster movies and the lure of mans best friend was what Burton needed to do-- either as atonement for his recent output or creative recharging-- and what his long suffering fans hoped for year now. Shot in gorgeous black and white, and made with the mystifying visual sense and style that made Burton such an electric artist to begin with, Frankenweenie was one of the most hopeful and buoyant cinematic experiences in all of 2012-- a religious experience for film nerds who came of age in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
Benh Zeitlin's astoundingly original and mythic tale of the denizens of "The Bathtub" and the intrepid young warrior named Hushpuppy engulf the cinematic imagination that delightful and intangible way of reminding the power and artfulness in which movie are capable of-- to absorb and the thrill the senses at the excitement of seeing something for the very first time. Even the most jaded aficionados must have recoiled with that sense at some point during Beasts of the Southern Wild, which at its simplest details a lifestyle on the fringes-- in this case off the levees of Louisiana, left with nothing to do but surrender in the awe and scope of this grandly, yet scrappy tale of survival and mysticism. Young Quvenzhane Wallis may have just been six when she made this film, but her charisma, drive and determination nets a performance that transcends mere accolades, and like the film, strikes the heart, just as the film creates an ever optimistic hopefulness for American independent filmmaking.
Do you hear the people sing? Well yes, and their singing live in Tom Hooper's moving and sincere epic telling of the beyond popular musical, itself derived from the immortal work by Victor Hugo. The endless gripping and drubbing of the film has done nothing to alter my take, my love and lust for this delectable movie musical. Unapologetically wearing its heart on its sleeve and made with a go-for-broke brio that singes right into the immortal cinematic soul, Hooper's Les Miserables is firstly a grand performance piece with star Hugh Jackman baring all as the graceful lead of Jean Valjean, a fugitive imprisoned who seeks a redemptive life and Anne Hathaway's searingly emotional Fantine, a true miserables, glides in with a heavenly voice and immortalizes a classic song that long ago had faded into novelty. What's most astonishing about Les Miserables, and may be a clue as to what get people all worked up at it, is the way Hooper and his team boldly go for the gut, making a riveting, thought long ago defunct emotional epic. Les Miserables on a technical standpoint, or on a mere bits and pieces dissection may be the one film on this list that I have the most issues with, but I stand that in all strives in making the film more interesting and magical.
A perfect melding of material with its artist. Wes Anderson, eternally besieged as the precocious maker of the preciously gilded and inventively art-directed. The rules of the game continue with Moonrise Kingdom, but the surprise and the delight of his best feature film since 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, is that there's an enchanting and lovingly melancholic undertone. A tale of young, adolescent love and quirky at-odds grown-up in a vacuum of 1960s nostalgia, Moonrise Kingdom is engrossing and witty, but with the surprising tugs of something more, something deeper and ultimately something far more personal that Anderson has ever shared with us on screen before. What's left and what's taken away is the best movie of 2012.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Central Ohio Film Critics
DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom
ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
ACTRESS: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Moonrise Kingdom- Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Lincoln- Tony Kushner
ENSEMBLE: Moonrise Kingdom
ANIMATED FEATURE: ParaNorman
DOCUMENTARY: How to Survive a Plague
FOREIGN FILM: The Kid with the Bike
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Skyfall- Roger Deakins
SCORE: Moonrise Kingdom- Alexandre Desplat
BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST: Bart Layton, The Imposter
ACTOR OF THE YEAR: Matthew McConaughey
MOST OVERLOOKED FILM: Killer Joe
Friday, December 21, 2012
Utah Film Critics Awards
 |
| Wes Anderson wins his first Best Director prize of the season for Moonrise Kingdom |
runner-up: Looper
DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom
runner-up: Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
ACTOR: Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
runners-up: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln; John Hawkes, The Sessions
ACTRESS: (tie) Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook; Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Dwight Henry, Beasts of the Southern Wild
runner-up: Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
runner-up: Ann Dowd, Compliance
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Looper- Rian Johnson
runner-up: The Cabin in the Woods- Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky
runner-up: Silver Linings Playbook- David O. Russell
ANIMATED FEATURE: ParaNorman
runners-up: Frankenweenie; Wreck-It-Ralph
DOCUMENTARY: Indie Game: The Movie
runner-up: The Invisible War
NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE FILM: Headhunters
runner-up: Amour
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Skyfall- Roger Deakins
runner-up: Life of Pi- Claudio Miranda
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Moonrise Kingdom and Oscar?
Well the golden reviews the Wes Anderson film received this summer were pretty impressive. A 94% on critical aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, and a 84 on Metacritic are comparable to falls heavy hitters (and certain Best Picture nominees) Argo and Lincoln; my review here. Plus, it's $45 million at the summer box office is good enough (more so than The Artist made last year.) It was a bonafide sleeper that played and played and played well. It held the record for the biggest opening weekend per-screen average for a live action feature of all time, until Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master yanked it away a mere four months later. It's an enchanting film, and upon its debut as the opener of this years Cannes Film Festival, many were wistful of the personally-honed nature that Wes Anderson channeled within his own idiosyncratic charm.
While Moonrise Kingdom will forever remain a dark horse Best Picture (and even more so Best Director) candidate, these early gets offer a nice bit of exposure for a film surely to be forgotten in the haste of the coming weeks. If nothing more, it solidifies what will surely be Moonrise's best bet-- an Original Screenplay nomination. Hopefully, the coming weeks will set up a win.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Moonrise Kingdom
Sam (Jared Gilman), an orphan khaki scout member, nearly pubescent, has runaway from his tribe headed by scout master Ward (Edward Norton.) He's a nerdy young man, an outcast, with diminished popularity in his team of scouts in the waning days of Summer on a fictional New England island in 1965. Suzy (Kara Hayward) is a wayward youth, ignored by her litigator parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), who on a whim for adventure joins Sam along for the journey...the two met a year prior and bonded over correspondence. What results is a two-fold story of the two kids (both of whom feel ostracized and marginalized by the disjointed grown-ups in their lives) and their puppy-love crush turned into something special, and the rag-tag group of people looking for the runaway fugitives. Along with Norton's scout master, and Murray and McDormand, Bruce Willis helps out as the towns police captain, and a team of khaki scouts who are more interested in a cold capture than helping the boy out.
There's a delicacy and poignancy (one that to Anderson's critics would read as overly precocious) to the kids will be kids developing romance between Sam and Suzy. The film partially plays like a chapter of a children's adventure story; one that Suzy herself admittedly relishes. However fleeting, there's touches of singular grace as the two interact. Sam, determined to figure things out for himself, and maybe feel a sense of connection; Suzy, more bored than damaged, in awe of the attention she's never received before, their union, while unlikely, is uniformly sweet. In a time where romantic comedies feel ever more disconnected from any sort of reality, it says a lot (in good ways and bad) that Moonrise Kingdom feels more authentic in the human spirit than a thousand cliche girl-meets-boys-stories in the past twenty years of film. Even in the artificially pastel-colored world of scout leagues and impossibly constructed New England home furnishings, Moonrise Kingdom has a soulfulness and aching heart to match every idiosyncratic Wes Anderson quirk.
Impeccably performed by a stellar ensemble, one that matches the auteurial challenges of Anderson's artifice while never outstripping the filmmaker from true star credit. Gilman and Hayward in particular are impressive for their natural line delivery and non-fuss chemistry, while the starry cast outside of them impressively (and seemingly relish) the poetic, heightened fantasy of summer camp that Anderson (and co-writer Roman Coppola) created. Alongside first time Anderson co-horts Norton, McDormand and Willis are Harvey Keitel as a rival scout leader, Bob Balaban as a sort of master of ceremonies and Tilda Swinton as a social worker known simply as Social Services. Anderson-alum Jason Schwartzman pops in as an officiator to Sam and Suzy's primal wedding. All seem to sparkle and jell to Anderson's wonderfully inventive, weird vision of past-time summer loving and adventure, marking Moonrise Kingdom a seductive art house diversion. It takes a gifted crew to make something that could come across so arch and overly staged, seemingly natural and playful.
While, alas Moonrise Kingdom likely won't convert those immune to Anderson's charms, it's still a distinctive, and I feel, definitive piece of his cinematic resume. After the sublime trip into stop motion with his last feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), and the diminishing returns of his last two live-actions films, The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and The Life Aquatic (2004), Anderson appears to have returned with a greater cinematic perspective of his offbeat sensibility, distilling what appears to be fragments of lost childhood in the shape an adventure that will likely be more absorbing than any battleship, alien invasion or superhero antic to be offered this summer. A-
Friday, March 9, 2012
Moonrise Kingdom to Open Cannes
The latest film from Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom, will open the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 16th. Co-written by Roman Coppola, the idiosyncratic comedy stars long time Anderson muses Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, as well as delectable newcomers Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton. This marks Anderson's first visit to Cannes. The film will open, courtesy of Focus Features, this summer.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Darjeeling Limited
An eternal movie nerd, I've been a loyal Wes Anderson devotee since the days of Bottle Rocket on to the glory of Rushmore and, my favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums. After The Life Aquatic, I began to lose faith-- maybe Anderson was just a meticulous set designer with an impeccable musical score. My faith returns with The Darjeeling Limited, which follows the same themes as his prior work, but opens up a possibly unsettling, more mature respect for life, while maintaining that offbeat, slightly melancholic humor that makes his films so special. This is arguably his moodiest film, and also his least plot-centered, but also atmospheric and full of feelings of anger, resentment, and mirth, it's the one least centered around overly precious set pieces (though there are still plenty) and seems to recall a sort of lost 1970s American road movie.
The films is about three brothers, although with the exception of their overly elongated noses they look nothing a like, reconnecting after a year separated on "The Darjeeling Limited," an Indian train. The Whitman brothers-- Francis (Owen Wilson,) Peter (Adrien Brody,) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) are all heavily neurotic and don't trust one another one lick, especially in the year absence since their father died, and their mother Patricia (Anjelica Huston) fled to India to become a nun.
Francis bands the three of them together for a spiritual journey throughout India, meticulously planning and updating his itinerary. He is also heavily bandaged from a motorcycle accident that might have been on purpose-- it's hard to not think about the real life Wilson in his characterization. Peter is dithering and prone to taking claim his deceased father's possessions, including a pair of prescription sunglasses he refuses to relinquish. He's also an expectant father, something he's kept secret, possibly masking his feared inadequacies of being a dad. And finally Jack, a writer of what he claims to be fiction, is getting over a crippling relationship-- he spies on his ex-girlfriend's answering machine.
That's the setup and all that's important. The brothers fight and argue and share Indian muscle relaxers all carrying their baggage with them. The symbolism with that is that they are literally carrying their baggage-- now famous matching luggage designed especially for the film by Dolce and Gabbanna. The first half of The Darjeeling Limited almost plays a Three Stooges episode with the goofy brothers squabbling and bickering and bracing into comical bits of physical comedy.
But it's the second half that's revelatory and surprising. When the train actually gets lost-- how does a train get lost, it's on rails? A wrong turn puts the brothers in turnaround and sets off on a real journey of enlightenment, one Francis couldn't possibly have planned. There's a scene so strong and jarring, I was momentarily jolted-- I won't give it away, it's best going in fresh, but it demonstrates, I think, an understated maturity by Anderson (who wrote the script with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman.)
The Darjeeling Limited is one of films I treasure for it's keen sense of surprise and wit. It's kind of like Wes Anderson unplugged. The elements of his previous movies are still there-- immaculate camera work, interesting set pieces, wonderful score, and generosity with actors that few or no other directors know how to properly use (Huston, Wilson, Schwartzman, and Bill Murray, who pops up here in an amusing cameo,) but there seems to be more emotion, more (often) brutal familial honesty and less fancy camerawork. As if he himself was on an emotional and spiritual journey reconnecting with making films that matter. A-
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