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Caught this Saturday night and while I enjoyed it and it was easier to follow than French Dispatch I feel like Wes Anderson is getting away from movies for anyone. Like I could show anyone Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic or MrFox and they’d enjoy them as much as anything else. This is veering into the quirky stuff he’s known for peppering in his older movies but doing it the entire time. I dunno - it’s just weird. It doesn’t have the same feel as his older movies.
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Jul 10, 2023 05:00
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Vintersorg posted:Caught this Saturday night and while I enjoyed it and it was easier to follow than French Dispatch I feel like Wes Anderson is getting away from movies for anyone. Like I could show anyone Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic or MrFox and they’d enjoy them as much as anything else. I think as an established voice artists generally do this. the phenomenon is refereed to as "late period style" because their career has allowed them to explore their own obsessions rather than chasing after audiences. Theodor Adorno posted:The maturity of the late works does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are for the most part not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth. The usual view explains this with the argument that they are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, "personality," which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated. even famed populists like nolan are not immune to it (imagine the guy who made tenet and oppenheimer wanting to do somthing like a batman or even an interstellar ever again). artists generally start getting more inside baseball, because as picassso (and recently scorsese) bemoaned "“I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say”" at least "asteroid city" isnt killers of the flower moon in length atrus50 fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 20:25
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Martman posted:This one I didn't feel that way, but I'm still fascinated by it and it's leaving me a lot to think about. I almost never want to rewatch movies when they're fresh in my mind but this one I really want to give another go at soon. Yeah, during the "you can't wake up if you don't go to sleep" scene I was thinking: "oh gently caress, this is going over my head. I need to watch this again." imho, of all of Anderson's movies, this one has the most themes and ideas to dig into. It feels slightly frustrating because it resists any one reading. IMHO it's about accepting the unknowable; literally, as with the alien, but also figuratively, as in the purpose of our lives, especially after grief or trauma. What is the correct thing to do with a box full of your loved ones' ashes?... ultimately, it doesn't matter whether or not what's "right" makes perfect sense. You just bury the ashes so you can move on. Sometimes you just need to accept things (fall asleep) so you can continue living (wake up). In a way, Wes Anderson is also forcing the viewer to "just go with it"... you start in a desert town, where there are continual cops and robbers having car chases; a wriggling blue piece explodes out of a broken car; these things are obviously absurd, but you can't move on to the heavier parts of the film without first accepting some the absurd reality you're shown Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 19:14
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I thought the scenes after the arrival of the alien were really good. The teacher is trying to get on with stuff a bit but everything keeps coming back to this thing that has entered their lives, something completely out of the ordinary context of their day to day, and the kids keep bringing everything back to it. And why shouldn't they, it would be hard in the moment to see how anything you cared about before could matter after that!
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Jul 11, 2023 19:21
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I just rewatched Rushmore, and Darjeeling Limited over the last few weeks, and saw Asteroid tonight. I think Schwartzman may be one of my favorite actors. I liked the Play character, but the real character is amazing as well if that makes any sense. I kind of feel like this: https://twitter.com/heylkatme/status/1677407964498481154?s=46&t=aodJzaq7CsSYKyH5SqrFJQ
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Jul 14, 2023 05:53
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Just saw this and loved it. The little roadrunner was such a delight, as were the three daughters. The very tentative alien was fun. It's not the world's most complicated movie but keeping track of the thematic relations between the play (and the acting in the play) and the frame story (and I guess the frame story for the frame story) kept my mind buzzing - there's definitely going to be a lot there during a rewatch. It has been a while since I saw any Anderson other than The French Dispatch - has he always had the lead actresses take off their clothes or is this something new he seems to be into? I definitely could've used more Tom Hanks. Did anyone else think Matt Dillon looks like Bruce Campbell in this?
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Jul 14, 2023 06:10
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Looking back it's a really good joke that the nude scene is filmed so that it could easily be a body double but it's actually her. I know there was a reference to body doubles but it didn't hit me in the moment and I feel dumb.
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Jul 14, 2023 06:37
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i loved it
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Jul 14, 2023 13:43
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Polo-Rican posted:Yeah, during the "you can't wake up if you don't go to sleep" scene I was thinking: "oh gently caress, this is going over my head. I need to watch this again." To maybe take this a bit further, there's a very interesting tension in the movie's themes where you've got internal states (especially grief) which can't be expressed combined with ritual overtop of nothing. This is primarily in the main character where he cannot express his grief but at the same time his theoretically expressive photographs don't seem to be backed by any internal state. Many characters can't really express themselves. The vending machine sells the deeds to empty land. The daughters invent this burial ritual for their mother that results in her ashes being buried in the backlot of a motel near the communal showers. You've also got the pairing of the unending car chase with the conspicuously un-chased roadrunner. A whole lot of ritual overtop nothing.
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Jul 15, 2023 02:03
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Martman posted:Looking back it's a really good joke that the nude scene is filmed so that it could easily be a body double but it's actually her. I know there was a reference to body doubles but it didn't hit me in the moment and I feel dumb. The body double was credited at the end? I thought it was not her? TychoCelchuuu posted:Just saw this and loved it. The little roadrunner was such a delight, as were the three daughters. The very tentative alien was fun. It's not the world's most complicated movie but keeping track of the thematic relations between the play (and the acting in the play) and the frame story (and I guess the frame story for the frame story) kept my mind buzzing - there's definitely going to be a lot there during a rewatch. It has been a while since I saw any Anderson other than The French Dispatch - has he always had the lead actresses take off their clothes or is this something new he seems to be into? I definitely could've used more Tom Hanks. Did anyone else think Matt Dillon looks like Bruce Campbell in this? I’m doing a full rewatch right now, and while it’s not the lead, there is lots of random nudity in his movies.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:15
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Snowmankilla posted:The body double was credited at the end? I thought it was not her? e: oh weird, I guess they are credited. Guess it was just lampshading the use of body doubles then, dunno about the interview thing Martman fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 03:23
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Martman posted:Dunno about the credits but scarjo has said in interviews that she actually did the nude scene, and she's done full nudity before in Under the Skin. Or it was her, but they still credited a body double to be even more ambiguous about what is real or not?
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Jul 15, 2023 03:31
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Tbh I wouldn't be surprised, but yeah I'm not trying to go full goon on internet detectiving an actress's body lol
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Jul 15, 2023 03:32
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Anderson credited the staff of the hotel where they presumably stayed during production, down to the gardener.
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Jul 15, 2023 19:13
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Hate to be the one to tell you, but that was actually the cast of Grand Budapest Hotel
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Jul 16, 2023 01:22
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Polo-Rican posted:Yeah, during the "you can't wake up if you don't go to sleep" scene I was thinking: "oh gently caress, this is going over my head. I need to watch this again." I really appreciated this post because I think it’s the clearest and most digestible examination of the movie. I’m looking forward to watching the movie through this lens.
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Jul 16, 2023 16:28
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Polo-Rican posted:Sometimes you just need to accept things (fall asleep) so you can continue living (wake up). Ohhhh drat! You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep! I get it now!
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Jul 18, 2023 03:01
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That whole bit is just Wes Anderson's homage to the Lullaby song from Shock Treatment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9wK3koVoPA (Honestly I got to thinking about the stylistic similarities- not just here, the whole film is framed with windows and boxes and the like- and if Anderson hasn't seen this movie he should.)
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Jul 18, 2023 07:14
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Polo-Rican posted:imho, of all of Anderson's movies, this one has the most themes and ideas to dig into. It feels slightly frustrating because it resists any one reading. IMHO it's about accepting the unknowable; literally, as with the alien, but also figuratively, as in the purpose of our lives, especially after grief or trauma. What is the correct thing to do with a box full of your loved ones' ashes?... ultimately, it doesn't matter whether or not what's "right" makes perfect sense. You just bury the ashes so you can move on. Sometimes you just need to accept things (fall asleep) so you can continue living (wake up). In a way, Wes Anderson is also forcing the viewer to "just go with it"... you start in a desert town, where there are continual cops and robbers having car chases; a wriggling blue piece explodes out of a broken car; these things are obviously absurd, but you can't move on to the heavier parts of the film without first accepting some the absurd reality you're shown To add to this, the metanarrative is in my opinion actually a dream of Augie's. A dream where things go great for him when he just goes with the flow of the dream ("I figured Augie broke the window to get his heart racing") and where things fall apart when he questions his motivations ("Why did Augie put his hand on the hot plate?"). In the penultimate dream scene, there's a time crunch. He can have a little bit of time to figure things out but then the play/real life will move on without him. His dead wife tells him to just roll with it and he does just in time to rejoin the play. What happened would not make any more sense as a play than it would as real life. After all "the imaginary drama" and "apocryphal fantasy" of the dream wouldn't make any more sense than real life.
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Jul 18, 2023 07:50
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Bumping thread because the first three (of four) Wes Anderson Roald Dahl shorts have dropped on Netflix. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher and (coming out tomorrow) Poison. Anderson has ramped up the artificiality of his moviemaking filming each short more like a play with stagehands moving sets around.
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Sep 30, 2023 01:51
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Just watched these on a plane. I liked them and I forgot how sad Dahl stuff is.
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Sep 30, 2023 22:53
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Looking forward to Wes Anderson's adaptation of My Uncle Oswald.
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Oct 1, 2023 18:41
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Snowmankilla posted:Just watched these on a plane. I liked them and I forgot how sad Dahl stuff is. The end of Poison is such a gut punch.
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Oct 2, 2023 02:16
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I'm in two minds about the shift in Anderson's aesthetic from really regimented, formalist shots to outright theatricality. On one hand, it's a huge bit of experimentalism he's working through and when it works, it's really effective (the miming of the poison tin in The Rat-Catcher, for example) but at other points its exhausting - as great as the Dahl adaptations are, after French Dispatch/Asteroid City/these, it's obvious it's the way Anderson's going to define his films for the next bit. My favourite Anderson films are the ones that have relatively straightforward narratives (Life Aquatic/Tenenbaums) and the obsession with layering in framing devices and presenting them all as stage plays is something that worked really, really well in Grand Budapest, but then less so in French Dispatch, less again in Asteroid City...I dunno. He's obviously got the cachet and license to do whatever the gently caress he wants and god knows I'm gonna be there day one, but there's a little less magic with the artifice being so present.
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Oct 2, 2023 04:09
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I totally get why people like Wes Anderson movies. But I am not one of those people.
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Oct 3, 2023 01:22
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I, Butthole posted:I'm in two minds about the shift in Anderson's aesthetic from really regimented, formalist shots to outright theatricality. On one hand, it's a huge bit of experimentalism he's working through and when it works, it's really effective (the miming of the poison tin in The Rat-Catcher, for example) but at other points its exhausting - as great as the Dahl adaptations are, after French Dispatch/Asteroid City/these, it's obvious it's the way Anderson's going to define his films for the next bit. My favourite Anderson films are the ones that have relatively straightforward narratives (Life Aquatic/Tenenbaums) and the obsession with layering in framing devices and presenting them all as stage plays is something that worked really, really well in Grand Budapest, but then less so in French Dispatch, less again in Asteroid City...I dunno. He's obviously got the cachet and license to do whatever the gently caress he wants and god knows I'm gonna be there day one, but there's a little less magic with the artifice being so present. Yeah it kind of made me sigh in Asteroid City. Like I get why he is doing it and what he is going for, I just got tired of it really quick and the constant 4th wall breaking doesn't really strike me as clever, just kind of trite and exhausting.
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Oct 4, 2023 08:37
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I haven't watched the other 2 yet but I felt Henry Sugar was a bit of return to form and easier to follow. Could be because it's an adaptation and not an original work though.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:39
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Agree with that. Asteroid City was low key infuriating because there was such an entertaining movie teased. Everything happening and the characters in the actual Asteroid City were a lot of fun - but the movie kind of gives a middle finger to that interest by blowing all the chekov's guns in twenty seconds and never really returning to that world. I get what he's doing, and think a lot of the flick is clever enough, it just forgets to also be satisfying. French Dispatch did something similar, where the framing was clever enough, but he didn't bother making the connecting thread satisfying. Which was more puzzling in that case, as the movie was a love letter to old magazine reporters, but by the end he did so little to actually endear you to the magazine. The Dahl Shorts are great. It's nice to see him do something that's just storytelling and not trying to be meta. The sets are just the best.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:11
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I watched Henry Sugar. I’m very up and down on Wes Anderson (but mostly down I think, although I don’t want to be). And I left the kinda-crummy Asteroid City thinking that a) I wish he’d do more adaptations of other people’s work, because his style is much stronger than his storytelling; and b) speaking of that style, it might be better suited for short films than feature length ones. Also, I’ve always loved the sections of Grant Budapest where Jude Law or F Murray Abraham are narrating the story Also, I’ve always remembered someone saying that Anderson’s films look like what happens in your head when you read a book. So, in short, I adored this. I was smiling all the way through. I wish this was a whole genre of films and there were hundreds of them for me to watch. Dev Patel should really be a huge star and it was nice to be reminded that Cumberbatch can be really good in the right role.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:21
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CatstropheWaitress posted:Asteroid City was low key infuriating a new study bible! posted:I really disliked this movie!
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Oct 15, 2023 21:14
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It was not worth the bandwidth I used to pirate it. It's also impossible to discuss WA movies because the people who like them like them a bit too much in a fart-huffing-pseudo-intellectual way and the people who don't like them don't want to spend any more mental energy on them than they already had to.
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Oct 19, 2023 09:40
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ijyt posted:It was not worth the bandwidth I used to pirate it. It's also impossible to discuss WA movies because the people who like them like them a bit too much in a fart-huffing-pseudo-intellectual way and the people who don't like them don't want to spend any more mental energy on them than they already had to. Yeah, I dunno if it makes me a philistine but I didn't bite on the lecture scene, the balcony, etc. Maybe it would improve with a second viewing but if I don't want to see it again I guess that's pretty telling  Gorgeous movie, arresting scenery, if it had a more conventional narrative it'd probably have been a favorite of mine this year.
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Oct 19, 2023 14:22
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Please don’t let Asteroid City’s lameness deter any of you from his Dahl shorts, which are all inexpressibly delightful.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:07
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All the shorts were pretty charming - although Rat Catcher one made me fall asleep.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:27
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Fiennes performance as the rat man is such fun tho. You don't always get to see an A-list actor spend ten minutes making all the subtle mannerisms of a rat.ijyt posted:It was not worth the bandwidth I used to pirate it. It's also impossible to discuss WA movies because the people who like them like them a bit too much in a fart-huffing-pseudo-intellectual way and the people who don't like them don't want to spend any more mental energy on them than they already had to. To be fair, WA is great because he generally writes interesting and entertaining characters. Asteroid City does have both, but he just does so little with them that it falls flat. I don't think you have to huff his intellectual farts to find a lot of the pieces in Asteroid City good. Just a shame it doesn't sum up to anything and actively scolds the audience for getting invested.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:52
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I really enjoyed Asteroid City. Not in any "fart sniffing intellectual" way but just taking each scene in the moment, the deadpan absurdism just works for me, I thought it was all quite funny.
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Nov 6, 2023 17:53
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