Saw Isle of Dogs last night. It is aggressively, exactly what I expected it to be. Wes Anderson has really entrenched himself at this point. I’d like him to strike out and do another Darjeeling-type movie. His last few films are all these little boy adventure films and I just kinda miss when he did quirky, fucked up character studies like Tenenbaums and Rushmore.
Ah yes, The Darjeeling Limited…
“How can I adapt eat, pray, love without quite tipping my hand?” -Wes Anderson, circa 2006
I like Darjeeling (as well as the short that preceded it) but it’s even worse than his prior work in being insufferably Salingeresque for the sake of it
I have still never watched Life Aquatic the entire way through without falling asleep or making out with the person I was watching it with to keep from falling asleep (I’m seriously like 0 for 4 here) but I thought Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest were both pretty genuinely decent compared to the older stuff? Like I failed to hate either of them despite fully expecting to going in, the way I did with the newest Noah Baumbach movie
Life Aquatic is easily my favorite of his movies.
Darjeeling is…eh? I mean, the flashback to their dad’s funeral and car theivery is my favorite part for summarizing how weird shit happens around funerals, but otherwise, kinda not my jam.
I want Wes Anderson to remake Alphaville
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a lot of fun.
Moonrise Kingdom is good because it dwells in that place where precocious adolescents try to filter their emotions through books they’ve read too many of? The self-mythologization of maladjusted children faced with overwhelming EMOTION for the first time. He should probably only make puppet movies and movies starring children.
Or commercials starring Willem Dafoe.
I mean, the climax of Life Aquatic is just that happening to Zissou.
i… disagree about the movies starring children thing. a lot of anderson’s stuff could be described as ‘salingeresque’ and moonrise kingdom seems to be the showcase for all of the worst aspects of that to put it lightly
i liked a lot of the movie but some parts of it made me super uncomfortable!
maybe it wasn’t such a great day for bananafish after all
I find children doing wes anderson things less annoying than adults doing wes anderson things because the emotional maturity level of everything suddenly seems of a piece
but at the same time, a recent criticism of MOONRISE as “wes anderson makes his dolls kiss” is not one I think I could argue with?
so maybe just let him make puppet movies
ideally puppet movies set in animal people worlds or about white people puppets
Like, I’m not even sure it’s better than Dog City
It can’t possibly be
Gone Girl is on Netflix now, I feel like if this movie had been released a few years later it would have been way more controversial
Really takes advantage of Afflecks inherent dickishness as a red herring
See also Eyes Wide Shut
I watched justice league on a plane today for a kick after not having seen, I don’t think, a single other modern DC movie, and holy lord was it ever terrible
the first half hour specifically is like an onslaught of bad taste (including the worst leonard cohen cover I have ever heard and just having to grapple with the reality of ben affleck batman) that it then kind of numbs you to but I was like, laughing out loud constantly and pretty much never in a way that I can imagine the filmmakers might have wanted
it is, among other things, like bizarrely heavy handed about gal gadot being israeli – there were like three separate instances of my wife (who was watching it next to me) wanting to make settler gags, which she is normally inured to (and which I don’t remember her saying anything about when she saw wonder woman with a friend of hers, so it’s somehow unique to the joss whedon take on the DC universe)
I exclusively watch DC movies on planes because they’re always too horrible to spend money or time on and always put me to sleep so I recently did this too
And honestly the main thing I noticed re wonder woman was how much more ass shots there were in comparison to her own movie
Which is part hilarious and part incredibly sad/predictable
It did make me retroactively appreciate the ww movie even more though