MUWT 2: The Quickening

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.

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Ah yes, The Darjeeling Limited

“How can I adapt eat, pray, love without quite tipping my hand?” -Wes Anderson, circa 2006

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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.

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I want Wes Anderson to remake Alphaville

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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.

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Or commercials starring Willem Dafoe.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/2010/01/lars-von-trier-finds-willem-dafoes-penis-confusingly-large/

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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!

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maybe it wasn’t such a great day for bananafish after all

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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?

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so maybe just let him make puppet movies

ideally puppet movies set in animal people worlds or about white people puppets

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Like, I’m not even sure it’s better than Dog City

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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

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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)

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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