I used to enjoy Anderson but with this he’s reached his masturbatory self-parody phase
I used to enjoy Anderson but with this hes reached his masturbatory self-parody phase
I used to enjoy Anderson but with this he’s reached his masturbatory self-parody phase
I liked it.
Self-parody is such a Reddit criticism go the frick back
French Dispatch was only bad because there wasn't really any common theme holding things together. Isle of Dogs was just weirdly intense - too violent. Hope this is a return to form.
>French Dispatch
Funny enough the car they drive in the opening of Asteroid City that completely falls apart and ends up on cinderblocks had French Press on the door. I'm figuring that was a nod to the movie not doing that well.
Look up what inspired Isle of Dogs
Also interesting that the movie that's very much displaying anti government sentiments is getting a ton of criticism. Interesting
>no common theme
homie you're reading a variety magazine in motion picture form. How did you not clue into this?
Tbf a lot of that movie seems to have flown over people's heads. The student protest story was the ultimate filter.
>The student protest story was the ultimate filter
It was so fricking awful, man. Worst thing Anderson has done. Haven't seen Asteroid City though. But it's hard to believe it could be worse.
What was awful about it? It sounds like you got filtered ngl. I feel like the final part of that segment really makes it obvious
What was filtering about it? I thought it was mostly boring, and didn't find Timmy's character very captivating. Although it was obvious that it was mocking the journalist who was infatuated with him.
French Dispatch was bad because of the revolution segment
He gets a lifetime pass from me just for Life Aquatic (though his style wasn't as boxed in then as it is now). But Tom Hanks and Maya Hawke joining the Wes Super-Friends makes me cringe.
Well he straight up uses his entire stock celebs he has for his movies in this one.
Using so many celebrities feels like a crutch.
Same with Christopher Nolan movies, where he just HAS to have famous celebrities even for minor parts.
What happened to character actors? What happened to directors who were confident to get by with no name actors/actresses who fit the part?
Not all directors are like that. Some have their stable of actors they go to. I got nothing wrong with that.
It's usually the israelites running things that need "a star attached to the project" so they can sleep better about getting their shekels back
I've never watched any of Anderson's movies and I probably never will, but I completely agree with you about using so many celebrities. It almost feels like these celebrity-filled movies are just elaborate money-laundering schemes.
MISTER ANDERSON
>Set in 1955, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is his first good period film, a conceit that indicates escapism and nostalgia. Those interests made Anderson’s earliest films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and The Darjeeling Limited) irresistibly moving. But the palpable sentimentality and need for retreat in Asteroid City make it seem as precious and limited as Anderson’s detractors once alleged. And yet, something genuine is expressed here. To borrow a Max Ophuls phrase, Asteroid City is superficially superficial.
>Anderson’s Fifties is introduced by recognizably alienated artists (playwright Edward Norton, TV commentator Bryan Cranston) who attempt to define their place in the era through a documentary program about theater. This turns into a big-screen performance piece, a movie within a movie: Broken families and a busload of tourists and school kids visit a Midwestern military bomb-testing base that was established where an asteroid had penetrated the atmosphere, leaving a large, mysterious crater, thus Asteroid City. The base and tourist site are operated by government personnel and local entrepreneurs whose particular customs and habits reflect back the private and cultural obsessions initially introduced.
>This deliberately eccentric, pastel vision is so overtly stylized — distant John Ford mountains as flat as stage scenery, Wild West exteriors reduced to the two-dimensional limits of a ViewMaster stereopticon — that it nearly distracts from the poignant domestic complications that used to be Anderson’s special insight into human relations.
Armond liked it and so will I
>Asteroid City combines the suspense of playing a family board game with TV lore (a mash-up of Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet and a Playhouse 90 presentation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town), featuring meticulous animated details. Each transition is presented in a different screen size. Separate sequences (including title-cards and intermission as at a theater program) emphasize the multimedia contrivance. For a lapsed Andersonian like me, this prismatic approach to storytelling is so virtuosic that I suspected he was just showing off again, as in his previous annoying, enervating extravaganzas The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch.
>Yet Asteroid City’s artifice is so transparent that we can see past the obvious careerism that has marred Anderson’s latest endeavors — the all-star casts (Norton, Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Margot Robbie, and Tom Hanks standing in for Bill Murray) that smack of the Hollywood elitism and social-climbing he shares with his colleague and sometime co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach. Despite these stunt characterizations and fussy narrative tricks, Anderson retrieves the signature farcical context that once felt profoundly personal.
>The fact that everything looks toylike and distanced in Asteroid City might be the point of that Atomic Age sci-fi title, recalling an America under threat of the Bomb, yet emotionally blasted — alienated — by insecurity and faithlessness. Anderson uses the accoutrements of childhood to convey the sense of a haunted, spiritually vacant country. Like America’s other out-of-touch filmmakers (Spielberg, Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, the Coen Brothers, David Gordon Green, Jared Hess), Anderson had lost sight of his original inspiration. But now, this childlike artiste’s Ground Zero vision syncs with post-Covid America.
He's loyle to his actors. Like Adam Sandler and his friends. Nothing wrong with it, but the movies suffer for it as a consequence.
>Think of Asteroid City as a stylized hypothesis concocted to scrutinize the state of a fallen society. The best scenes — Schwartzman and Hanks grieving while “saying the same thing”; a father and son truly recognizing each other for the first time; an actress and a photographer revealing themselves at a distance; an actor envisioning his departed soul mate; and brainiac kids trying out their smarts — are among Anderson’s finest. They’re breathtaking moments that piece back together the pure, childlike innocence we miss now more than ever.
>When sequestered vacationers are notified that “the president lifted the quarantine,” Anderson’s reference to the Covidapocalypse is culture shock — more effective than Baumbach’s failed adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and better than the nihilistic sci-fi of Jordan Peele’s Nope.
>An American visionary, Anderson embraces his bourgeois adolescence with poetic accuracy: a boy floating forward to give help; a girl raising her hand to ask a question; a general revealing his ethnically specific history; everyone dumbfounded by an extraterrestrial’s appearance. These uncanny instances also reveal the uneasy experiences and sensitivity that various characters articulate as “tragic calamity” and “strategically wounded.” Anderson had made that subtext too obvious in the slightly smug Moonrise Kingdom and the preening nastiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The setting looks interesting but I saw a screenshot of tom hanks and yeah nah i aint gonna be paying to see this film thats for sure
>No doubt the psychic wounds of the Covidapocalypse necessitated that Anderson create a fresh cosmology — like his witty fantasy of Broadway marquees: Death of a Narcissist, Circle the Wagons, Fruit of a Withering Vine, Asteroid City. In the film’s curtain-call finale, Actors Studio hopefuls chant and repeat “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Anderson’s story-time nostalgia salutes guilelessness and yearning.
I think Wes Anderson's movies are exhausting. They are form over function, except with cinema instead of design. Basing an entire filmography around this kind of goofy, quirky shit was a massive mistake.
He does something new with it, with each new movie. But it must be getting harder and harder, yes. And the evergrowing cast of actors he re-uses is a problem. Watched a behind the scenes of 'Grand Budapest' and the feeling of it is that they're somewhat of a family. The movies are just there as an excuse to get the circus on the road again and have some fun. All the actors want to be a part of it.
I'm sure he'll give himself a reboot shortly. His boat is running out of steam and inspiration. And if he doesn't, he's made a handful of good movies at least.
I am sure that the hipsters appreciate that, but I agree with the OP, it's self-flagellating.
The size of cast is increasing and will go parabolic until every human on earth is in a Wes Anderson movie and we are not allowed to stand against assymetrical backgrounds
Schwartzman burning his hand on the griddle was a really good gag.
A-Are those?... w-w-white people?
AHHHHH I AM GOING INSANE, HELP ME JORDAN PEELY
The amount of brown people in position of authority in the movie completely breaks the feel of 1950's whiteness.
for me? It's Tenenbaums, then Bottle Rocket
Based. Just rewatched Bottle Rocket last night. Had a dumb smile the whole time. It's pure soul
Agreed, Royal Tenenbaums to me feels like taking the good of Bottle Rocket and amplifying it, but not to the point of caricature like some later ones
I still really like Grand Budapest though. It's just full of heart and the caricature angle actually suits the movie since it's a storybook come to life.
Based