Austin discovers Wes Anderson

Movies
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Relevant background material (and there will be spoilers):

I know those words, but that post makes no sense.

-xtien

“I’m citing you for gross misconduct.”[/QUOTE]

I expect a full report here or in all pertinent threads, or in your very own Wes Anderson Discovery thread. Either way, enjoy your trip! :)[/QUOTE]

Having finally started on my journey with Rushmore, I have to say that I can’t yet see where all the claims of self-parody come from (I’m sure I’ll figure it out after a few more movies), but I can now see how Fantastic Mr Fox is as much Wes Anderson as it is Roald Dahl.

It might be better to say that I can’t unsee it now. I’m not sure how I feel about that with respect to Roald Dahl purism, but fortunately I still love the ways the movie differs from the book. Quite different charms, the two!

As for Rushmore, the first half hour was interesting but not at all what I expected. Then a single line turned me in my seat (or rather, from my side to my stomach in bed, a more attentive position, but there’s no real figure of speech for that!) and made the whole film click for me:

“Oh my god! I wrote a hit play! . . . and I’m in love with you…”

There is so much expression in this one line that I feel like it sums up the entire story, at least with subtext included.

From there on out, I was delighted to find every natural situation for these characters explored, each of them unexpected without being a surprising break in character. The best example of this is when Max leaves Rushmore for public school. I wasn’t expecting this, what with the title of the movie & all, but I love the way that it doesn’t seem to have any effect on his character. Instead he ends up starting a kite club! (I fly kites every other weekend, so I’m singling this one out.)

Along these lines, the ending leaves me imagining that he’s going to keep being a jerk to little Ms Yang because he’ll forever be stuck on Ms Cross. I hope I’m wrong.

I’m looking forward to more. This makes three for three so far, counting Fantastic Mr Fox and Moonrise Kingdom.

2

You were made for Wes Anderson.

-Tom
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Watch Bottle Rocket next.

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Bill Murray smoking two cigarettes in the hospital elevator in Rushmore might be my favourite thing ever put to film.

5

“You smoke?”

I love that line delivery in The Royal Tennenbaums.

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That’s not what I took from this at all, given how much effort he expends just to get Cross and Blume talking again. He’s moved beyond what was nothing more than a crush. But he’s still uncoordinated when it comes to women which is why the dance with Margret goes the way it does.

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One of my favorite moments, too!

I like your version better. More importantly, you have a better argument for it. I’m convinced.

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“Were you in the shit?”

I love that line.

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The best part about that scene is he just finished explaining how Miss Cross is all messed up as he’s putting two cigarettes in his mouth. That and he looks like shit as he’s saying it.

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So I watched Bottle Rocket a few days ago, and I’m still not sure what I think about it.

Unlike the other three I’ve seen, this one might not be greater as a whole than it is as a collection of its wonderful parts. It opens with a wonderful gag, and almost every scene was equally amusing. I think my favorite Owen Wilson bit is when he gets reprimanded by the bookstore owner & addresses him apologetically as “Sir.”

And what a wonderful selection of places to rob! A practice run through his mother’s house, a bookstore, and the factory with the confusing elevators.

As they’re both first films about botched robberies, I couldn’t help but think of Bottle Rocket as Reservoir Dogs with Crazies.

I think my favorite aspect of the film as a whole is the way Luke Wilson’s romance manages to be so sincere despite being comical almost to the point of parody of romance stories.

Royal Tenenbaums is up next.

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I just want to say I’m thoroughly enjoying this, Austin. Thank you so much for this thread.

I have such a weird relationship with Bottle Rocket. I first saw it in a group. A couple from my wife-before-she-was-my-wife’s work invited us over to have dinner and watch a movie. They were making dinner. We were choosing the movie. For some reason Bottle Rocket was on my radar, so I rented it and brought it over.

They all hated it. It was a total disaster. Everyone made fun of it and I sat there feeling like a total moron and not really getting why everyone hated it but feeling like I just must be wrong. I can still feel myself sitting there in their crappy living room, feeling embarrassed and awful and confused.

Fast forward to Rushmore. Sitting down in a crappy theater in Burbank with my friend Aaron and being totally transported. This is same director as that? What?

I’ve since come to love Bottle Rocket, of course. The first gag you mentioned. Dipak Pallana and that whole bookstore caper. And of course every time I watch it I cannot help but think that the world would be a better place with more Lumi Cavazos. She is beyond adorable.

Point is, it stands up to repeat viewings, so enjoy.

-xtien

“What about that guy?”

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I can’t express just how floored I was by Rushmore myself. I had only vaguely heard about the movie since it had garnered good reviews. But everything about that movie was so different, so quirky, from the very first scene where he is describing his activities. What a character. I’d never seen one like it before.

Years later, when I saw Bottle Rocket, I was really, really disappointed. It’s as if that weird quirkiness and uniqueness of Rushmore was its own universe, and Bottle Rocket was also set in that same universe. It somehow made Rushmore feel less special, which I resented. Similarly with Wes Anderson’s other movies, I began to recognize that same weird way that the characters all had similar quirks and talked in a certain way; all very Rushmore. The more Wes Anderson movies I watched, the less special they all felt to me. I wish I’d just watched Rushmore and then not seen the rest.

But that changed with Fantastic Mr. Fox. Wow. What a movie. And what a medium. Suddenly, the claymation made everything fresh and unique again. It wasn’t just set in the same universe as Rushmore. It was a completely new and different universe where the cartoon characters I was watching happened to be really different and very funny. I loved it. Now I will continue to ignore Mr. Anderson’s live action movies and wait for his next claymation feature; because I feel that his quirk and uniqueness is particularly suited to that medium.

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Does Bill Murray smoke in a hospital in every Wes Anderson movie?!

(Seriously, did he ever light up in a medical tent in Moonrise Kingdom? I don’t remember & wouldn’t have made a note of it before having seen Rushmore & The Royal Tenenbaums.)

I also liked the return of the double cigarettes, although this time it was Gwyneth Paltrow lighting them up. Also of note as a recurring theme (later in his work) is the almost mythic return of the falcon (hawk?) late in the film.

I’m not gonna lie: this film took a while to get going for me. I was watching with several friends, including the one I saw Moonrise Kingdom with (& later showed Fantastic Mr Fox after making her read the Roald Dahl story), and I might even have been distracted from the movie somewhere halfway through.

But I will have to rectify this situation, because when it finally picked up in the second half, I wasn’t just paying attention, I was emotionally involved with these people; and I want to remember every last detail of their portrayed lives after another viewing.

This might be the opposite situation from Bottle Rocket, where here not all of the little gags hit their mark (at least for me), but the story as a whole came together in a far more meaningful way for each of its characters.

As far as gags go, two that stood out to me are the choice of the game closet as a secret meeting room of sorts, and the way Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson fall into a zen garden at the end of their fight. I like these because they offer subtext which I suspect the characters themselves pick up on.

“I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that.”

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And next up “The Life Aquatic”?

I have had a theory about Wes Anderson movies in that I believe everybody loves the first one the see and slowly get tired of him as the watch each successive movie. For me and my wife the first movie of his we saw was indeed The Life Aquatic and the last was The Darjeling Limited. To this day we still quote lines from Aquaric back and forth to each other. Darjeling always came across to me as being the fourth movie with the same father issues explored yet again. One wonders about Wes Anderson’s relationship with his father at this point.

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I will gladly poke a hole in that theory by pointing out that I have seen all his movies in the order he made them, and I furthermore believe Darjeeling Limited is his best movie, and Moonrise Kingdom may very well be my favorite of his movies.

-Tom
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I saw them in order as well and like Tennenbaums the best.

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Same.

Austin, make sure you cleanse your palate in between these. Darjeeling limited made me hate the man’s entire body of work for a while.

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Oh, don’t worry. That’s why it’s taking so many days in between. Well that & I’m also in the middle of packing to move to Seattle, so there might be a gap for the next week, but hopefully I’ll find time somewhere in between.

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Y’know, inspired by this thread I watched The Royal Tennenbaums the other night, for the first time in some years, and I… didn’t really enjoy it as much as I thought I did. Oh, sure, it’s incredibly well put-together, but for some reason when I recall Wes Anderson films, I remember the whimsy but forget all about the melancholy. Catches me off guard every re-watch.

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I always marvel at the way he stashes what is arguably the most moving moment in The Royal Tenenbaums (“It’s been a really hard year, Dad.”) at the tail end of an incredibly elaborate tracking shot loaded with actors, dogs, the crashed car, a firetruck, etc. He doesn’t even cut in for the close-up. Truly audacious directing but he and Ben Stiller pull it off. I haven’t watched that in years but the Criterion blu-ray comes out in August!