Tag: Jeff Goldblum

Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” his ninth film, may be his grimmest yet, but it’s perfectly at home with his best, most familiar work

If anything, Wes Anderson is very consistent. His films all share his brisk pacing, deadpan humor, diorama creativity and color, and precise attention to detail. And they’re all good.

This is even though each of his nine films is wildly different and ambitious in ways unique to each project. He’s put his quirky, fantastical stamp on coming-of-age romances, family dysfunction dramas, children’s fables and French New Wave cinema. You could make a case that any of Anderson’s films is the “Most Wes Anderson” film. I wrote as much about his previous film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which found him globe hoping, going to dark places and using his dioramas to examine legacy and loss. That’s all true even though his other films have these qualities in spades, in their own ways.

So where does that leave Isle of Dogs, his second stop-motion animated film following the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox? It feels like Anderson at his ugliest, dabbling in washed out horizons, muted colors and grizzly characters, though you can find parallels in his past films. He’s fully embracing his Japanese influences from Akira Kurosawa and kabuki dance, though eagle-eyed viewers must’ve known he’s a fan. And it also feels like his most grim movie, with an immensely percussive score lending gravitas and stakes to an otherwise pleasant story about dogs. You know where this is going.

Isle of Dogs is exactly like all of Anderson’s films and none of them. It dazzles with animation and moods that Anderson has never dabbled in before, and yet it feels at home with his best work. Continue reading “Isle of Dogs”

CIFF Review: Le Week-End

“Le Week-End” is a brisk and alive comedy that bares some similarity to “Before Midnight.”

“Le Week-End” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. The movie will be released in America in March 2014.

 Film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in a tweet that Lindsay Duncan’s character in “Le Week-end” would be the splitting image of “Before Midnight’s” Celine if only she was 15 years older and British. Not only is Roger Michell’s film on the realistic trajectory for where Jesse and Celine might end up two films from where they are now, “Le Week-end” crackles with the intelligence, realism and charm of Richard Linklater’s masterpiece of a trilogy.

And yet unlike “Before Midnight,” Michell’s film dares to make philosophical expressions of love and marriage into something other than talky and dour. It’s a brisk comedy with a spark for life and lunacy, and it hits a perfect note of authenticity between the chemistry of its two leads.

Jim Broadbent and Duncan play Richard and Meg Burroughs, a married couple of 30 years on vacation in Paris for their anniversary. Upon arriving at their dingy shoebox of a hotel, Meg immediately storms out and grabs a taxi to a luxurious Paris institution, doing so with a superficial, yet lovingly sophisticated confidence to always get her way.

Richard tags along like a sheep dog, at first appearing only concerned about money the way all cliché old men do in the movies. But after they’re well settled in and he’s stopped caring, he reveals that he’s been forced into retirement after an off-color comment about one of his students.

It’s just one of many complications in their marriage, one that leads Meg to question whether or not after 30 years she still wants to be with Richard. They bicker over their deadbeat son and why they don’t have sex anymore, but they do so with a sly, witty understanding of one another that shows at least why they belong as friends. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Le Week-End”

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is a very gifted filmmaker, but he might be completely lost if it weren’t for Bill Murray.

The title character of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is an oafish, selfish, narcissist who is impossible to like, and yet Murray, as he’s done before in films like “Groundhog Day” and others, makes the character palatable, funny and even just a little relatable.

It’s the story of a nature documentarian trying to fund and make the second part to his most recent film, in which a mysterious creature he calls a jaguar shark eats his longtime friend and companion. Now he intends to document the hunt for the shark out of revenge. At the premiere of his film, he meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a man who claims to be Zissou’s illegitimate son. He and a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) accompany Zissou on his most recent nautical quest.

Anderson’s films have been criticized as cold and without emotional entry points, and “The Life Aquatic” may be the start of that. It’s a film obsessed with its colorful kitsch, the regal mixed with the cartoonish. It has acoustic covers of David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese as its soundtrack, it has stop motion animation done by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline”) to provide unexpected visual gags and it has dry, uptight characters not making jokes but acting as self-parodies.

When Anderson pans across an intricate set with the fourth wall removed in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or in “Moonrise Kingdom,” he does so to provide context of the depth of family or the spirit of fantasy and discovery. Here, Zissou’s boat looks especially like a movie set, and it’s used as a one-off joke. Like Zissou’s own corny, dated documentaries, he uses it to make a statement about how this nostalgia has lost its kitschy charm and appeal over time and become just a joke.

That’s because for how colorful “The Life Aquatic” is, all of it feels so flat. None of the colors are bright, only soft yellows and blues, and none of the frames have depth, just strikingly picturesque framing in two dimensions.

And yet Anderson’s control over framing and tone is consistently and surprisingly brilliant. He can invigorate the film with a completely nuts scene of Bill Murray going badass on a group of pirates that have invaded his boat. He can make time stop in a nearly Kubrick-esque sequence of a helicopter crash.

All of these moments too scream Anderson. It goes without saying that every Wes Anderson film is so Wes Anderson-y, and no director does it quite the same.

3 stars