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”

Rapid Response: Bottle Rocket

Wes Anderson’s first feature signals a director already in full control of his style.

Any discussion of a legendary director’s first feature is a study in scrutiny and similarity. Rarely is the film taken on its own but as a discussion of how the director’s themes and signature style have evolved over time. Did he contain that spark early in his career, and what here can provide context for what comes later?

Wes Anderson has very recently been anointed to legendary status, complete with indie royalty credibility, a Best Picture nomination, box office gold, an ability to work with any actor he damn well pleases and a cinephile approved book dedicated to his life’s work. All those early skeptics of Anderson saw “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Moonrise Kingdom” and now “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and have come out of the woodwork to revisit and heap praise on what they might’ve missed earlier.

Whether or not this is a good way to evaluate a film is up for grabs, but “Bottle Rocket” probably gets a pass today because it is a Wes Anderson debut. As Matt Zoller Seitz writes in his essay on “Bottle Rocket” in his coffee table tome “The Wes Anderson Collection,” “Anderson didn’t make references; he had influences. And there were already signs that he had a pretty good idea who he was as a director and was comfortable in his own skin.” We see it in his first 90 degree whip pan, the “eye of God” shots, as Seitz puts it, or the affinity for color, music and whimsy. Some of the moments are so oddly beautiful and so definitely Anderson-y that you might call it brilliant, whereas someone seeing it fresh in 1996 could easily call it uneven. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Bottle Rocket”

The Grand Budapest Hotel

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” finds Wes Anderson embracing his visual style fully and showing complete control as a director.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson has been making Wes Anderson movies his entire career; no one quite does it better (though many have tried). They’re rife with perfectly precise miniatures of colorful, excrutiating detail, and over the years his set dressing has conveyed kitsch, adolescence and cartoons.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” may be the most Wes Anderson-y film yet. Its title character M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) embodies the fastidious perfectionist with an eye for fashionable excellence in a way that no other Anderson character has captured the director’s true sense of style. It’s a silly, sinister and sneaky caper that thrives on its careful construction.

Gustave is the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional Eastern European country Zubrowska in 1932. Years later after war has forever affected the majesty of the region and the hotel itself, we meet Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham) regaling his days as a young lobby boy (Tony Revolori) under Gustave’s tutelage.

Fiennes is wonderful as an eloquent and aloof manager and womanizer, quick witted in his authority and charmingly blunt to the elderly women he beds. His prize is Madame D. (an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton under pounds of makeup), a wealthy maiden who suddenly turns up murdered, but not before bequeathing a priceless painting to Gustave. As a result, Gustave soon finds himself on the run from Madame’s vindictive son (Adrien Brody) and the authorities (led by a hilariously out of place and without an accent Edward Norton). Continue reading “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

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

Moonrise Kingdom

As “Moonrise Kingdom” begins, a boy is listening to a record of Benjamin Britton classical music compositions intended for children. A high-pitched, nonthreatening kid’s voice interrupts the song to explain the intricate layers of Britton’s piece, and the boy appreciates it all the more.

Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film is much like this record: an art house picture pieced together and slowly revealed to us like an elaborate opera. It has characters, themes and a silly tone that a child could embrace, and yet its presentation has complexity and maturity that may be beyond most adults. In this way, “Moonrise Kingdom” is one of the wackiest, most inventive, and most notably, the most heartfelt film Anderson ever made. Here then is a movie about growing up, independence, living above your age and loving the beauty of the more challenging and sophisticated pleasures of the world.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is the romance fairytale of Sam and Suzy (newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), two preteens who escape their parental care to elope on a hidden cove on their small island home of New Penzance. Sam is a nerdy orphan, the most unpopular boy amongst his summer camp Khaki Scouts (by a significant margin), and yet a skilled mountaineer and adventurer. Suzy is the oldest child in a dysfunctional family, and she’s at an age where her needs cannot be met by her two unhappy parents. The couple is tracked by the lone island cop Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), Sam’s camp counselor, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), and Suzy’s two parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Continue reading “Moonrise Kingdom”

The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson doesn’t make deliberately quirky indie comedies or inscrutable art house films. He makes fantasies. “The Royal Tenenbaums” is just the story of a dysfunctional family, not an epic voyage to the bottom of the sea or the tale of an adventurous talking fox, and yet it feels as wonderfully strange and exotic as any of those.

That’s because just about every Wes Anderson film ever made is the most wholly Wes Anderson-y movie you’ve ever seen. His style drips over every moment in his framing, his tone and his quirky imagination. “The Royal Tenenbaums” more than any of Anderson’s films perhaps is like visual poetry in the way the film’s offbeat dialogue punctuates his quick cuts.

His shots are exploding with wild imagery. None of it is natural or has a purpose; it is merely beautiful to look at. One room has two giant murals on the wall featuring tigers and hunters, and another room reveals the head of a giant stuffed badger to be mounted on the wall. Continue reading “The Royal Tenenbaums”

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Why has Wes Anderson not been making movies like “Fantastic Mr. Fox” his entire career? This charmingly stop motion animated kids movie is as perfectly in Anderson’s style as any film he’s ever made, and his colorful and peculiar quirks fit in beautifully with Roald Dahl’s lovingly crafted story. Continue reading “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

The Darjeeling Limited

I find it almost pointless to attempt to describe and review “The Darjeeling Limited” because the best way to describe any element of the film would be by saying it is a Wes Anderson movie. What does it look like? It looks like Wes Anderson shot it. Is it funny? That would depend on whether you thought Wes Anderson movies were funny. What’s it about? I have no idea.

Does it sound like I don’t like this movie? Film criticism is about describing the reaction you personally had as a viewer and about how you changed upon coming out of it. I can sadly report however that I had little to no reaction to it. The seemingly pointless irreverence of the film is well made, quirky and atmospheric, but it bounced off me as though there were nothing to gain from the experience.

It tells the story of three oddball brothers who come together for the first time in a year since their father’s funeral to ride the Darjeeling Limited train and explore India for an enlightening experience. Continue reading “The Darjeeling Limited”

Rapid Response: Rushmore

When Wes Anderson made “Rushmore,” his second film, he desperately tried to get it screened for the film critic Pauline Kael long after she had retired and was close to her death. I’m not sure if her reaction was good, but I imagine the reason he tried to screen it for her was because his film was simply so different. Being released in 1998, it’s not so much ahead of its time because it kicked off this style of film making for the next decade, but it feels very much like a 2000s movie.

How should Anderson have reacted if he had a feeling he was ushering in the next generation of the movies?

I’ve seen five of six of Anderson’s films, all of them in a peculiar order. “Rushmore” is the movie that put him on the map, along with the film’s co-screenwriter Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman (very young here) and would solidify the sorts of low-key older man roles Bill Murray would take until today.

But my first outing with the director was with “The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou,” a film that is equally odd and clearly identifiable in Anderson’s colorful yet distant visual style, but features Murray in the lead and seems more “classically” funny. Unlike “Rushmore,” it has what you would call “jokes.”

That’s not to say “Rushmore” isn’t funny; it’s hilarious. It’s to say “Rushmore’s” comedy is very much centered around attitude and absurd attention to detail in a quirky screenplay.

But in fact, all of Anderson’s films play and look in this fashion. That’s what makes him striking as a director. It is impossible to watch even a few moments of one of his movies and not recognize it as such.

The fans he established with “Rushmore” would say he fine-tuned his craft to perfection in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a film I’ll have to revisit but others have heralded as a cult masterpiece. Then he worked with Noah Baumbach (another disciple of his) on “Life Aquatic” and allowed that quirky attitude to meet situational comedy. And Anderson soon got to the point at which his “The Darjeeling Limited” was overstuffed in Anderson’s style that it felt like nothing more than a vehicle for Anderson’s quirks. Finally is “Fantastic Mr. Fox” what I feel is his finest film. That stop-motion animated picture felt so much like an Anderson movie without sacrificing any of its childlike charm that you wonder why he hadn’t made stop-motion animated films his entire career.

Watching “Rushmore,” it did become obvious that his movies have always felt like cartoons of sorts. “Rushmore” is hardly “about” anything, its characters fit into no reasonable human mold, its scenarios are largely absurd and overblown, yet the characters and the world in which they live are so richly “drawn” that it casts a spell nonetheless.

I’m glad I finally got around to seeing “Rushmore,” as I finally understand Anderson’s significance as a modern auteur of film.