Posts Tagged ‘Darjeeling Limited’
I Regret to Inform You
The Wes Anderson Power Rankings 2018:
1. Rushmore (1998)
1. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) (tie)
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
4. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
6. “Hotel Chevalier” & The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
8. Bottle Rocket (1996)
9. Isle of Dogs (2018)
I thank you for your support at this difficult time.
UPDATED with some thoughts from Twitter this morning:
Wes Anderson Movies Power Ranking 2014
1. Rushmore (1998)
2. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
3. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
5. “Hotel Chevalier” & The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
7. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
8. Bottle Rocket (1996)
In general I would say that Anderson’s career seems to me to be divided between two clear periods: films about failed genius (Bottle Rocket through Darjeeling) and about fairy-tale genius (Fantastic through Hotel.) That is: in the first period we find characters whose attempts to realize their creative potential are hamstrung by their inability to move past sadness, with the arc of the movie generally allowing them to expiate that sadness and move on (Max finds love and can write again; Royal’s children forgive him; Zissou grieves; the brothers literally abandon the baggage they’ve been carrying around the entire film). But the films of the second period, unlike the first, are dominated by characters who cannot lose: Mr. Fox is temporarily troubled but ultimately unflappable, always fantastic; Suzy and Sam are able to bend the unforgiving adult world to the service of their love; M. Gustave’s poise, control, and total mastery over social convention never fail him except in the face of maximum fascism in the moment of his heroic death. The all-pervading sadness of the first films persists in the fairy tale films, but only in the background, in the side characters who threaten to, but never quite, take over the main narrative: F. Murray Abraham’s adult Zero; The Bishops and Captain Sharp; Fox’s less-than-fantastic son. My gloss on Anderson’s recent “fairy tale” films is that they feel, generally, like the stories the characters from the “failed genius” period attempted, but failed, to craft about themselves. Moonrise Kingdom feels very strongly like one of Max’s or Margot’s plays; the story the Reader reads of the Author’s recounting of Zero’s telling of M. Gustave’s life feels like a cut from one of the films from the heroic era of Zissou Society, and is quite literally the lie Royal gets engraved on his tombstone: “Died tragically rescuing his [friend] from the wreckage of a [country sinking into fascism].” The ironic cruel-optimism gap between potential and reality that dominated the early films, that crucial space of failure, is strongly pushed off center stage in the later ones — and I think that’s why, while I love them all, I think the later ones are generally a bit worse.
But I wonder if The Grand Budapest Hotel won’t improve a bit, in my estimation, upon subsequent viewings; while a strong sense of entropic breakdown runs throughout the setting, especially in the subtle architectural sublime of the Budapest itself as it falls into ruin, the anti-climatic “shock” of the abrupt ending permanently hurls us out of the fairy tale back to a world structured by failure and loss. Unlike Fox and Moonrise, which never deviate from the inner logic of a children’s story, The Grand Budapest Hotel can really only be viewed that way once. When M. Gustave’s magic finally fails at the end of the film, as it always had to, the fairy tale dispells and only the elegy is left; we’re actually left at the end of Hotel in a world darker and sadder than any found in the earlier films, a world where we seem to have neither the compensations of art nor friendship, where grief never fades, where the intricately constructed dollhouse becomes instead a tomb.
Rocking Thursday Night
* For anyone who still has a heart, Don Pease’s Dr. Seuss biography could be a necessary read.
* Sharon Astyk has your definitive powerdown blog rant.
* BP says the oil leak has been capped.
* The financial reform bill has passed; this means capitalism is finally perfected.
* Is nothing sacred? New episodes of Beavis and Butthead.
* Is nothing sacred? Douglas Coupland is designing clothes now.
* Is time disappearing from the universe? J.G. Ballard was right!
* Paging J.J. Abrams: Workers have unexpectedly excavated an 18th-century ship at the ruins of the World Trade Center.
* The Darjeeling Limited is finally getting its Criterion Collection release.
* And Argentina now has marriage equality. ¡Hurra!
Just Another Thursday Night Linkdump
* Bad news, grad students: Lack of sleep linked to early death.
* Joe Lieberman thinks he’s found a loophole in that silly Constitution thing: revoking the citizenship of suspected terrorists. It’s a great idea that has no possible downside and could never be abused.
* Oh, and Lieberman’s take on the Gulf of Mexico disaster is “Accidents happen.” What could possibly go wrong, that hasn’t already gone wrong, to convince these people that offshore drilling isn’t worth it?
* Democrats demoralized. I wonder why.
* Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling.
* Facebook doing everything wrong.
* The flooding in Nashville has now been declared a national emergency. The Big Picture has pictures of what’s happening there.
* Genetically engineered crops lead to genetically engineered weeds. Via MetaFilter.
* The FCC will reclassify broadband in order to preserve its ability to protect net neutrality.
* Natural Catalogue (in Alphabetic Order). Photos from Agata Marzecova.
* Eric Cantor booed by Heritage Foundation audience for refusing to name Obama a “domestic enemy.” The lunatics are running the asylum.
* Matt Yglesias covers some important bipartisanship cooperation from the U.S. Senate.
* Oil disaster update: Less than a week after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before. Robert F. Kennedy explores the Cheney connection, while Nicole Allan blames Halliburton.
* Hope: The Tucson and Flagstaff city councils voted Tuesday to sue Arizona over its tough new immigration law, citing concerns about enforcement costs and negative effects on the state’s tourism industry.
* The Darjeeling Limited coming to the Criterion Collection.
* Tough but fair: Goran Tunjic carded for fatal heart attack during soccer game.
* And your feel-good/feel-terrible story of the day: Local boy with cancer turns into a superhero for a day.
A Few for Wednesday
I hate to bury the more important Afghanistan posts, but I’ve been working hard to avoid my work this morning and I wanted to memorialize my efforts with a linkdump.
* Via The Rushmore Academy, Richard Brody says The Darjeeling Limited is the second-best film of the decade. Coming as this does just one day after a lunchtime argument with Ryan over whether Wes Anderson is a “serious” filmmaker, I think my affirmative case has now been definitively proved.
* Matt Yglesias had a good post this morning on the way institutional pressures in the military-industrial complex drag America’s foreign policy to the right no matter who is president.
* Bad behavior from conservative Democrats in the Senate has put Snowe and Collins’s votes back in play on health care.
* UC-San Diego’s Gordon H. Hansen: Despite all this, illegal immigration’s overall impact on the US economy is small. Low-skilled native workers who compete with unauthorized immigrants are the clearest losers. US employers, on the other hand, gain from lower labor costs and the ability to use their land, capital, and technology more productively. The stakes are highest for the unauthorized immigrants themselves, who see very substantial income gains after migrating. If we exclude these immigrants from the calculus, however (as domestic policymakers are naturally inclined to do), the small net gain that remains after subtracting US workers’ losses from US employers’ gains is tiny. And if we account for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash. The bolded phrase represents the reason why, despite ongoing shrieking nativism from the Republican party base, immigration reform never actually occurs. (via @mattoyeah)
* Kottke: Photos of Dubai in decline are the new photos of Detroit in decline. Have to admit I laughed at Stewart’s sad “It’s now Du-sell” pun last night.
* And Scott Lemieux has today’s deep thought.
I am absolutely shocked that, despite a near-total lack of precedent, a wealthy professional athlete has engaged in sexual relations with persons to whom he is not married, and I hope that cable news will devote more time to these remarkably surprising and important revelations.
Anderson v. Ashby
Matt Zoller Seitz pits Wes Anderson vs. Hal Ashby in the third part of his Moving Image documentary, coming to a startling conclusion:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Anderson’s selective adoration. But when you look at the totality of what Ashby accomplished—the social and political dimensions that all his films explored, the blunt honesty of their expression—Anderson’s work can’t help but come up short, just as the work of Anderson’s imitators is overshadowed by the genuine article.
Tell Matt Seitz he just made my list of things to do today. In all seriousness, I guess I can see Seitz’s point, but you can only conclude “Anderson’s work can’t help but come up short” when you demand of Anderson’s work the things it is quite pointedly refusing to do.
Wes, Part 2
Part 2 of Matt Zoller Seitz’s five-part Wes Anderson documentary is now up. The focus this time is on Scorsese, Lester, and Nichols.
If you missed the video for the first one, it should be said that the video (and not the text) is the whole link. The link to the video is practically invisible; scroll down and keep your eye on the right side of the page.
Wes!
The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, “the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation.” (Tarantino who?) Here’s Part 1.
When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.
But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.
The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we’ve talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one’s own film…
Wes’s Next?
Wes Anderson aficionados may be waiting a long time for the director’s next original project. With The Fantastic Mr. Fox wrapping up, he looks to be writing (and possibly directing) a remake of the French film Mon meilleur ami, about
a cranky antiques dealer who learns at a dinner with his closest acquaintances that none of them really like him because of his harsh manner and selfishness. When his business partner bets him a valuable vase that he can’t produce a best friend, the dealer tries to get an amiable cab driver to pose as his buddy.
Sounds fun, but I want my Darjeeling followup already.
Wes Anderson Wordles
Tim ups the ante with Wordles of Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I’ll take up his challenge with five killer Wordles: the scripts of Wes Anderson.
We see again that Wordles are both fun and smart—here, for instance, the inescapable importance of want is highlighted, as well as the crucial distinction between thinking and knowing. Yeah.
BONUS: “Hotel Chevalier.”
‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies’
This backlash follows a perfect storm of anti-intellectual prejudice: Movies are considered fun that needn’t be taken seriously. Movies contain ideas better left unexamined. Movies generate capital in all directions. The latter ethic was overwhelmingly embraced by media outlets during the Reagan era, exemplified by the sly shift from reporting on movies to featuring inside-industry coverage….
This disrespect for thinking—where film criticism blurred with celebrity gossip—has resulted in today’s cultural calamity. Buyouts and dismissals are, of course, unfortunate personal setbacks; but the crisis of contemporary film criticism is that critics don’t discuss movies in ways that matter. Reviewers no longer bother connecting movies to political or moral ideas (that’s was what made James Agee’s review of The Human Comedy and Bosley Crowther’s review of Rocco and His Brothers memorable). Nowadays, reviewers almost never draw continuity between new films and movie history—except to get it wrong, as in the idiotic reviews that belittled Neil Jordan’s sensitive, imaginative The Brave One (a movie that brilliantly contrasts vengeful guilt to 9/11 aftershock) as merely a rip-off of the 1970s exploitation feature Death Wish.
If the current indifference to critical thought is a tragedy, it’s not just for the journalism profession betraying its promise of news and ideas but also for those bloggers. The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking. It breeds a new pinhead version of fan-clubism.
“What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies”: Armond White argues that film reviewing in America has gone completely off the rails.
What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.
That there isn’t a popular hit among any of these films proves how critics have failed to rouse the moviegoing public in any direction.
There’s a little too much of Matthew Arnold here for me, and anyway I think he’s misread There Will be Blood (actually very good) and World Trade Center (actually pretty pernicious) at least—but I can’t disagree too vehemently with anyone who gets this out there:
Critics say nothing about movies that open up complex meaning or richer enjoyment. That’s why they disdained the beauty of The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson’s confrontation with selfishness, hurt and love were too powerful, too humbling. It’s no wonder that the audience for movies shrinks into home-viewership; they also shrink away from movies as a great popular art form.
Top Cinematic Moments of 2007
InContention has a list of the top ten cinematic moments of 2007. (Part 1, Part 2.)
I’ll go along with a lot of what’s said here—though I can’t help noting that Tapley is a bit over-appreciative of The Assassination of Jesse James; that the best shots of There Will Be Blood surely beat all comers; and that the omission of the opening sequence of Darjeeling Limited (out on DVD tomorrow!) is simply inexcusable.
Because the Oscars Have Been So Reliable Up to Now
Oscar nominations have been announced, and The Darjeeling Limited (my review, and the many times I’ve posted about it) has been completely shut out. Inconceivable!
In its absence, I have no choice but to root for The Coens’ No Country for Old Men to sweep every category for which it is eligible and Juno to take everything else—pending, of course, my appraisal of There Will Be Blood, which I’m supposed to see this Thursday, and which I’m given to understand is pretty good.
Gerry Canavan 