The first wave of these redesigns has earned a lot of attention around the internet. We here at Rushmore Academy have also taken note, and an exclusive Rushmore//Youssef surprise is in the works. It’s a cliffhanger, so keep checking back for more details.

In the meantime, you can purchase the released-as-yet posters in 2 sizes at Ibraheem Youssef’s shop.

In an on-going series that takes a look at films from the past twenty-five years that have found their audiences in non-traditional routes, the A.V. Club‘s Scott Tobias has taken a look at Wes’ first film, Bottle Rocket.

We did it, though, didn’t we?” —Owen Wilson as Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Back when Fantastic Mr. Fox debuted a few months ago, the following thought occurred to me: “Wes Anderson is forever doomed to make Wes Anderson movies.” Here’s a director who did all he could to step outside his comfort zone, adapting someone else’s work for the first time—in this case, that of Roald Dahl, an author with his own singularity—and using stop-motion animation, a painstaking collaborative process that seems like it should suppress his auteurist instincts. Alas, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a Wes Anderson movie from frame one, because he found a way to square his sensibility with Dahl’s (or, as detractors might put it, “shoehorn it in”) and wrangle a team of animators into bringing his homemade, obsessively detailed Rankin-Bass universe to life. There are two ways to look at it: Anderson is either to be praised for his consistency of vision, or damned for painting himself into a stifling creative corner. This may explain why the maker of such gentle, eccentric, lovingly particular comedies remains one of the more polarizing directors in the business.

Read the full article at the A.V. Club, complete with clips from the film.

Todd Gilchrist at Cinematical writes about Bottle Rocket in their Shelf Life feature. It’s an interesting read and we agree with his conclusion. Full article after the break.

Wes Anderson’s movies have entertained and enchanted audiences for more than a decade now, offering a singular and yet strangely universal point of view time and again about oddballs and outsiders who simply want their creativity to connect with others. This week, Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox arrives in theaters (in limited release), and while we’ve already fallen in love with the his latest work (thanks in no small part to his particularly fertile adaptation of author Roald Dahl’s source material), it seemed appropriate to go back and revisit his first film, the oft-forgotten Bottle Rocket, to remind ourselves where the writer-director started, if not where our love affair with his work began.

As longtime fans of the filmmaker (I remember reviewing this in 1996 when it was first released, and later declared his follow-up, Rushmore, one of my all-time favorites), this is one of his only movies I haven’t seen what seems like a hundred times. Thankfully, Criterion’s stunning Blu-ray, released late last year, not only offer the best-ever presentation of the film, but a bounty of extras to add context to Anderson’s indefatigable creativity. But as for the movie itself?

The Facts: Bottle Rocket was released in 1996 after acclaimed writer-director James L. Brooks bankrolled Wes Anderson’s feature film debut. The film also introduced Luke and Owen Wilson, who became stars in their own right. According to online sources, however, at the time of its release, the film received some of the worst test screening points in the history of Columbia Pictures. Financially the film flopped, earning back only $560,000 of the $7 million that it cost to make (although its widest release was in 49 theaters simultaneously), but it did receive a few nods from critics’ groups, most notably a New Generation Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

What Still Works: Although the film is probably best viewed as groundwork for what Anderson did later, its conception, direction and performances are all not only convincing, but genuinely compelling. Anderson uses both Owen Wilson’s frenetic, childlike energy and Luke Wilson’s understated ordinariness to amazing effect, revealing unseen sides of two guys who otherwise might seem both less and more interesting, respectively. Anderson truly seeds every scene with the same, unifying theme, which would manifest itself again in virtually all of his subsequent work: his characters are dreamers, romantics, and idea men, whose ambition and abilities are always sadly disproportionate, so they ultimately end up settling for low-key success or noble failure. Anderson’s hand is surest in this territory, and he manages to give their peccadilloes poignancy but never lets them languish in deeper melancholy, instead offering a whimsical optimism that surpasses the sadness and offers a sense of redemption that is both rewarding and really earned.

What Doesn’t Work: Not a whole lot. It’s obvious that Anderson was not only working on a limited budget, but still developing his signature style, so some of the execution is scruffier than one has come to expect from the director. But as a whole the technique, story and tone of the film is fluid and effective, without necessarily being as well-defined as in his later works.

What’s The Verdict: Bottle Rocket is a really terrific movie, and even if it doesn’t quite live up to all of Wes Anderson’s later work, it’s both a rewarding promise of things to come and a really great movie on its own. As indicated above, Criterion’s Blu-ray is really the best way to watch the film, because the transfer is simply gorgeous, and it’s packaged with a commentary track and several hours worth of bonus materials. But Bottle Rocket truly succeeds because when it goes off in front of your eyes, you know that you’ve seen something truly special.

What’s another $4,000 after paying private school tuition? That was probably the pitch made by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson to their fathers, a year after the two met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas at Austin and decided to pen a script together about a trio of unlikely hoodlums. Similar to the clueless would-be criminals they created — Bob (Robert Musgrave), Anthony (Luke Wilson) and Dignan (Owen Wilson) — Anderson and Wilson scored the initial amount of cash that they asked for from their parents, but only wound up shooting eight minutes of 16mm footage before running out of funds. As a result, the Wilsons’ father contacted family friend and “Paris, Texas” screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson to see if the kids’ work had promise, which led to Carson finding enough money to finance the rest of the 13-minute short, as well as producer Barbara Boyle getting in touch with then-Gracie Films vice president Polly Platt. The short got into Sundance in 1993, and though the unusually rhythmic patter of the characters didn’t make much of an impression on audiences in Park City, it got the attention of Platt’s boss, James L. Brooks, who would ultimately bankroll the feature — which ironically was rejected by Sundance, though there’s no question who got the last laugh.

So What’s Different? Beyond an expansion of the plot, not a whole lot is different except for a jazzier score and that it’s shot in black-and-white.

You can see the glorious result above!  Thanks, Ian!

From an Amazon review:

The Criterion 2-disc Bottle Rocket is outstanding, but don’t toss your original disc just yet… the new edition is a slightly different edit that loses one laugh and adds another. I couldn’t find any reference to these changes in the supplementary material at all.

MISSING: Originally, during the book store robbery, Anthony grabs a random book off the shelf and opens it, revealing the title page “Job Opportunities in Government – 1995″ which always gave me a little chuckle. Now for some reason the book opens to a black and white photograph of a military plane (it goes by so fast you’d have to freeze frame to make it out.)

ADDED: Originally, when Bob hands his earnings over to Future Man to cover his attorney fees, he asks if he can keep a few bucks for gas, and the scene ends. Now the scene plays a few seconds longer, and we hear Future Man’s reply: “No, you can’t.”

Waris Ahluwalia on The Sartorialist

It’s not the first time Waris has been on a fashion blog. He was on Facehunter in 2007, repping fashion designer, Benjamin Cho.

Brought to you by the 2009 Wes Anderson Film Festival.

Suggest the next Wes Moment! E-mail edwardappleby @ yankeeracers.org or tweet @rushmoreacademy!