In addition to the great Season’s Greetings video we posted yesterday, we have a video card similar to the Thanksgiving one we shared last month. After the break are shortened links to both videos to send to friends and family for holidays.

Read the rest of this entry…

Want to say Happy Thanksgiving in a Wes-y kinda way? Send our video!

E-mail, tweet or telegraph it by sending one of the links below:

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDU26QEYg20

twitterable link: http://bit.ly/6s83Uc

Fantastic Mr. Fox has been in limited release in the U.S., and today it opens nation wide.

To celebrate, you can take a look at all of our Mr. Fox posts by going here, and if you see the film today give us your reactions in the comments below or on Twitter or Facebook.

Enjoy the film!

(Above: Ash, reblogged via grilledcheesevstaco)

We now have a page on Tumblr. It features content from the site as well as photos, quotes, and links shared by our friends. Be sure to follow us; we will follow you back!

Fox Searchlight has revealed a new website for Fantastic Mr. Fox, and it features our website! A hearty thanks to our friends over at Fox Searchlight. We are honored by your recognition.

Back in 2001, I received an e-mail from the marketing department at Disney, my first contact with a studio. Since then, we have had robust relationships with both Disney and Fox Searchlight. This day beats that one by a bunch. Glasses up! Here is to many more years of The Rushmore Academy. Clink, clink.

Head on over to the chat now and watch the Life Aquatic with us!

Updated: Thanks to everyone who came and watched it with us, see you next time!

Please join us tonight for the second film in our summer Wes Anderson Film Festival.

What do you need to do to be a part of it? Simple, grab your DVD and at 11pm ET/8pm PT, head on over to the Chat Room, press play, and chat with us during the film.

You can view the Facebook invitation here.

More information about the film after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry…

Today, Slate looks at The Brothers Bloom and “the problem of Wes Anderson’s pervasive influence.” Problem? Hrmm…

Rian Johnson’s caper comedy The Brothers Bloom begins its nationwide rollout already burdened with a reputation as an imitation of an American original. If Johnson’s terrific debut, Brick, crackled with the borrowed brio of the Coen brothers, early notices for The Brothers Bloom have identified a new muse: Wes Anderson. It’s an assessment that the preview and opening sequence hardly dispel.

But The Brothers Bloom is only the latest addition to a burgeoning subgenre. Over the last few years, Anderson’s movies have become touchstones for indie culture. In the 1990s, it seemed every NYU graduate and Sundance contender was making his own Tarantino knockoff. These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes. A popular strain in recent American indie cinema has been the Andersonian quirkfest, a tendency that runs through movies like Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Son of Rambow, Charlie Bartlett, and Garden State, among others.

Read and watch the slideshow essay.

Above all, the essay rehashes an old argument, about the alleged “decline” of Wes Anderson:

If Anderson’s ascent was swift, so has been the backlash. His last two movies, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, were received coolly by critics. Some of that has to do with the ubiquity of the Anderson aesthetic, an overexposure that has had the effect of watering down the originator’s own vision. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Aquatic and Darjeeling are rediscovered as unfairly maligned classics a decade or two from now, removed from the fickle context.) But part of it has to do with the elements of his style that Anderson has chosen to cultivate. The Royal Tenenbaums inaugurated the current Anderson period, defined by whimsical bricolage and diorama-style mise-en-scène. His recent movies give off the sense of an artist receding ever deeper into a dollhouse of his own making-or, worse, becoming his own imitator, repeating moves that we have become all too familiar with.

These criticisms are not new. I end with a quote from our interview with author Derek Hill from September of last year:

So if we castigate Anderson for these cinematic sins then we have to scold Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford and David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and Yasujir? Ozu and Luis Buñuel and on and on. I think the criticism is unfair and displays a lack of awareness about how some directors choose to work. If you don’t like Anderson’s style, so be it. It’s the way he’s chosen to tell stories and I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing that he may have a limited thematic or stylistic palette. There’s nothing wrong with that. Look at the films of Lynch in regards to style. They’re distinctive yet rather limited; same with his themes. Even Kubrick, who tried his hand with various genres and style, was repeatedly working his way through ideas concerning control systems and the chance that what we label individuality wasn’t even possible within these constraining social and biological systems. Big, bold themes… but “limited” as well. Anderson is no different.