The World of Wes Anderson
We’re very sad to report the passing of Kumar Pallana, he was 94. Pallana appeared in four of Wes’ movies, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. We’ll be putting something together on each of these roles later, but for now crack a safe for Kumar.
Abrams Books has released a trailer (yes, a book trailer) for the great Matt Zoller Seitz’s forthcoming The Wes Anderson Collection, which will be released into fine bookstores near you on October 8th. We heartily recommend you buy it. Did we mention it’s by, for our money, the foremost critical voice on Wes’ work? Did we mention it has an introduction by certified Important Author Michael Chabon? Did we mention it has a brand spanking new interview with Wes that encompasses his entire career to date? We didn’t, did we. Well it does, so be like Margot and sit in your zebra adorned room reading like a Tenenbaum. Pre-order from Amazon (by doing so you help support the site, and ensure we post at least three to four times a year).
Speaking of fine bookstores, Seitz will be appearing at the Word Bookstore in Brooklyn on October 8th, at New York’s legendary Strand Bookstore on October 10th, discussing the book and Wes’ work along with Lisa Rosman and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, and Seitz will host a special screening of Bottle Rocket October 19th at Videology in Brooklyn.
Bravo, Matt!
Color us excited, frequent Wes collaborator Roman Coppola (co-writer of The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom) is back with his second directorial effort A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, coming more than a decade after his wonderful film CQ. The film stars Charlie Sheen in the title role, as a graphic designer with girl trouble. We’re most excited though by Coppola cousin Jason Schwartzman and American hero Bill Murray, who appear to play Swan’s best friend and father figure, respectively. The film comes out in the US on February 8th. We’ll be first in line.
Wes and co. had a good night last night in New York at the IFP Gotham Awards. Moonrise Kingdom took home the top prize of the evening, the Best Feature award, which was accepted by Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, Sam and Suzy themselves. We’ll have more, including pictures of the night, and hopefully the acceptance speech, in the coming days.
MTV’s Josh Horowitz interviewed Law at TIFF, where he’s promoting his new film Anna Karenina, and Law confirmed that he is indeed involved in Wes’ next film The Grand Budapest Hotel, and gives some indication that the floated cast list is likely accurate.
Just a quick note: we hope to return to updating the site more regularly, a perfect storm of personal stuff keeping our writers busy and a stunning lack of news has left the site a bit barren. Never fear, we’ll be up and running again soon.
Come one, come all to this week’s round-up! We’re excited to announce we have a few new features that will be rolling out in the coming weeks:
And now, for our meat and potatoes, this week’s news:
The line-up for the Toronto International Film Festival was announced today, and with it the announcement of a new film from frequent Wes collaborator Noah Baumbach. The film is called Frances Ha and stars Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote, as “a dancer who moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.” We’re big fans of Baumbach, and we can’t wait to see what he has up his sleeve here. To see more pictures from the film, head over to CriterionCast. No distributor yet, but we’re hoping Focus, who released Greenberg and Moonrise Kingdom will pick it up for the US.
Deadline reports that Scott Rudin and Indian Paintbrush will produce Wes Anderson’s eighth film The Grand Budapest Hotel. This sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel No plot details yet, though if we had to guess, the film would involve a hotel of some sort. They also confirm earlier reports that Johnny Depp will have a role in the film. Looks like the film is shaping up pretty quickly, and we have to imagine that Moonrise Kingdom being such a hit certainly isn’t hurting things.
In the latest bit of speculative scraps, Twitch has learned about some well known actors Wes has supposedly reached out to for Movie #8. We quoth
While it’s hard to say what stage of the process each of these is at at the present, we are told that Anderson is approaching a cast of Johnny Depp, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jude Law, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe and Angela Lansbury to star in the film.
If this holds any salt, we can be sure that Wilson, Murray, Brody, Dafoe, Goldblum and Norton are on board given their history. The rest, particularly the last, will remain to be seen.
Moonrise Kingdom is not a drastic departure from Anderson’s first six features but rather an intensification of their characteristics, or even just their more explicit revelation.