The really great “making of” documentary for Rushmore by Eric Chase Anderson, thanks to elkemonkey’s YouTube channel.
Wes Anderson YouTube channel
YouTube user elkemonkey has put together a fine collection of Wes Anderson videos, including “making of” films for The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums.
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Note that only a few videos are available in the widget above. I will post these to the A/V Club soon.
Slate: The Ubiquitous Anderson
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 These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes.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.
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.
Trailer for (hypothetical) film festival
A very cool trailer that advertises a hypothetical Wes Anderson Film Festival:
Happy Birthday, Wes!
Today, May 1, 2009, is Wes Anderson’s 40th Birthday! Happy Birthday, Wes! Send along your birthday greetings, videos, and haikus to edwardappleby(at)yankeeracers(dot)org or tweet them @rushmoreacademy! I will post them through the day.
From TheGladGirl:
Wes you’re my hero! Happy Birthday. Thnx 4 coloring my world. XO 40 x infinity!
Happy Birthday Mr Anderson.
I will celebrate Wes’ bday by writing a play, saving Latin, killing a jaguar shark & making out with my adopted brother.
emfa:
Wes Anderson turns the big 4-0 today. Happy Birthday to Wes!
Me and him are celebrating by running around downtown Vancouver shooting short films French New Wave style via handheld camera.
Tonight it’s possible that I may sacrifice a small goat to celebrate this joyous occasion.
Chat and watch The Royal Tenenbaums with us Thursday at 9 p.m. ET
What: Royal Tenenbaums screening party
Where: Rushmore Academy chat room
When: Thursday, April 30, 2009, 9 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Pacific
Wes Tribute
Very cool. Bravo, Max.
Wes-inspired art
From Les Herman:
Update: if you are interested in prints, please contact lesliepherman(at)gmail.com.
Wes Anderson
The Darjeeling Limited
From Phil:
“At the Movies” (starting in the front row, left to right: Terry Gilliam, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Hal Ashby, Woody Allen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Werner Herzog, Michel Gondry, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, François Truffaut, Sidnet Lumet)
Wes Anderson Soundtrack Tribute Night in Northampton, MA
Oh, what’s that Will Oldman? I can’t hear you over the awesomeness…
May 1, 2009
Wes Anderson Soundtrack Night
140 Pleasant Street
Northampton, MA 01060
www.elevensmusic.com
10pm $5
Will Oldham is cranky (and, uh, who is Will Oldham?)
From The Onion A.V. Club:
After giving a memorable performance as a boy preacher in John Sayles’ 1987 coal-mining drama Matewan, Will Oldham made a brief attempt at being a working actor, before becoming disillusioned with Hollywood and retreating into seclusion for several years. When Oldham emerged, he came bearing music. As the reticent, creaky-voiced frontman for the mysterious Palace Brothers (later Palace Music, Palace Songs, and then just Palace), Oldham brought a distinctive new sound to indie-rock, informed by spooky country ballads, Eastern mysticism, and hermetic eccentricity…
AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas?
WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, “Wow, I’ll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I’ll bet they spent months shooting this, and I’ll bet they spent months editing this, and now they’re spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue.” How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline. Not only is that a crime, but it’s a crime not to give people who are good at making music for movies the work. It’s like saying, “We don’t need you, even though you’re so much better at it than I am as a music supervisor.” Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name?
AVC: Wes Anderson?
WO: Yeah. His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, “Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.” The two are just thrown together. People are constantly contacting me saying, “I’ve been editing my movie, and I’ve been using your song in the editing process. What would it take to license the song?” And for me it’s like, “Regardless of what you’ve been doing, my song doesn’t belong in your movie.” That’s where the conversation should end. Music should be made for movies, you know?
AVC: So there aren’t many contexts in which you can imagine licensing one of your songs to a movie?
WO: No. I mean, I could see-
AVC: Over the closing credits, maybe?
WO: Right, the closing credits. But again, someone wrote me recently and said, “We wanna use your songs in our movie, and we’ve already got this artist, this artist, this artist, this artist.” And I was thinking, “Well that makes for like, no integrity to your movie. All these different voices combined with the actors’, writer’s, director’s and DP’s voices. That sounds like the worst place to be. That sounds like a music festival.” [Laughs.] I liked it when those crazy, dirty, Rhode Island brothers made movies like There’s Something About Mary.