The World of Wes Anderson
Here are the nominees for Best Animated Film:
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
The Princess and the Frog
Up
Let’s show some hustle, Hollywood Foreign Press Association!
Award season speculation from Variety (full story):
As has become the custom, there are still a few bad boys this awards season whose creations cannot be ignored, including the Coens (“A Serious Man”), Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”), Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon”), Spike Jonze (“Where the Wild Things Are”) and Wes Anderson (“Fantastic Mr. Fox”). There’s also genre specialist Guy Ritchie, whose revisionist “Sherlock Holmes” is sure to raise a few eyebrows even as the director goes highbrow…
“The whole somewhat misbegotten notion of the auteur theory is that the director’s personality is itself an aspect of the movie,” says Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer. “Most films from Hollywood, particularly these days, seem to be anonymously directed. And then you have Wes Anderson. Whatever one thinks of his movies, they definitely reveal the person behind the camera and a particular point of view — a way of seeing, a type of humor that is highly distinctive to him.”
“Wes Anderson sometimes seems to me the wise guy in your history class in high school,” adds author and Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel. “He’s articulate, he’s ambitious. And somehow most of his movies don’t seem to be quite up to his own expectations of them.”
From Richard Brody’s New Yorker blog, where he ranked TDL the second best film of the 00s:
As ever with the films of Wes Anderson—the best new American director of the last twenty years—love and death, comedy and tragedy, comfort and adventure, understanding and opacity, style and substance fuse in a modernism of personal and reflexive cinema and a classicism of grand and subtle literary emotion.
Wes, Alexandre Desplat, Jarvis Cocker, and the London Oratory School Schola
Richard Brody profiled Wes a few weeks ago for the New Yorker. On Brody’s excellent film blog for the New Yorker, Front Row, he added some additional commentary (and praise) for “The Darjeeling Limited”:
I’ve seen it many, many times since that press screening two years ago. It has not only held up but gotten richer; each viewing yields fresh wonders.
Wes and Noah Baumbach appeared at the New York Public Library last evening. You can now listen to the audio of the conversation over at their website, and watch video.