The World of Wes Anderson
Back in October (or thereabouts), Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody assembled their own Darjeeling Limited playlists for the iTunes Store. While old news to many, this is new news to us! Thanks to Owen for the lead. Track listings after the break.
Continue reading “Wes, Jason, and Adrien offer up their own Darjeeling Limited playlists”
From Cotter:
I thought you guys would appreciate this. I was reading the hard-to-ignore coverage of the Governor Spitzer prostitution situation and was amused to find one of our old friends is Ms. Dupre’s court-appointed legal counsel. Here’s a quote from the Post:
“If she’s made that much money in that short amount of time, that would certainly make her ineligible for taxpayer-supported legal fees,” defense attorney Steve Zissou said. “That should be brought to the attention of the judge. Certainly she is capable of paying her own legal fees.”
ZISSOU!
I hope all our Istabuli readers will be heading to the Istanbul International Film Festival (April 5-20) where The Darjeeling Limited will make its Turkish premiere. The Festival has an overall “’68 Generation” theme and will be presenting some wonderful films (Godard’s Rolling Stones doc Sympathy for the Devil to Hopper’s Easy Rider). TDL will show in the “American Independents” category alongside The Savages and (Team Anderson collaborator) Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding. Two hundred films will be screened in all. If I am not mistaken, this is the second Middle East showing for TDL, after the Israeli premier earlier this year. So Bosporus bathers, don’t miss this wonderful opportunity!
Paris fashion week is in full swing and Marc Jacobs, as usual, has been impressing the critics. We of course know that Marc Jacobs (creative director for Louis Vuitton) had a close working relationship with Wes Anderson on The Darjeeling Limited with the creating of the spectacular luggage and suits used by Francis and his brothers. But in the Guardian piece it seems that the film that “most influences” Jacobs his The Royal Tenenbaums:
Louis Vuitton only started making clothes 10 years ago under the aegis of Marc Jacobs, almost 150 years after the label first knocked out the ubiquitous bags. But its fashion division has become a credible player and last year the label achieved record growth. As if to rub in the American-ness, Jacobs has said that the film that influences him most is not Breakfast at Tiffany’s but The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s offbeat film about a dysfunctional family.
Anderson was also in attendance at this show (as was Sofia Coppola and many others).
It’s out! (yesterday!) Where have we been? Well, watching it.
Visit the Yankee Racers forum. Share your thoughts on the film/DVD and your adoration for Wes.
Buy it and support the site, if you haven’t already.
The Darjeeling Limited is out on DVD this Tuesday! Buy it here from Amazon.com, and support the site! Thank you.
From Hypebeast:
To commemorate Wes Anderson’s award nominated The Darjeeling Limited film, French fashion label APC teamed up on a t-shirt. The simple tee design features the movies named printed on the chest in two different color. Available February 29th at APC locations in Japan.
Wonder if these will be available at North American locations?
Update (Sun, 24 February): MoviesOnline.ca is giving away TDL on DVD:
To enter this contest send an email to contests@moviesonline.ca with the subject Darjeeling Limited and include your name and address. We will then pick a bunch of winners and announce them here on the site!
(no idea if this contest is open to non-Canadian residents… but I tried anyway?)
February 25, 2008, DVD review by Richard Brody (link)
It’s unjust that the Academy didn’t nominate Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” (Fox) in any category, but inexplicable that they didn’t invent a special one for it: Best Luggage. An exquisite set of suitcases, credited to Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, plays a large role in this blissful, loopy comedy of family anguish and sublimated tenderness.
The film’s subject is coming home, and it’s a sign of Anderson’s comic genius that it takes a picaresque jaunt through India by three brothers, estranged since their father’s funeral a year ago, to do so. The domineering Francis (Owen Wilson), who is recovering from a motorcycle accident, has convened the other two—Peter (Adrien Brody), a regular guy in a panic over the impending birth of his first child, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), a literary romantic trapped in a troubled relationship—for a “spiritual journey,” which he plans down to the minute.
The trip brings odd misadventure, off-kilter romance, and sudden danger, but the real story involves coming to terms with a lifetime of ingrained resentments plus grief of more recent vintage. For Anderson, such troubles are too big to blurt out without bathos and ridicule. Following other Wasp modernists such as Hemingway and Howard Hawks, he relies on high style, sly gestures, and arch pranks to evoke intense emotion with bite and grace. His tight, sketchlike structures bring out the best in his actors, especially Schwartzman (who co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola), a Dustin Hoffman for our time, who doles out Zen wisdom with a carnal leer. In Anderson’s world of brothers without sisters, the ribald rituals of male bonding suggest the unfathomable otherness of women—including the trio’s mother (Anjelica Huston), whose life haunts them no less than their father’s death and who turns out to be the real reason for their trip.
Where people prove elusive, material things play an outsized, totemic role. The brothers’ grudges emerge in their wrangling over their father’s relics—glasses, keys, toiletries—but pride of place goes to his luggage. Dark tan, finely tooled, and adorned with a faux-naïf intaglio of wild animals, it follows them around on their journey at great inconvenience, a perfect, literal metaphor for their heavy emotional baggage.
The film begins with a neat dose of backstory: a short preface, featuring Jack holed up in a luxurious Paris hotel before his passage to India, where he receives a surprise visit from the woman he adores (Natalie Portman, chomping a toothpick, her hair cropped martially short). Movingly, stoically, whimsically, Anderson suggests the difficult self-restraint and self-mastery that the most intimate relationships demand. Love, in his book, is tolerance and acceptance—facing up to pain in order to take the pleasure that’s given.
The Louisville Film Society is screening Rushmore on Tuesday, February 19, 7.30 pm at the Actors Theatre. Admission is free, but you must RSVP ahead of time (502.584.1205).
(thanks to the Backseat Sandbar)
Today’s Boston Globe has an article/review on that well-respected man, Ray Davies. M. Davies’ new CD, Working Man’s Cafe, comes out on Tuesday.
P.S. 100 members in our Facebook group to date! Please join, if you haven’t already!
A rather lovely version of “These Days” (from The Royal Tenenbaums) by St. Vincent, found thanks to aerolls.
Rocket Science (2007) — buy at Amazon and support the site
From The Onion:
Sometimes, indie films rip off Anderson’s work wholesale; at other times, they have the familiar texture of his movies while heading off in different directions. Though Jeffrey Blitz’s semi-autobiographical debut feature—a follow-up to his hit documentary Spellbound—has its own particularities and a greater commitment to realism than Anderson’s work, it applies his stylistic template. The use of music, especially, connects Blitz to Anderson, from the repeated refrains of Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun” (including a version for cello and piano) to the mopey Eef Barzelay tunes that underscore the entire movie like the David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic. Unsurprisingly, Blitz’s stabs at Anderson-like whimsy are the film’s weakest element; when he gets real and deals directly with a stutterer’s coming of age, the film stakes out more original territory (link).