The World of Wes Anderson
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.
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.
Waris Ahluwalia, with co-editors Mortimer Singer and Tina Bhojwani, have put together a beautiful and interesting scrapbook called To India with Love: From New York to Mumbai.
Ask people who have been there, and they will all tell you India is like no other place in the world, a land that stirs every one of the five senses and stays in your heart forever. It is this India that brought together three friends, Waris Ahluwalia, Mortimer Singer and Tina Bhojwani to raise funds, spirits, and awareness for the victims of the attacks in Mumbai in November, 2008. The editors set out to create a scrapbook collecting personal photos, stories, and memories from people who, like themselves, love India. The contributors include Wes Anderson, Adrien Brody, Francesco Clemente, Anthony Edwards, Jeanine Lobell, Natalie Portman, Yves Carcelle, Jean Touitou, Owen Wilson, Laura Wilson, Cynthia Rowley, James Ivory, Matthew Williamson, Rachel Roy, Tory Burch, Padma Lakshmi and Shobhaa De. This book declares to Mumbai and the whole country that we are all thinking of them and support them: hence To India, with Love: New York to Mumbai. Profits from the sales of the book will go to support families affected by the attacks. This book can truly make a difference, by opening eyes to the wonders of India and by once again letting the pen or a camera dominate the sword.
It is featured in the New York Times “The Moment” blog.
Photo by Wes Anderson
From the Film Society of Lincoln Center:
Coming to you from Belfast and Nashville via the Internet, the opinionated gents of The Film Talk (Gareth Higgins and Jett Loe) dissect our Satyajit Ray series. You can listen to them talking about achieving effortless naturalism in cinema, the proper pronunciation of Satyajit Ray’s name, and the meaning of a Ray retrospective in the midst of a world of multiplexes. It’s a great contextualization of our Ray series, which is closing tomorrow (Wednesday).
New podcasts from The Film Talk come out frequently, and cover notable movies both high and low. You can subscribe to them on iTunes, or visit their official site.
Coincidentally, you can follow the Film Society of Lincoln Center on Twitter!
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)
“To have not seen the films of Ray is to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon and the sun.” – Akira Kurosawa
During the second half of April, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York) will present the films of Satyajit Ray in First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy (tickets). The series focuses on the first half of Ray’s career, including The Apu Trilogy, and will conclude with a conference at Columbia University.
Ray’s work inspired Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Tragically, The Apu Trilogy is out of print in the United States.
A fun little post from At the Edge:
Image: Famous “Typewriter Sequence” from Merchant Ivory’s film Bombay Talkie (1970) featuring “Queen of the Nautch Girls” Helen and great Shashi Kapoor. The film is not the best from Merchant Ivory duo, but the sequence is definitely iconic.
Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) made the song somewhat of an international hit (editor’s note: did it?). Here is the song clip with Ismail Merchant, in a very Indian way, explaining the metaphor of “Fate Machine.”
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The really fantastic film site The Auteurs is showing the films of Merchant Ivory, free of charge this month. The music and films of Merchant Ivory helped inspire The Darjeeling Limited.
Thanks to the dream team of American-born director James Ivory, Indian producer Ismail Merchant, and German-British screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Merchant-Ivory Productions set the standard for gorgeous period pieces and sophisticated literary adaptations. This month, The Criterion Collection presents six of them for free, ranging from Bollywood-tinged comedies to award-winning E. M. Forster adaptations.
Follow The Auteurs on Twitter! (we are!)
(Just a reminder: Owen Wilson will be presenting tonight’s Top Ten List on the Late Show with David Letterman.)
The debut music video from Company of Thieves, is inspired by Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. The video for the song “Oscar Wilde” was filmed at Sycamore Elementary School in Kokomo, Indiana, over the course of just one day in December 2008. It includes over 60 props which were mostly bought from flea markets and vintage stores. The video was shot on Kodak Vision3 500T 16mm film using an Eclair ACL camera with 12mm and 14mm lenses, with 23 lighting setups. The footage was digitally transferred to uncompressed 10 bit format and edited in Final Cut. If you like the song, it’s available for free download.