The World of Wes Anderson
From geek tyrant: Another advert for something that doesn’t really exist. These videos are apparently connected to Jason’s upcoming movie, Funny People.
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The really great “making of” documentary for Rushmore by Eric Chase Anderson, thanks to elkemonkey’s YouTube channel.
A little book recommendation from that great literary journal South Coast Today (Massachusetts), The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen:
If Wes Anderson were a novelist, this is the novel he’d write.
This is 29-year-old Larsen’s first novel, and he is incredibly, almost supernaturally, gifted.
Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a 12-year-old genius, the son of a silent Montana cowboy born 100 years too late and an entomologist more interested in tracking a rare tiger beetle than in her family.
T.S. is an exceptional cartographer and scientific illustrator, contributing to various magazines, such as Scientific American and Science.
In his color-coded notebooks, he maps loneliness, the way his sister shucks corn, the way his dad drinks whiskey, the plot of “Moby-Dick,” how the parts of a train correspond to the parts of a sandwich, and all the possible outcomes of Cat’s Cradle, among thousands of other phenomena.
When his illustration of a rare beetle is given the prestigious Baird award by the Smithsonian — the institute assumes T.S. is an older gent — he hops a train and hoboes his way to Washington, D.C.
In reviews, you’ll read that this book is “whimsical” — a word I hate, because it’s vague, semi-meaningless, and kinda lame.
Has anyone read this? It reminds me of Eric Chase Anderson’s Chuck Dugan is AWOL.
From Cinematical:
Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it’s over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom‘s creative and thematic elements seem like they’re on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they’ve been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it’s cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson’s movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.
NME has a great tribute to Bill Murray:
Wes Bill – ‘Rushmore’ (1998)
In Wes Anderson, Bill found a director whose phonecall he actually wanted to return. As well as this, the best ‘high school film not about high school’ he went on to accept invitations to ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, ‘The Life Aquatic’ and even popped up (all too briefly) in ‘The Darjeeling Limited’. So that’ll be every film (bar his debut) that Wes has ever made. What a lucky bugger. See also – Those films I just listed above and this year’s ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’.
With the move of Fantastic Mr. Fox from 20th Century Fox to Fox Searchlight, its November 13, 2009 release date could be up in the air. More soon…
From Digital Spy via WesAndersonFan:
Best known for directing The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach, Henry Selick is a modern day master of stop motion animation. His latest movie Coraline is based on Neil Gaiman’s spooky book for children and marks his first foray into 3-D. While chatting to us about the new movie, Selick also revealed what really happened with a certain Fox and hints at another collaboration with Gaiman.
What happened with your withdrawal from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox?
“While originally I was going to be part of Fantastic Mr Fox, when Coraline got greenlit I had to tell Wes Anderson ‘well, sorry’. But I recommended an animation supervisor for him and several of the animators coming off Coraline have come on to Fantastic Mr Fox. So sideways I have had a little bit of a hand but not too much.”What are your future moviemaking plans?
“I haven’t chosen my next project. I loved working with Neil and we’re certainly in talks about maybe doing another one. There are other things that have come to me, an original story as well, but I can’t tell you because I don’t know what’s next to me.”
Our old pal Derek Hill’s book is featured in today’s IFC.com Bright Lights:
So back to those book reviews. First up is Derek Hill‘s “Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave,” and Colm O’Shea notes that the filmmakers under consideration here, or at least the six warranting their own chapters, are Richard Linklater, David O Russell, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and Michel Gondry…. It’s curious that Kaufman, despite being featured in the title, does not get a chapter to himself. Though the book was written before ‘Synecdoche, New York,’ Kaufman is after all presented as the driving force behind Jonze and Gondry’s best work to date, and the embodiment of the sensibility with which Hill is so enamoured…. Hill sets out his linking principle as a predominant thematic through-line of comic unease and alienation.”
If you haven’t read Derek’s book yet, you really should.
In an unrelated note, Aman Singh reports “You Can’t Offend Waris Ahluwalia”:
Waris Ahluwalia – best known for his roles in Wes Anderson movies and his House of Waris jewelry line – looked at us quizzically at Saturday’s Elise Overland presentation, as though trying to remember if he’d met us before. “I actively chose a while ago to go, I’m not going to remember anything,” he explained. “Sort of a meditative thing: I thought I would keep my head clear, and thoughts would flow in and out. And then I became an actor.” There are occupational hazards to this M.O., such as memorizing lines or awkward social encounters. “We were up in Hudson, on the street. This guy comes up: ‘Hey.’ I’m like, ‘Hey, nice to meet you.’ And, like, beginning of the summer we had spent a weekend at his house,” said Waris. But he has adopted a credo passed onto him by Simon Doonan: “Be unoffendable.” We decided to hold him to it.
Waris, a Sikh, keeps his hair tightly coiled under a turban. How long, we asked, were his locks? “I cannot believe you asked me that!” he said. “It’s down to the hips.” Nearby, a girl with her back to us had her hair up in a bun. “It’s sort of like that,” he said, cupping his hand around it. She spun around, looking slightly bewildered. Waris didn’t flinch: “Unoffendable!” He’s removed the turban in movies like The Life Aquatic and Inside Man, but never for a photo shoot. So which fashion magazines would he take it off for? “Purple. And I’d do it for L’Uomo Vogue. I believe in art, and I believe in ideas and concepts,” he said. So, no Men’s Vogue? “No.” What about Harper’s Bazaar? Waris pointed to his turban. “They get this.” Waris is currently playing a hypochondriac in a film he hopes is Sundance-bound. Does he draw on his own neuroses for the role? No, he said, sounding a bit disappointed. “I wish I had some kind of weird tendencies. I try to.”
These videos cannot be embedded (complain!). Enjoy.
Got the embed code. Part II and III are after the jump.
Perhaps the most respected male fashion bloggeur, Scott Schuman (aka The Sartorialist), has stopped Frequent [Wes] Collaborator, and dedicated turban wearer,Waris Ahluwalia for a photo in New York — Fifth Ave., to be precise. In addition to his website, Schuman also has his own page in GQ every month. That’s some fashion clout.
It’s not the first time Waris has been on a fashion blog. He was on Facehunter in 2007, repping fashion designer, Benjamin Cho.
