The World of Wes Anderson
For much of the Common Era (C.E.), geeks have been unfairly ignored by the West’s esteemed sleepover magazine culture. No longer. Sarah O’Brien & Lacey Soslow save us with Geeky Dreamboats: A Celebration. How does Wes rank on the “Geekboat Meter”? Shall we consult his “Geekboat Nugget”?
“Tall, check. Skinny, check. Fabulous glasses, check. Living film auteur, check. Okay, there you have it. Wes is a living legend among geeky dreamboats…”
Thanks to the Slog blog @ The Stranger.
From the Associated Press:
NEW YORK — “Can I do a flashback?” asks Jason Schwartzman.
The 29-year-old actor and musician is chatting over coffee, sitting in a Manhattan hotel lobby almost Zen-like, but full of questions and curiosity. He clearly relishes conversation, pursuing any tangents with a lively interest:
Words he hates: “vibe, journey and voice.”
The “amazingness” of math: “Logic plus logic equals the illogical. Do you know what I mean?”
The previous night’s Steelers game: “The … has pretty much hit the fan.”
Schwartzman’s storytelling is vibrant, abstract and often not chronological. And at this particular moment, everything seems to relate back to the past.
Schwartzman made his film debut eleven years ago in Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” as Max Fisher, the spectacled, love-crazed, eminently intrepid teenage misfit — easily one of the most remarkable first stabs at movie acting.
“I can’t express enough to you how bizarre that experience was,” Schwartzman recalls. “It was like a drive-by shooting, but a positive one.”
Continue reading “AP: “A decade past ‘Rushmore,’ Schwartzman hits stride””
At the Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK:
A Fantastically Foxy half term
Saturday 24 October to Sunday 1 NovemberTo celebrate the release of Fantastic Mr Fox, the new film animation, we have fox-themed activities running throughout half term week. Join in with Fox Trails around the local sites which inspired some of the film’s scenes and sets and into the woods which Roald Dahl imagined as Mr. Fox’s home. We’ll have lots of Fox storytelling and you’ll be able to make your own Mr. Fox complete with burrow!
Fox Searchlight has graciously invited us to the premiere of Fantastic Mr. Fox at the BFI London Film Festival in October (thank you!).
One problem, the trip will be rather expensive, and the site costs more to run than it makes in advertising.
How can we fund our trip? Send your ideas to edwardappleby@yankeeracers.org or tweet @rushmoreacademy.
The tubes of Twitter and the blogosphere have been full of talk about the recent Empire interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox cinematographer Tristan Oliver, who (in the posted bit of text) suggests that Wes called in the film.
Since we haven’t read the full interview, we don’t plan to weigh in on a out-of-context comment. There is some discussion on the Yankee Racers forum… join in!
From IFC, “Starting Small: Ten Notable Shorts That Became Features.” Among them, Bottle Rocket:
What’s another $4,000 after paying private school tuition? That was probably the pitch made by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson to their fathers, a year after the two met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas at Austin and decided to pen a script together about a trio of unlikely hoodlums. Similar to the clueless would-be criminals they created — Bob (Robert Musgrave), Anthony (Luke Wilson) and Dignan (Owen Wilson) — Anderson and Wilson scored the initial amount of cash that they asked for from their parents, but only wound up shooting eight minutes of 16mm footage before running out of funds. As a result, the Wilsons’ father contacted family friend and “Paris, Texas” screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson to see if the kids’ work had promise, which led to Carson finding enough money to finance the rest of the 13-minute short, as well as producer Barbara Boyle getting in touch with then-Gracie Films vice president Polly Platt. The short got into Sundance in 1993, and though the unusually rhythmic patter of the characters didn’t make much of an impression on audiences in Park City, it got the attention of Platt’s boss, James L. Brooks, who would ultimately bankroll the feature — which ironically was rejected by Sundance, though there’s no question who got the last laugh.
So What’s Different? Beyond an expansion of the plot, not a whole lot is different except for a jazzier score and that it’s shot in black-and-white.
From /Film:
In 2007 an omnibus film called Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) played at festivals. Made to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the collection featured short films about cinema made by an amazing variety of directors: Takeshi Kitano, Gus Van Sant, Zhang Yimou, Jane Campion, Atom Egoyan and many more. Among those ‘many more’ were Joel and Ethan Coen, who enlisted their recent star Josh Brolin in a three-minute movie called World Cinema. Problem was, World Cinema didn’t show up on either of the DVD releases of Chacun son cinema, making it very difficult to see. (I was lucky enough to see it at Toronto that year.) But now it has found its way onto YouTube, and you should watch it after the break, right now, before it goes away again.
From the Noah and the Whale blog, after the Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer:
Looks as amazing as I imagined it would. I actually walked past Mr. Anderson a couple of weeks ago. We were mixing the sound for the film at the same post production house that he was mixing ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’. As I got out of a lift, he walked in. I said nothing. Minutes later the building next door burnt down. Seriously.
Their new album/film The First Days of Spring drops 6 October 2009. We can’t wait.
