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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“5 Ways to tell if your life is a Wes Anderson film”
From 10 minute ramble:
In Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, main character Will says, “The thing is, a person’s life is like a TV show …”
Or a movie.
And if your life is a movie, how do you know what type it is? How do you know who’s making it
Here’s five ways to tell if you’re in a Wes Anderson film.
1. You are or you see a lot of Bill Murray. He’s been in all of Anderson’s movies except one … where presumably James Caan took his place. So, Bill Murray is a good indicator your life is in the middle of a Wes Anderson plot. (Note: This also holds true if you are or you see a lot of Kumar Pallana.)
2. Your soundtrack has 70s rock-n-Roll or other obscure music. Soundtracks are the thumbprint of movies, and Anderson’s print is distinctive, colorful, out-of-the-ordinary, and a little pretentious … which pretty much reflects his movies. So, if you own Seu Jorge …
3. Your surroundings are bathed in bright, distinctive colors (unless you’re going to make a suicide attempt … then it’s cool colors). If soundtracks are one thumbprint, this is the other. Especially if you wear greens and yellows or a range of reds and oranges.
4. At the end of the day, things go in slow motion. This holds true unless you’re running after a train; then it’s slow motion, followed by regular motion. So, #4 should read “At the end of the day, or in the next-to-last part of the end of the day …”
5. You have a strange relationship with a parent or parental figure. Especially if the strange relationship involves #1.
If more than 3 1/2 of these things describe you, smile, crank up your music, and slow down … you’re life, though crazy, is pretty good fodder for the rest of us.
More promotional materials for the (not real) Wes Anderson Film Festival
Yusuf/Cat Stevens on Colbert
Yusuf (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) was a guest on The Colbert Report a few weeks back. Two of his songs are featured on the Rushmore soundtrack, and he is one of our favorites. He has a great new album called roadsinger.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Yusuf | ||||
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| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Yusuf – Roadsinger | ||||
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300 followers on Twitter!
I am proud to announce that we have reached 300 followers on Twitter! Please follow us! (and we’ll probably follow you, unless you are a spammer)
We’re still going to find the Twitter whale and destroy it, possibly with some dynamite.
Film: The making of ‘Rushmore’
The really great “making of” documentary for Rushmore by Eric Chase Anderson, thanks to elkemonkey’s YouTube channel.
“If Wes Anderson were a novelist, this is the novel he’d write.”
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.
Tweet your favorite Wes Anderson film #ilovemovies
One of today’s trending topics on Twitter is #ilovemovies. Be sure to tweet your favorite Wes Anderson film!
(and follow us if you aren’t already!)
Wes Anderson YouTube channel
YouTube user elkemonkey has put together a fine collection of Wes Anderson videos, including “making of” films for The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums.
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Note that only a few videos are available in the widget above. I will post these to the A/V Club soon.
Slate: The Ubiquitous Anderson
Today, Slate looks at The Brothers Bloom and “the problem of Wes Anderson’s pervasive influence.” Problem? Hrmm…
Rian Johnson’s caper comedy The Brothers Bloom begins its nationwide rollout already burdened with a reputation as an imitation of an American original. If Johnson’s terrific debut, Brick, crackled with the borrowed brio of the Coen brothers, early notices for The Brothers Bloom have identified a new muse: Wes Anderson. It’s an assessment that the preview and opening sequence hardly dispel.
But The Brothers Bloom is only the latest addition to a burgeoning subgenre. Over the last few years, Anderson’s movies have become touchstones for indie culture. In the 1990s, it seemed every NYU graduate and Sundance contender was making his own Tarantino knockoff. These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes. A popular strain in recent American indie cinema has been the Andersonian quirkfest, a tendency that runs through movies like Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Son of Rambow, Charlie Bartlett, and Garden State, among others.
Above all, the essay rehashes an old argument, about the alleged “decline” of Wes Anderson:
If Anderson’s ascent was swift, so has been the backlash. His last two movies, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, were received coolly by critics. Some of that has to do with the ubiquity of the Anderson aesthetic, an overexposure that has had the effect of watering down the originator’s own vision. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Aquatic and Darjeeling are rediscovered as unfairly maligned classics a decade or two from now, removed from the fickle context.) But part of it has to do with the elements of his style that Anderson has chosen to cultivate. The Royal Tenenbaums inaugurated the current Anderson period, defined by whimsical bricolage and diorama-style mise-en-scène. His recent movies give off the sense of an artist receding ever deeper into a dollhouse of his own making-or, worse, becoming his own imitator, repeating moves that we have become all too familiar with.
These criticisms are not new. I end with a quote from our interview with author Derek Hill from September of last year:
So if we castigate Anderson for these cinematic sins then we have to scold Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford and David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick and Yasujir? Ozu and Luis Buñuel and on and on. I think the criticism is unfair and displays a lack of awareness about how some directors choose to work. If you don’t like Anderson’s style, so be it. It’s the way he’s chosen to tell stories and I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing that he may have a limited thematic or stylistic palette. There’s nothing wrong with that. Look at the films of Lynch in regards to style. They’re distinctive yet rather limited; same with his themes. Even Kubrick, who tried his hand with various genres and style, was repeatedly working his way through ideas concerning control systems and the chance that what we label individuality wasn’t even possible within these constraining social and biological systems. Big, bold themes… but “limited” as well. Anderson is no different.