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In defense of The Brothers Bloom / In praise of Bill Murray

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’.

Read more…

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indieWire: Scorsese’s Saves The World (Cinema)

Martin Scorsese is saving world cinema, or trying anyway. The goal of his new World Cinema Foundation, with Kent Jones as its executive director and allied with Criterion and the Auteurs,  is “preserving and promoting films from around the world.”

The Foundation, which has four films in this year’s Cannes Classics section at the Festival de Cannes, will use its alliances to take films from the fest in France to other festivals and museums, followed by a roll out to universities, film clubs, online at The Auteurs, via iTunes and Netflix, through to Criterion DVDs.

“These are considered to be the best films to have ever been made,” praised Cakarel from The Auteurs, adding that the films need to be made available worldwide, for free, so that they can be discovered by international audiences. His site has launched four preserved WCF titles online today.

The Auteurs, a virtual Internet-based cinematheque, will present a World Cinema Foundation portal on their emerging international platform online, incorporating discussion forums, video interviews and editorial content built around the films themselves. B-Side will re-launch and re-develop the WCF website. Criterion will create special DVDs of WCF titles.

“Film culture is richer now than fifteen years ago,” proclaimed Becker from Criterion, saying that these alliances can arm engaged audiences while also reaching out to new moviegoers.

Link

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Imagining Wes soundtracks: The Cloud Photographers

Coming up with Wes Anderson mix tapes, imagining soundtracks for films that only exist in Wes’ (and our) dreams, is a favorite hobby of ours. We came upon a really fantastic one recently:

1. Cumulus
2. Donovan – Hi It’s Been a Long Time
3. Andrew’s Waltz
4. The Kinks – So Long
5. Les Boréades – Piggies
6. Paul Simon – The Obvious Child
7. Artur Rubenstein – Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini – Var. #7
8. Belle and Sebastian – Fox in the Snow
9. With a Chance of Rain
10. Mike Berry and The Outlaws – Don’t You Think it’s Time
11. Hindi Beatles medley
12. The London Double Bass Sound – Moses Fantasy (paganini)
13. Ion Laceanu – Briu
14. The Rolling Stones – Mother’s Little Helper
15. The Flight of the Bumblebee* (Sinfonia Lahti Cello and Bass Ensemble) (Rimsky-Korsakov)
16. The Zombies – Beechwood Park
17. John Cale – Paris 1919
18. The Who – Can’t Explain
19. English Chamber Orchestra – Water Music Suite No. 2 in D
20. Sparks – Whipping and Apologies
21. Itzhak Perlman – Caprice #2 in B Minor by Paganini
22. The Damned – Jet Boy Jet Girl
23. The String Quartet – Sunday Morning (Velvet Underground)
24. Sigur Ros – Olsen Olsen

More

Dream up your own Wes soundtrack? Send it to us at edwardappleby(at)yankeeracers(dot)org, and we might feature it in a follow-up post.

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The Times interviews Jarvis Cocker

From The Times of London, an interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox composer Jarvis Cocker:

Cocker divides his time between Paris and London (he has a place in trendy Shoreditch), with regular forays back to his home town of Sheffield. But he wants to remain in the French capital for his son, who is at school in the city. And he has established a life there – one of his friends is the American film-maker Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), another expat.

Anderson has created a role for Cocker in his forthcoming, stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. “Petey” is a mandolin-strumming puppet who looks and sounds like his real-life counterpart. Cocker and Anderson have written a song for the film — “a little hoedown number”, says Cocker, who also wrote music for and had a cameo role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “I did a narration bit at the start of Mr Fox, too, but they showed that to test audiences in the US and they were very bamboozled. So I’ve ended up on the cutting-room floor. I tried to enunciate clearly!”

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Brothers Bloom

Looks fantastic. Adrien Brody stars. Limited release next two weekends. Wide release May 29.

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Trailer for (hypothetical) film festival

A very cool trailer that advertises a hypothetical Wes Anderson Film Festival:

The goods on the film.

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Mr. Fox release date in question?… and Henry Selick!

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.”

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Confirmed: Mr. Fox is Fox Searchlight

searchlight

We have confirmed that Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released and distributed by the Fox Searchlight division of Fox. Searchlight has focused on “indie” and art house films.

Fox Searchlight distributed Wes’ last film The Darjeeling Limited. Other recent Searchlight films include Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Juno (2007), and Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

Very exciting for everyone over at Fox Searchlight!

Thoughts?

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(Fake) Mr. Fox posters

From Katy Wu via Clooney’s Cookie Crumbs:

See more…

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Derek Hill + Waris Ahluwalia (unrelated)

(buy the book)

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.”