The World of Wes Anderson
Sigur Rós (“Starálfur” from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) just released a new dual-disc album called Hvarf/Heim.
Hvarf/Heim is the companion album to Sigur Rós’ new documentary “Heima,” which was filmed during their 2006-’07 tour of their home country, Iceland, and shown at this year’s Madison Popfest. Hvarf/Heim is not exactly a soundtrack, but an unveiled, down-to-earth approach to their renowned transcendental sound…. Disc two, Heim, is even better. Recorded live during their tour, the lack of electricity forced Sigur Rós to go entirely acoustic. Without the dissonance, Heim has a very natural feel. The string quartet and piano materialize familiar ethereal melodies such as “Samskeyti”—also “Untitled 3” off ( )—and “Starálfur”—the familiar song from “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” but this version makes it harder to imagine a large yellow submarine and animated sea creatures (UW Daily Cardinal)
Times (London)
November 12, 2007
(thanks to Racer jexxica for the lead)
His recent films have been offbeat, melancholy comedies, but what Wes Anderson really wanted to do was bring his favourite Roald Dahl story from childhood to the big screen. After nearly a decade of planning, during which he made The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, the American director has started work in London on an animated version of Fantastic Mr Fox, with George Clooney providing the voice of the eponymous hero.
Dahl’s classic tale was written in 1970 after he had made his name as a children’s writer with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. Aimed at younger readers, it pits the daring Mr Fox against three memorably grotesque farmers who are determined to put an end to his raids on their stock by shooting him or starving his family out of their den. “It was one of my favourite books as a child,” Anderson told The Times. “I have been trying to make this film for eight years.”
New characters and plotlines, including something resembling a raid scene, have been introduced to make the story into a feature-length film.
“There’s a whole new bit at the start and a new section at the end, but we’ve tried to do something that Roald Dahl would love,” Anderson, who is writing the script with Noah Baumbach, a director, said.
Amanda Conquy, who runs Roald Dahl’s literary estate, said that she and Felicity, the author’s widow, had no doubts that the pair had the right vision for the project.
“Whatever Wes does is interesting and has a definite point of view. He understands the humour of Dahl and the sweetness and slightly anarchic nature of this story,” Ms Conquy added.
Links:
From a really fantastic review by Walter Chaw, which I found at the Quiet Bubble:
Anderson has up until now touched on spirituality only obliquely. Here, his disconnected players stop to pray at every altar passed along the way; the loss of a father initiates/necessitates this desperate casting-about for another. Towards the end, there’s a flashback bookended with matching shots that laid me to waste, and in watching the picture a second time, I was stunned by how controlled and economical Anderson is with his images. The film isn’t about the desire to be found, as lesser films might have it–rather, it’s about growing comfortable with being lost. In its way, The Darjeeling Limited is all that needs be said about post-modernism: with the search for God finished, move into an acceptance of aloneness. A character at one point says, “We lost him, and we’re never going to be okay, but it’s the past now–and the past is over. Isn’t it?” There’s an understanding that life is Renoir’s Indian river: it’s never the same twice, and it’s always the same. Anderson handles the shift from deadpan comedy to formalist pathos better than he ever has in the past–The Darjeeling Limited resembles a Takeshi Kitano masterpiece: instantly recognizable, intricate and artificial, and overwhelmingly human. It’s a stunning companion piece to The Royal Tenenbaums (I imagined, more than once, that this is the procession and eulogy for that picture’s patriarch), a distillation of Anderson’s surprising sobriety. If you hear the music, you’ll recognize that beneath Anderson’s hipster veneer is the low keen of loss and wounds that never close. I’m loathe to declare it a better picture than The Royal Tenenbaums (which, with three years to go, remains one of the best pictures of the decade), yet I’m growing comfortable with the idea that if Anderson isn’t the most individualistic, important American filmmaker on the scene, he’s at least that to me.
Max Fischer
Grover Cleveland High School
A little angst-ridden British Invasion music is in order, but today we saw a great compilation of Unit 4 +2 music (“Concrete and Clay,” from Rushmore):
For that angst-ridden British Invasion fix, what of Creation? (“Making Time,” Rushmore)
About this series: RushmoreAcademy.com is a non-profit website dedicated to the films of Wes Anderson. You can support the site by buying products at Amazon.com through our product links. When shopping at Amazon.com this holiday season, be sure to click through our links (even if you aren’t purchasing the page-featured item).
(link)
‘One does feel misunderstood’
For Wes Anderson, real life and films get very mixed up. He talks to Xan Brooks about his Indian odyssey, confusing critics, and the problem with Owen Wilson.
Wes Anderson likes to live his movies before he shoots them. It is a neat way of working, he says; it helps the creative process. So if, for instance, he is making a film about life at a private school, it is only natural to cast his alma mater in the title role. Or if he makes a film about a dysfunctional New York family he’ll have Anjelica Huston wear his mother’s glasses to play the matriarch. His most recent work, The Darjeeling Limited, features a trio of squabbling American brothers on a train ride across India. In preparation, Anderson embarked on the exact same trip alongside his writing partners Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman. The three of them, he explains, were acting out the plot as they went along. They were, in effect, being the movie before the movie existed.
Continue reading “Wes Anderson interview in the Guardian (UK)”
We will start the voting process over on the Yankee Racers forum soon. Until then, some pictures…
(P.S. I will post more soon. I am having some minor difficulties with Flickr)
