I think it's fine to anticipate Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom

get him everyone!

lol

Are you all recommending I should watch Flirting? Is it like an australian MK?

I watched this recently based on the references in this thread and it is great, you should see it. It bears only a tangential relation to MK, but Anderson has clearly borrowed from Flirting throughout his career.

good time to watch this movie.

I was a bit underwhelmed by this movie. It mostly looked pretty good. I just wish Anderson took as much interest in characters and stories as he does in set design and art direction. There were a couple of good visual gags (the tree house) and a few good lines (the bathtub scene: "You're just trying to hurt me" "Exactly"), but a lot of this was a slog for me. Anderson doesn't seem very interested in nature, except as a place to get away from other people, so I'm not sure this premise was a good fit for him. I agree with the comment upthread that the action scenes were really stiff. This also OTM, though I thought Schwartzman wasn't given much to work with:

Schwartzman also given the most classic Anderson schtick in the whole film - that assured importance in delivering protocol despite the circumstances not warranting such a serious approach.

The whole Khaki Scouts thing was like a boyhood fantasy of military pomp and pageantry. Anderson seems like an old-school Anglophile - the fascination with elaborate social codes and decorum. In addition to touchstones already mentioned (Peanuts, Pierrot Le Fou) I also saw elements of "Swiss Family Robinson", "A Christmas Story", and "James and the Giant Peach".

couldn't finish it. I'm impressed he's committed to his dioramas of white aristocracy thing even after Steely Dan tried to stage an intervention, but when he started taking the girl's clothes off and then bob balaban showed up to talk about the chocktaw that was more than enough of the pathology for me

honestly surprised so many people are still into his shtick, it's practically framed photos of puppies wearing ascots afaic

though i guess people are really hard up for anything that even hints at french new wave

I suspect fans love the sensation of submitting to an all-encompassing vision -- the guy knows exactly what he wants to say. As a guy who can only endure Rushmore and his cartoon foxes by way of Roald Dahl, I'm totally creeped out.

he reminds me of Woody Allen at his worst: in the same way that Allen thinks he's got a character because he cast Claire Bloom or Sam Waterston in the role, Anderson thinks giving Edward Norton a cigarette to pose with will by nature reward interest.

*becomes interested*

*furiously interested*

*is rewarded*

"it's practically framed photos of puppies wearing ascots"
i'm kind of indifferent to wes anderson but if he actually made an ascot puppy movie instead of the same movie each time, i might upgrade to fan. i feel the same way about david lynch, too, though.

james cameron also seems to be succumbing to this. sometimes i think artistic freedom is the worst thing you can give to a director. you really have to judge something like moonrise kingdom against something like the star wars prequels, in which case it comes off pretty well, i think.

Not repeating himself is one thing, in the face of my otherwise waning enthusiasm, I'll give the other Anderson credit for--although the solemnity of There Will be Blood and The Master is ominous. The list of directors who repeat themselves is long. For a defense of that, see The American Cinema.

where is the thread where we talk about the horrorfest of anderson mannerisms gone fratboy of Roman Coppola's "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charlie Swan III"?

^what a terrible cluster of posts

Nicely presented:

http://focusguilds2012.com/mrkscript/

I laughed out a loud a few times during this. One scene that stayed w/ me FSM is the bit where Ed Norton does that jump. LOL.

a terrible cluster of posts nicely presented

dioramas of white aristocracy thing

gonna call total BS on this unless you come correct and explain what the hell that means.

+ why it is "bad."

could it just not be someone's thing

seriously, i even said i was impressed with his commitment

most directors would have chickened out by now and tried to prove unpredictability/range but no here's another ornately decorated box with verbose children listening to an edith piaf record in it

well no one but aristos were listening to Francoise Hardy in New England

xp

if only he had T*rantino's unpredictability/range, amirite

i apologize if my glib word choice re: aristocracy ruffled your feathers

though he probably won't make some dramatic stylistic shift just to prove he can, i do think eventually wes is going to drop a relatively grounded memoir on us and reap some oscar hay for it - ten bucks says a girl first touched his dick at a screening of the red balloon

I suspect fans love the sensation of submitting to an all-encompassing vision -- the guy knows exactly what he wants to say.

all Great Artists create a little world, you understand. Wes Anderson has created a little world, therefore--

ten bucks says a little girl first touched his dick at a screening of the red balloon

fixed

in a way this guy reminds me of tim burton inasmuch as once he was through exploring his private array of cultural obsessions and fetishes he had nowhere to go except repeat himself or make (admittedly awesome) animated films.

I dunno. I see the Burton comparison, but I find there's always an emotional core/complexity to Wes Anderson - the intricacies, ironies and contradictions of family, mostly - and I appreciate the affectations as a sort of stylistic sleight of hand, or at least shorthand. He's never ... cheap the way that Tarantino (or Burton) can be. Like, his level of homage rises above references, I think. I can see why the surplus of style can be maddening, and there's a lot Anderson has done that I have not dug, but coming off my least fave batch of his films, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and this one reminded me of the guy's gifts.

Yeah everything he does, stylized as it may be, still has some kind of emotional core to it.

Burton is a bad point of comparison, hasn't written any original material in what, 20 years...? Anderson is one of the few writer/directors of original material worth a damn.

I dunno – he's recycling himself something awful.

that's different

Anderson doesn't have a filter that he applies to existing corporate properties once a year

Burton is a shitty director but writing your own material can be as inhibiting as using Hollywood rent-a-scripts.

Recycling? I dunno. He uses a lot of the same sort of imagery, and of course many of the same actors, but if you distilled each of his movies down to a sentence or two, you couldn't possibly come up with a weirder bunch of stories.

for all my issues with modern-day wes anderson there's no comparison bw what he does and tim burton's alice in wonderland type garbage

MK is just as garish and mannered.

Garish?

I'll give you mannered.

yeah i'm gonna say... no on that one.

No, he's refining himself in splendid fashion, Alfred. His last two films eclipse everything but Rushmore.

I suppose he gets points for creating his own lurid tropes instead of buying them readymade but like croup said upthread I'm done with him unless he gets Clooney to play another wry fox.

i think i'll give him garish, just with 70's curtain and cushion fabric as opposed to matte foundation and shitty hairdye

Whit Stillman is a better example of a guy refining himself in splendid fashion.

they might be on a continuum of manneredness or garishness, but that doesn't make them the same.