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

UK release today. Came to it as an unrepentant stan of Anderson's previous work - Rushmore esp. is one of my favourite films.

I really liked it: looks great as ever, although strange seeing his usual camera tricks and slides done in beautiful soft super 16mm. For a period piece, the aesthetic is basically the same as all his other films (particularly The RT's ) ie. if it wasn't stated "it's 1965" then (apart from the police car) you'd never guess. For its shortish run time it felt really dense and there was lots of quick editing so will def. need a second viewing to get the detail.

The cast are all good and special mention to Norton who was a lot better than I expected him to be. The main kids were both decent, although the lead lad speaks like he's got a mouth full of marbles the whole time. Felt to me like Anderson was a bit less buttoned-up than on Darjeeling, in a good way - there were some really atmospheric outdoors shots, and wonderful location scouting with a Swallows & Amazons vibe a lot of the time. Use of music was less dead-on than in some of his other stuff, and if I'd not seen Desplat credited would never have noticed his contribution (again, this might come out more on further viewings). Not much here that will convince non-fans of Anderson's style, but a lot to love for those who are on side.

this definitely looks more like the kind of WA i like, i am tentatively excited after feeling various degres of letdownness since tenenbaums

visual style looks like instagram

dont put the cart before the horse here.

On a cameo(s) related note, there was not enough Schwartzman for my liking, although he does some good work with minimal screentime. Keitel given nothing to do. Swinton as great as ever + ace outfit.

http://vimeo.com/20089652

Isn't what a lot of people hate about Anderson a perceived fetishization of aesthetic quirkiness, emotional sensitivity, and childhood nostalgia -- in other words, a sense that he's twee as fuck?

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Friday, May 25, 2012 3:20 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was this apropo of anyting in particular?

wes anderson's movies are fun! for the most part! i'll go see this.

I thought it was, but on rereading the thread, perhaps not. I guess I was just trying to pinpoint what the haters hate about W.A. (you said you found it weird how polarizing he was) -- although I guess there's a larger question about why anything remotely "twee" provokes such derision.

(xp to Am)

for me its as simple as, his early movies were about people i wanted to spend time with, and his later ones were about people i wanted to stuff into lockers and give swirlies to

jaymc, w/ all due respect, that argument has been had a zillion times since the late 1990s and it doesn't get any more interesting. there are people who won't like a WA movie, and those who will, and i'm OK w/ that.

wes asserson

i guess the things that people see as major flaws i either just don't see, or find it easy to ignore. the arguments tend to take place somewhere kind of far away from what i most appreciate about his films anyhow.

i think for me i was such a huge fan of his first couple movies, thought they hit the perfect balance between his curatorial/affected side and a more freewheeling kind of deadpan hilarity, that when he gave into the former, i just felt like it unbalanced them

esp since what seems to be the archetypal anderson film, royal tenenbaums, is not one of my biggest favorites.

xpost

moonrise buttdom

its hard to formulate exactly what i liked about the ones i liked and what i dont like about the ones i don't.

jaymc, w/ all due respect, that argument has been had a zillion times since the late 1990s and it doesn't get any more interesting. there are people who won't like a WA movie, and those who will, and i'm OK w/ that.

I'm OK w/it, too!

w/o it seeming like i'm blanket-condemning his whole thing, which i'm not

Am, I hope you don't think that I'm necessarily endorsing that view of WA. I am, however, interested in how and why that kind of post-Salinger twee-ness *has* become such a polarizing aesthetic these days -- if you've seen some good analysis from a sociocultural perspective (as opposed to just rehashed ad-hominem arguments), then let me know.

i don't read stuff about that because it's boring.

and by "these days" you mean 2001?

i'm gonna put it out there and say it's not so much a polarizing aesthetic (though it also is) as it is something that's been hammered-to-fucking-death by lesser talents over the last decade, making w.a. himself seem like part of the problem (though he also sometimes is).

xpost

sorry jaymc i don't mean to be rude but i basically said above that i don't care about that stuff, so i'm not the one to refer you to the article you want.

also "children and childlike adults learn to put away childish things (without losing their essential impish charm)" is a theme that's also been hammered-to-fucking-death over the last decade, and not just in twee-ass indie movies, e.g. the apatow corpus.

i think for me i was such a huge fan of his first couple movies, thought they hit the perfect balance between his curatorial/affected side and a more freewheeling kind of deadpan hilarity, that when he gave into the former, i just felt like it unbalanced them

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki)

i sort of hate quoting things and just saying "otm" and not adding anything of worth whatsoever but this is exactly how i feel.

for me its as simple as, his early movies were about people i wanted to spend time with, and his later ones were about people i wanted to stuff into lockers and give swirlies to

― Hungry4Ass, Friday, May 25, 2012 5:30 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm & this seems linked to owen wilsons level of involvement

the more ppl ref the antoine doinel series, the more scared i am 2 see this

I like this line from the Slate review:

"But maybe it’s OK to find Moonrise Kingdom both dramatically inert and aesthetically entrancing, to recommend it with a Wes Anderson asterisk (which would probably be a bright yellow asterisk, lovingly embroidered on brown corduroy)."

If it's being reviewed, I thought it would have opened in Toronto this week, but doesn't seem so.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/05/moonrise_kingdom_directed_by_wes_anderson_reviewed_.html

and by "these days" you mean 2001?

I mean within the last 10-15 years. I'm not saying it's new to 2012.

Anyway, I don't get why this is suddenly a big deal! I shouldn't have said anything, I guess.

(For anyone who's not Amateurist: I think that Jess is right that people are skeptical of Anderson because of superficial similarities to a whole host of terrible "quirky" indie films. But I also feel like a lot of people -- plenty of ILXors, in fact -- have an intense knee-jerk reaction against anything that might be described as precious or naive in art, and I wonder whether that's worth interrogating.)

As a Rushmore lover who remains basically sympatico with what I think Anderson is up to, I recommend the Salon review, which addresses this very point.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/moonrise_kingdom_wes_andersons_mid_60s_love_story/singleton/

(Suddenly I'm a clearing-house for indie film reviews.)

i think it's fair to say that a lot of ILXors (and people in general) respond with special vitriol to a certain stripe of twee, indie-oriented pop art - the venomousness of the response all the more remarkable for the seeming inoffensiveness of the thing in question. you can find evidence of this in discussions of bands/musicians like belle & sebastian and jens lekman, and films like little miss sunshine and the darjeeling limited. probably the best stand-alone example, though, is the official pomplamoose thread: So who ARE that insufferable indie couple in the new Hyundai TV ads.

there are a lot of reasons given for the distaste: the ubiquity of the style, its tendency to value soothing comfort above all else, the idea that it's a neutered thirdhand version of something that once had substance of a sort, the lack of depth and aggression, christian-friendliness, etc. i often think it's a class-based response, tbh. there's something specifically entitled and middle/upper class about the cutie-pie ennui of twee indie. it often seems to be the disaffection of those who never really had to care about anything, could afford to be indolent and romantically wistful, and i suspect that annoys a lot of people.

i think its just nerds being macho but what do i know

i'd say yr right:

for me its as simple as, his early movies were about people i wanted to spend time with, and his later ones were about people i wanted to stuff into lockers and give swirlies to

― Hungry4Ass, Friday, May 25, 2012 9:30 PM (Yesterday)

i have a hard time seeing what W.A. has to do with those pamplemoose or whatever videos. almost nothing, it seems to me.

there's something specifically entitled and middle/upper class about the cutie-pie ennui of twee indie.

OTM. I think this is one of the reasons I prefer Rushmore over all other Wes films (although I've only seen Tenenbaums once, in 2001, and should probably re-view): Max' entitlement is confronted/challenged. Maybe something similar happens in Mr. Fox, but I couldn't finish it. Great actors do not make great voice actors.

But this new one is getting crazy-good reviews, so I'm sure I'll see (what Kinks songs are in) it.

i actually have very little idea what people mean by calling his characters "entitled," except for darjeeling limited where that is explicitly thematized. max is i guess "entitled" (for the first 1/2 of the film) but in a very specific and idiosyncratic way.

i feel like people are projecting a lot of things onto the films that may have been circulating in the discourse at the time but don't actually seem a strong part of the films themselves.

it's possible that his films (the best ones anyway) satisfy me so deeply in some OCD/semi-autistic way that i just don't see what other people see, or don't care.

max is not really 'entitled' in the class sense -- his dad is a barber! he got to go to rushmore because of a scholarship. always read his character as being lower middle class.

i don't think it's really an issue in 'fox' since, yknow, they're foxes.

in mentioning entitlement, i wasn't describing something i object to in wes anderson films, but rather something that i think a lot of people object to in twee indie stuff generally. that said, entitlement (a condition that results from unchallenged privilege), is a common theme and condition in anderson's films. rushmore, subverts it, i think, by having max essentially aspire to entitlement. he's a poor kid, remember. he adopts an attitude of privileged entitlement as compensation.

the characters in bottle rocket, the royal tenenbaums, and the darjeeling limited, on the other hand, accept their entitlement without question, seem bored by their privilege and construct trivial (heartwrenching) agonies to fill time. i think anderson romanticizes this kind of privileged disaffection, but also questions and criticizes it. he's not guilty of anything, as i see it, but i do understand why people might lump his films in with pomplamoose and their ilk.

oh fuck off JD. i was criticising the way he writes characters, specifically how his characters have become unlikable degenerates. ive never had anything to do with the ILX War Against Twee, i thought the pomplamoose and etsy threads were stupid as shit and i even liked little miss sunshine.

Just hit me I won't be watching this until it hits Redbox because I have a newborn.

(I misread that post as signed Twee4Ass.)

http://img.slate.com/features/2012/bingo/bingoCardBlank.jpg

Blank card; you have to go here to play. (Not meant as a knock on Anderson--you could do the same with Scorsese, Bergman, and most any great filmmaker ever.)

Critics sometimes use "twee" as shorthand to describe you work -- or they dismiss it as just another "Wes Anderson movie." How does that make you feel?

Well, it's not annoying. It's just, you know, my real honest response is just ... nothing. It's just white noise to me. It's lost all its sting over the years.

whatre the reviews like on this thing, do people like it who didnt like his last few, the trailer makes it look like kinda the worst but im getting the feeling via internet headlines that this is maybe being considered a return to form

it's worse than the trailer and he must be stopped

ha ok cool will ignore

The reviews on the freq misleading RT are 4 "rotten" out of 80

yes, his characters are often irritating, welcome to people.