Seriously, Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, looks like what would result if the creators of “Not Another Teen Movie,” “Scary Movie,” and “Epic Movie” got together to make “Wes Anderson Movie.”
There was once a time when Wes Anderson was my favorite new director - with the hilarious and affecting Bottle Rocket under his belt, Rushmore was an insta-classic, something that managed to condense everything great about sixties cinema into a weird slice of late-nineties neo-preciousness. The guy just had something special in his films, even as they were all very different. The Royal Tenenbaums was a bit of a misstep in many ways, though it was inarguably a great film and a great condensation of the entire Salinger oeuvre.
And then he made it again but called it The Life Aquatic. Now he’s making it again and calling it The Darjeeling Limited.
Has Wes, the fresh breath of Texan air that brought Luke and Owen Wilson into the film world with him, turned into just another Hollywood studio goon turning the crank and printing vacuous, uninspired cash-ins? “Hey, kids, you liked that? Have another one! And another one!”
This looks great. I’ve loved all of Wes Anderson’s films so far. The Royal Tennenbaums is my favorite movie of all time.
As for this looking the same as Tennenbaums and The Life Aquatic (which were quite different in style, theme, setting and plot), did you mean to link to a different trailer? Because this looks like a pretty big step away from all that. Tennenbaums, and especially The Life Aquatic were both based in a very surreal world. This looks a lot more grounded, using exotic but more realistic Indian imagery instead. Really, the only dead giveaways I saw that this was a Wes Anderson film was the cast and the title design. The former is laudable since he gets great performances out of his people, and who cares about the latter?
Please, in a world where we actually do get multiple sequels to Scary Movie, people who give half a shit about good film should be lining up to kiss Anderson’s ass.
Maybe you’re not as comfortable discussing film, because that trailer portrays a movie that’s identical in style, aesthetic, shot composition, production design and sensibility, dialogue, theme, music, and WES ANDERSONNESS to “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic,” which were basically identical to each other in those respects. The basic window dressing has been changed from a family’s house to a submarine and now to a train passing through India.
The man has a signature style, sure. So does Guillermo del Toro and Michel Gondry, to name two of my other favorite current directors*. So did Shakespeare and Hemingway. That’s part of what makes them all interesting as artists. What’s your point? It doesn’t mean the film is the same if it differs in plot, theme, and tone. I don’t think an artist has to completely reinvent himself every outing to remain interesting, or even to grow as an artist. He may simply grow by improving and varying on what he’s done before.
*Hell, those two are much more stylistically identifiable and limited in choice of subject matter thus far than Anderson is. They’re still brilliant.
I would agree that Tenenbaums and Aquatic were similar in the ways you describe, but I don’t see how Rushmore is any different.
Still, I think VC03’s got something here. Look at the Coen brothers. They have an unmistakable style IMO, but their films aren’t as similar to each other as WA’s are. That said, I’ll probably be shelling out 10 bucks when this new one comes out.
I think that, with regards to Wes Anderson’s style, his usage of the same actors hurts him. Royal Tenenbaums, imho, was good because Gene Hackman was able to put some punch into the movie. Anderson’s writing and directorial style can come across as a bit disaffected and flat at times and Hackman gave it the punch that the movie needed. Life Aquatic, with Bill Murray, didn’t have that lift. The dialogue just sort of coasted along. The Wilson brothers (with Jason Schwartzman playing Luke Wilson in this movie.) just don’t have the ability to lift the dialogue in the same fashion. They read Wes Anderson lines in the Wes Anderson style and it gets to feel a bit like you’ve seen the movie before, no matter which family member is trying to reconnect.
You know, this sentence and the attitude behind it sort of precludes any kind of meaningful discussion. If one agrees with the OP, then there is nothing to discuss. If one disagrees with the OP, then clearly it is only because (s)he doesn’t know as much about film as the OP, and once again there is nothing to discuss.
Which Salinger do you mean? (If you throw in mis-en-scene, we’ll be forced to acknowledge that you may have taken a film class, which would account for how amazingly comfortable you are discussing film.)
I’ve had ambiguous feelings about the Wes Anderson pictures I’ve seen. I would like to see some characters who seem to enjoy life for a change. (And I was hoping the schoolgirl in Rushmore would somehow go to prison and do hard time for falsifying scientific data. Or at least, it should go on her Permanent Record.)
Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors, and arguably one of the best directors of our generation. I can’t even begin to think what made you start this thread. Royal Tenebaums had some missteps but was inarguably a great film? WTF? (I’m too lazy to quote). Then, how can you feel any different about this upcoming movie when all you’ve seen is the preview? The only thing I would argue is that it doesn’t look as fun (I’ve only seen the preview once, right before Sunshine), and is more serious, but who knows?
Can somebody start a pit thread about people who reach concrete, *inarguable *conclusions about a movie based on a trailer?
You do know, V, that the trailer is not likely to be edited by anyone involved with the actual movie? That it’s a marketing tool designed to get you shell out your money; it’s not in any way an attempt to distill a film down to its purest elements? You do know that, right?
Is the guy in the middle of the crowd namaste-bowing (I have no idea what to call this) shown for about a second in the trailer the same actor who played Ashok in The Namesake?
While VCO3 is often Very Confused and Ornery (times 3!), I think he’s right on the mark with Wes Anderson.
The man has made the same movie twice now (Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic) and before that was the mess that is Rushmore (that’s right, I said it). I enjoyed Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic, but they are the same damn movie.
And Rushmore just annoys me. The whole movie is just like Max. He thinks he’s clever and amazing, when the reality is, he’s just an annoying ass hole. Rushmore thinks it’s a clever and amazing movie, but in reality, it’s just kind of annoying.
I think I also hold a grudge against it because it was basically the start of Bill Murray’s “sad clown” phase and I’d really like to see him do something funny again (admittedly, he was funny in parts of Life Aquatic).
Oh, of course. (I don’t use smilies, but I am actually rolling my eyes while continuing to touch-type.) So you mean J.D. Salinger. Why the fuck didn’t you just say so? Now, since you brought it up, explain the relationship between Wes Anderson’s movies and J.D. Salinger’s short stories.
What are you talking about? “The Royal Tenenbaums” was all but a filmization of Salinger’s Glass Family stories. I don’t understand what you’re getting at - do you disagree? It’s common knowledge.
"The siblings of the Tenenbaum family are all highly intelligent and disillusioned, struggling with their own identities. They are loosely based on a rabble of similarly disillusioned siblings from the later books of famed author J.D. Salinger. The Glass family, comprised of seven child-prodigy-turned-adult-misanthrope characters, is the central subject of three of Salinger’s five published books, and form the basis for the quirky and unhappy Tenenbaum family, as director Wes Anderson revealed in an interview with Premiere magazine conducted in January 2001.
In one scene, Etheline Tenenbaum urges her daughter Margot Tenenbaum to get out of the bathroom. A similar scene takes up a large part of J.D. Salinger’s book Franny and Zooey, when Bessie Glass spends quite a bit of time bothering her son Zooey Glass."
I think it looks really good - possibly even good enough to go see in a theater. I agree with lissener that it’s silly to put much stock in movie trailers, but from what I can distill this movie seems more like Bottle Rocket than The Royal Tenenbaums in that it takes male sibling relationships as its central focus.