Man, how can anybody not like The Royal Tenenbaums? It gets better and better every time I see it.
Does it matter? Why does everything have to be “made for” somebody in particular? A lot of good movies that die at the box office would have a better chance if more people had more open minds regarding what “genres” they should be going to see.
Maybe I’m weird because I have VERY eclectic taste in movies (the other day I saw The Princess and the Frog, Up In The Air AND Invictus, and enjoyed all three movies very much), but still…
And I really liked the movie. I like Wes Anderson films in general, but this one was different enough that while I was watching it I temporarily forgot it was one of his films.
I too thought the “cuss” thing was very clever. It was censorship, but it sounded like it was making fun of censorship at the same time.
Another detail I enjoyed: the small moments of “wild animal” behavior (tearing into food, the digging, Mr. Fox and Mr. Badger’s snarling and growling) despite the heavy anthropomorphism. I tend to prefer it when animals aren’t highly anthropomorphized in books or film (a la Watership Down), but in this movie they actually managed to make it work.
I brought this up briefly in the other thread, but another thing I liked about it was that it seemed so affectionately inspired by one of the greatest stop-motion films ever: Wladyslaw Starewicz’s wonderful The Tale of the Fox.
YouTube has the whole thing on their site; here’s Part I.
I liked Huckabees and I certainly liked Mr Fox. It had a gentle charm about it.
My little girl (4 years old) loved it too. I thought it might lack the “vulgarity and vitality” (as IIRC one reviewer put it) of a CGI film, but she went nuts over it.
It may go without saying, but Disney’s Robin Hood was a love story between two foxes, which made the inclusion that much more charming.
Also, while the film has received its share of year-end Best Animated Film awards (though not as many as Up), it has also received two awards for Best Adapted Screenplay! Here’s hoping the Writers Guild and Academy follows suit…
I was really reluctant to see it, having soured on Wes Anderson (really, dude, how many movies can you make about privileged, self-absorbed white guys who go around feeling sorry for themselves?) But finally I rented it, because my wife had been wanting to see it, and because it’s gotten such universally positive reviews.
I freakin hated it.
The book is practically mythic, and i don’t mean that like epic, I mean it like Joseph Campbell would be comfortable writing about the trickster icon in it. It’s a lovely Dahlian work, full of nasty characters getting their comeuppance from a sly hero.
But Anderson hasn’t yet finished examining the travails of middle-class men, this time a middle-class man who feels trapped by an emasculating middle-class wife. So he takes the trickster character and bourgeoisifies him into a sad shadow of a trickster. Throw in a pouty teenaged son, jokes about flipping houses, and a horrifying ending (the animals in the book have turned natural burrows into an underground town; in the movie they’re forced to move into the sewers and eat fake canned giblets from a supermarket, yet more middleclassification of the wild animals), and you’ve got something I found totally appalling.
Sure, the art was good, and absolutely the movie had some fine moments. Anderson is, after all, an excellent movie-maker. I just wish he’d put his powerful talent in the service of less revolting stories.
Man, how can anybody not like The Royal Tenenbaums? It gets better and better every time I see it.