Last Movie You Saw, Name & Review Movie • Page 254

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - 3.5/5
You wouldn't be allowed to make this movie today. Too many Nazis get punched in the face.

 

The Turnin Horse is an effective anti farming film, you don't get any of the joy of farming or horse ownership

Come and See is pretty close to a real anti war film. No fun battles, only horrors.

 

I thought Warfare was a pretty effective anti-war movie. No glamor, just brutality.

 

Rewatched Royal Tenenbaums last night and saw Phoenician Scheme today. Didn’t expect some of the specific structural and thematic overlap, the echo of a daughter with disconnected biology from her ethically challenged father. Michael Cera was excellent. I really enjoy Tom Hanks in Wes Anderson films. Asteroid City and Phoenician Scheme are maybe my two favorite late stage Wes. Royal Tenenbaums is an eternal personal favorite.

 

I genuinely don't understand how critics who loved Asteroid City and/or The French Dispatch so much got their knives out for The Phonecian Scheme, which I think is just as good, but certainly isn't appreciably worse. It adds some new thematic ideas, the jokes still hit, and it's about something.

 

I wish I liked Anderson more. I mean that sincerely and not in a snarky way. I liked Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic when I was younger, but his tone started to grate on me at some point and I haven't really been able to turn that around. Genuinely feels like I'm missing out every time I see how excited people are about his stuff

 

I can take him or leave him, certainly am not a fanatic but I’ve loved most of what he put out. Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox / Isle of Dogs, and the Grand Budapest Hotel are probably my faves

 

watch the Darjeeling limited

 

I liked this one when I was younger as well

 

I basically read a review that kinda unlocked it all for me that said basically the extreme stylization was a way to create a distance at which he could process really difficult emotions like loss and still make it funny and interesting. I've watched all his movies that way since.

 

Maybe I'll revisit the ones I liked with this mindset and see if I'm interested in moving forward into his filmography. Wasn't super hot on Asteroid City, unfortunately, but that could change on rewatch.

 

That's really the one that benefits most from being viewed in that light, imo. All about processing loss, both in the frame story (Margot Robbie's incredible scene) and the narrative in the desert.

I also think it makes his dealing with morality and faith and metaphysics easier to grapple with in The Phonecian Scheme

 

Well said. I mean he’s maybe underrated as a technician, because he’s created his own aesthetic in many ways, and the set and costume designs are so intricate and stylized, and the dialogue and characters are heightened, people tend to react to that first, but behind all that the emotions are very real and authentic. When I saw Moonrise Kingdom in theaters I had a negative reaction, he’d been a top 3-4 director for me before that but maybe it hit as too precocious for me at that time in my life, but Grand Budapest won me back in a big way and I connected even more with Asteroid City. Phoenician Scheme is snappy and funny but beneath all that it’s asking some real questions and interrogating the humanity of the characters that the veneer might seem to obscure. But even when the veneer is such a specific visual delight and so tied to why you compose images like that with actors like that on a big screen, he still really does have a mind for how everything ties together emotionally and thematically at the same time.

 

It's also worth noting that while people kind of write the meticulous visuals off as a default because they're an identifiable element of his style, that shit takes work.

 

Rewatched Asteroid City tonight, affirmed masterpiece about how creation searches for the fundamental aspects of life, humanity, and connection, even when the artist can’t answer all the questions they interrogate. Aligns with the Phoenician Scheme, when Augie doesn’t understand the play but just has to keep playing his part, to in the Phoenician Scheme when Leisel says no one responds when she prays, so she does what she imagines God would say, which is “usually pretty obvious”. That’s the core of why I love Wes.

 

The thing people don't seem to mention about those first three films is how gritty and raw they are. The Wilson brothers were unknown then, as was Schwartzmann, so when he started having people like Paltrow and Stiller it felt like he had arrived. The music cues, the run-down feeling of the landscapes in Bottle Rocket and his version of New York City in The Royal Tenenbaums, all of it added up to a feeling of outsider cinema, whereas now it feels like there is a competition to get as many names on a billboard so people can do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme. He took the big swing and a miss with The Life Aquatic, mostly came back to form with The Darjeeling Limited, and while there are admirable things about pretty much all of his recent films (maybe the last great Bruce Willis performance?), I always end up leaving the theater feeling hollow.

 

The Royal Tenenbaums is one of the handful of films that I accidentally stumbled on in late middle school to early high school that really changed me so there is a bias as well.

 

I mean, he’s a known commodity at this point, he doesn’t have to fight as hard to get Gene Hackman level actors in his films anymore, someone like Tom Hanks is more than happy to enter his world on his terms. Still, Asteroid City is full of meaning, honestly I think it’s potentially his most emotional and existential film. I think he’s had a particularly existential/moral bent lately, considering the Henry Sugar Netflix adaptation alongside Asteroid City and the Phoenician Scheme. The Phoenician Scheme, while leaning into the surface Wes trappings, has a resonant emotional and philosophical core. The Royal Tenenbaums and Asteroid City probably respectively anchor him in the major stages of his career for me, if the dividing line between early and late Wes is around Fantastic Mr. Fox/Moonrise Kingdom/Grand Budapest. I like Isle of Dogs/Henry Sugar/French Dispatch fine, though a tier below the Bottle Rocket through Darjeeling run, but I’d stand behind Asteroid City as an essential Wes Anderson film.

 

The thing that separates the periods for me is the degree to which the characters and the situations are pushed to the absurd. Max Fischer and Royal Tenenbaum are absurd people in many ways, but the things they are going through are very easy to relate to. When we start getting into hunting jaguar sharks or the international man of mystery in The Phoenician Scheme, it gets harder to relate to those characters.

This is a light criticism, though. I would call all of his films "good" except The Life Aquatic and Isle of Dogs. It just feels more constructed and less authentic than it used to. Chaz Tenenbaum is ridiculous with his family matching jumpsuit, but I understand his lifelong feelings of abandonment at how his father preferred his brother and the overprotectiveness that came from losing his wife. Max's desire to be accepted by adults he considers intelligent and successful rings so true for anyone who grew up feeling alienated from his peers. None of that felt as true in The Phoenician Scheme.

 

I liked that everyone was having a fun time on the train in DL

 

The Darjeeling Limited was the first time I traveled for a movie. I was probably as big of a Wes Anderson film as I would ever be at that point. I think I saw it three times in the theater.

 

Have you seen Universal Language yet?

 

I agree that what largely separates the eras of Wes Anderson for me is that the scale of plot became larger and looked further outward, both personally and geographically, around 2009-2014, but Asteroid City and the Phoenician Scheme are still family films at heart. I would welcome a more intimate and “grounded” Wes Anderson film again, but part of why Asteroid City in particular works so well for me (though I think the French Dispatch/Henry Sugar/the Phoenician Scheme exist in a similar playground) is that it’s metafictional elements feel like Wes Anderson directly engaging with what’s on his mind via a the metaphor of writing an absurdly heightened/abstract script that’s still essentially about universal emotions and themes of human aging, loss, and morality, and ask how to find/create meaning in an inherently chaotic, meaningless world where the machinations of everything around you run counter to what we all basically understand to be “right” or “human”.

 

I haven't watched a movie in about a month. I might get back into it around October.

 

I remember the relationship between Hanks and Schwartzmann to be the most affecting in Asteroid City, even if Schwatzmann still feels boyish.