Matt Zoller Seitz pits Wes Anderson vs. Hal Ashby in the third part of his Moving Image documentary, coming to a startling conclusion:

There's nothing inherently wrong with Anderson's selective adoration. But when you look at the totality of what Ashby accomplished—the social and political dimensions that all his films explored, the blunt honesty of their expression—Anderson's work can't help but come up short, just as the work of Anderson's imitators is overshadowed by the genuine article.

Tell Matt Seitz he just made my list of things to do today. In all seriousness, I guess I can see Seitz's point, but you can only conclude "Anderson's work can't help but come up short" when you demand of Anderson's work the things it is quite pointedly refusing to do.

Part 2 of Matt Zoller Seitz's five-part Wes Anderson documentary is now up. The focus this time is on Scorsese, Lester, and Nichols.

If you missed the video for the first one, it should be said that the video (and not the text) is the whole link. The link to the video is practically invisible; scroll down and keep your eye on the right side of the page.

The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, "the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation." (Tarantino who?) Here's Part 1.

When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.

But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.

The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we've talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one's own film...

Wes Anderson aficionados may be waiting a long time for the director's next original project. With The Fantastic Mr. Fox wrapping up, he looks to be writing (and possibly directing) a remake of the French film Mon meilleur ami, about

a cranky antiques dealer who learns at a dinner with his closest acquaintances that none of them really like him because of his harsh manner and selfishness. When his business partner bets him a valuable vase that he can’t produce a best friend, the dealer tries to get an amiable cab driver to pose as his buddy.

Sounds fun, but I want my Darjeeling followup already.

Tim ups the ante with Wordles of Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I'll take up his challenge with five killer Wordles: the scripts of Wes Anderson.











We see again that Wordles are both fun and smart—here, for instance, the inescapable importance of want is highlighted, as well as the crucial distinction between thinking and knowing. Yeah.

BONUS: "Hotel Chevalier."

This backlash follows a perfect storm of anti-intellectual prejudice: Movies are considered fun that needn’t be taken seriously. Movies contain ideas better left unexamined. Movies generate capital in all directions. The latter ethic was overwhelmingly embraced by media outlets during the Reagan era, exemplified by the sly shift from reporting on movies to featuring inside-industry coverage....

This disrespect for thinking—where film criticism blurred with celebrity gossip—has resulted in today’s cultural calamity. Buyouts and dismissals are, of course, unfortunate personal setbacks; but the crisis of contemporary film criticism is that critics don’t discuss movies in ways that matter. Reviewers no longer bother connecting movies to political or moral ideas (that’s was what made James Agee’s review of The Human Comedy and Bosley Crowther’s review of Rocco and His Brothers memorable). Nowadays, reviewers almost never draw continuity between new films and movie history—except to get it wrong, as in the idiotic reviews that belittled Neil Jordan’s sensitive, imaginative The Brave One (a movie that brilliantly contrasts vengeful guilt to 9/11 aftershock) as merely a rip-off of the 1970s exploitation feature Death Wish.

If the current indifference to critical thought is a tragedy, it’s not just for the journalism profession betraying its promise of news and ideas but also for those bloggers. The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking. It breeds a new pinhead version of fan-clubism.

"What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies": Armond White argues that film reviewing in America has gone completely off the rails.

What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.

That there isn’t a popular hit among any of these films proves how critics have failed to rouse the moviegoing public in any direction.

There's a little too much of Matthew Arnold here for me, and anyway I think he's misread There Will be Blood (actually very good) and World Trade Center (actually pretty pernicious) at least—but I can't disagree too vehemently with anyone who gets this out there:

Critics say nothing about movies that open up complex meaning or richer enjoyment. That’s why they disdained the beauty of The Darjeeling Limited: Wes Anderson’s confrontation with selfishness, hurt and love were too powerful, too humbling. It’s no wonder that the audience for movies shrinks into home-viewership; they also shrink away from movies as a great popular art form.

InContention has a list of the top ten cinematic moments of 2007. (Part 1, Part 2.)

I'll go along with a lot of what's said here—though I can't help noting that Tapley is a bit over-appreciative of The Assassination of Jesse James; that the best shots of There Will Be Blood surely beat all comers; and that the omission of the opening sequence of Darjeeling Limited (out on DVD tomorrow!) is simply inexcusable.

Oscar nominations have been announced, and The Darjeeling Limited (my review, and the many times I've posted about it) has been completely shut out. Inconceivable!

In its absence, I have no choice but to root for The Coens' No Country for Old Men to sweep every category for which it is eligible and Juno to take everything else—pending, of course, my appraisal of There Will Be Blood, which I'm supposed to see this Thursday, and which I'm given to understand is pretty good.

Roger Ebert says Juno is the best film of 2007, while blucarbnpinwheel says it's just okay at best. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm inclined to trust Ben, especially insofar as we apparently had the exact same reaction to Napoleon Dynamite right down to the Rushmore comparison. (Although in fairness to N.D. I have grown a little more fond of it in retrospect and upon a subsequent viewing.) In Ebert's plus column, he does note the greatness of No Country for Old Men, which I've been meaning to write about but am having trouble improving upon the Candleblog review: Holy crap. I was just punched in the face by the Coen brothers. Every single individual moment of this film is perfect. I am in awe. How dare they make this film?

But Ebert maliciously and incorrectly snubs by omission The Darjeeling Limited, obviously my choice for best film of Oh Seven, almost as if he's deliberately trying to provoke me into a blind rage. Winner: blucarbnpinwheel!

I'm still hoping I like Juno, though. As I believe I've mentioned before, literally everything Michael Cera does makes me laugh, so the outlook is good.

Rotten Tomatoes pries a few more Fantastic Mr. Fox tidbits from Wes Anderson's cold, dead hands. Via blucarbnpinwheel, which also offers up the Guardian's belated defense of quirk.

It started to feel a little bit, not competitive with the monkeys, but that they didn't have your best interests at heart. Wes Anderson talks to Owen Wilson about The Darjeeling Limited and more on everybody's third-favorite community Web site, MySpace. Thanks to blucarbnpinwheel, as always your source for Wes Anderson interviews.

I've put up some preliminary thoughts about The Darjeeling Limited over at culturemonkey. There are spoilers, so I wouldn't actually recommend that you read what I've written until you've seen the movie—but I hope you'll come back and read it when you have. (Be sure and watch "Hotel Chevalier" first; not playing the short with the movie is an abomination.) Here's the medium version:

More overtly comedic than any of Anderson's other films, with more than a few surprisingly slapsticky exchanges, Darjeeling is in other ways the most overtly tragic, facing head-on nostalgia's unforgiving brutality: our scars don't heal, the dead don't rise, the things we have lost do not return to us. But this brutality is matched in the same breath with a fuller vision of what redemption must mean, one that promises us not a return or replacement of the thing we lack but the ability to live our lives without it.

The short version may come as something of a relief: it's extremely good.

What makes the family inexhaustible, to the dramatic imagination, is that what may perplex and pain its members is likely to register as comic folly in the eye of the beholder.

Anthony Lane reviews Darjeeling in the New Yorker. The plot is never the point in a Wes Anderson movie, but be warned there are slight spoilers.

The House Next Door has a ton of Wes-Anderson- and Darjeeling-flavored links for your Friday night.

Tonight's vaunted Crazy Prize goes to "The Life Fascistic: Fascist Aesthetics in the Films of Wes Anderson."

Second place: "Wes Anderson Is a Big Fat Racist, Am I Right?"

The New York Post, has an interview today with Wes Anderson about The Darjeeling Limited and "Hotel Chevalier."

HW: Your short film, Hotel Chevalier starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, screened prior to the Darjeeling. Will it be screened in theaters before the feature? What were the workings behind that?

WA: The short, we made about a year before the movie. At first I wrote this scene and then I kind of figured out that I wanted Jason in it. And I thought, "I think this is the same character" [from Darjeeling], because we were working on the script already for the movie. It was already kind of linked. Then as I was finishing writing the short we decided that they [the films] definitely go together. Then [reenacting doubt], we'll see if Natalie Portman wants do it? She was the person we had in mind. Then she said yes. So I said, "Let's just make this right now." So I just paid for it and made it right then.

HW: In between script sessions for Darjeeling?

WA: We kept working on the script. It's a weird thing to do. There wasn't a game plan. Yes, they go together. Yes, to understand why Natalie Portman appears near the end of the movie, you really should've seen the short. It's not really a very commercially sound concept. So, once it was all done then I was faced with [imitating himself], "We can show it [Hotel] in front of it [Darjeeling]?" But then, "I don't know if I'd like for everyone to see it in front of it." And really, I kind of feel like, "It's nice if you see it [Hotel]. Then you see the movie the next day."

HW: So, like your directing style, the Hotel Chevalier/Darjeeling Limited package is a multi-varied concept?

WA: In the end we try to make it that one person can see it in one way, and another person can see it in another way. We'll have the short [downloadable] on iTunes. And then maybe at a certain point we'll add the short in with the movie in the theaters; and it'll be [available] on the DVD. You can watch the movie and then the short, or the short and then the movie. It'll just be in different ways. It wasn't very preconceived. In the end I just felt [pauses], "I don't want to force it. Let's just see what it is. Let's just see what it wants to be."

Because he lives in the Megapolis, blucarbnpinwheel has seen The Darjeeling Limited and reviewed it at his blog, which like most of the reviews I've linked to I only skimmed for fear of being spoiled. The film comes to the Outskirts sometime in October; I think next week, but maybe that's wrong.

"The Darjeeling Limited" -- which opens the New York Film Festival this evening, and opens elsewhere beginning tomorrow -- is the first of Anderson's movies that has elicited even the mildest scrap of affection from me: I feel warmly toward it, although I reserve the right to remain wary of its aging-hipster gimcrackery.

More Wes Anderson news, via blucarbnpinwheel: first a conversation with Anderson at the Huffington Post and second some tidbits of information about his inscrutable next project, the stop-motion-animated The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Meanwhile, at the House Next Door, Keith Uhlich reviews Darjeeling. He isn't in love, but he's in like, which probably means I'll be in love. I'm keeping my expectations sensible and rational, but I've been out to sea for a long time.

There is a sense—and it is by no means a trivial sense—in which "Hotel Chevalier" is an iPod commercial. And there is surely another sense in which it is all about the frustrated desire to see Natalie Portman's breasts. It also seems to have a lot to do with the color yellow.

But putting all three of these senses aside for the moment, "Hotel Chevalier" is most completely about being Part 1 of The Darjeeling Limited, and the tremendous amount of joy that very notion brings me.

So far I've watched it twice.