Tag: Bill Murray

Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” his ninth film, may be his grimmest yet, but it’s perfectly at home with his best, most familiar work

If anything, Wes Anderson is very consistent. His films all share his brisk pacing, deadpan humor, diorama creativity and color, and precise attention to detail. And they’re all good.

This is even though each of his nine films is wildly different and ambitious in ways unique to each project. He’s put his quirky, fantastical stamp on coming-of-age romances, family dysfunction dramas, children’s fables and French New Wave cinema. You could make a case that any of Anderson’s films is the “Most Wes Anderson” film. I wrote as much about his previous film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which found him globe hoping, going to dark places and using his dioramas to examine legacy and loss. That’s all true even though his other films have these qualities in spades, in their own ways.

So where does that leave Isle of Dogs, his second stop-motion animated film following the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox? It feels like Anderson at his ugliest, dabbling in washed out horizons, muted colors and grizzly characters, though you can find parallels in his past films. He’s fully embracing his Japanese influences from Akira Kurosawa and kabuki dance, though eagle-eyed viewers must’ve known he’s a fan. And it also feels like his most grim movie, with an immensely percussive score lending gravitas and stakes to an otherwise pleasant story about dogs. You know where this is going.

Isle of Dogs is exactly like all of Anderson’s films and none of them. It dazzles with animation and moods that Anderson has never dabbled in before, and yet it feels at home with his best work. Continue reading “Isle of Dogs”

Rapid Response: Ghostbusters (1984)

GBPosterThe thing about Bill Murray movies is, they often don’t work without him. “Groundhog Day” would be a horrible Adam Sandler comedy if anyone but him played the part, and the same is true of “Ghostbusters.” Aside from all the ugly misogyny that’s being thrown at the movie sight unseen, no wonder everyone is freaking out over a remake of “Ghostbusters.”

If there’s so much controversy about whether women can play the Ghostbusters, it’s because even from its opening moments, Dr. Peter Venkman (Murray) channels a distinct brand of ’80s masculinity. He’s a smug playboy, a sarcastic goofball, an apathetic regular Joe, and yet he’s hilarious, confident, charming and likable. Take the opening scene after the credits, in which Venkman flirts with a cute student while tormenting another nerdy one with some electroshock therapy. Watch how he grins in a way that telegraphs to the camera he’s full of it but confounds his two test subjects. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Ghostbusters (1984)”

The Monuments Men

George Clooney stars and directs this World War II drama with a rich cast and a weak execution.

Art has been a part of human culture since the dawn of man. People like me spend their lives writing about it, protecting it and debating it because it tells us about ourselves, defines our history, makes us think, moves us to act, provides escapism and many more things that can fill a term paper. And we should preserve it at all costs because Hitler is bad and go America.

George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” champions art and the soldiers who helped to salvage it from the Nazis during World War II, but it’s a muddled war film rather than a stirring piece of art full of ideas and meaning itself. It’s about the lofty Idea of art, only important on the motivation of preventing Hitler from making someone else’s culture his own.

“Art is to be held up and admired, just like these men,” Clooney says. And the extent to which Clooney feels art should simply be placed on a pedestal or hung on a wall like the way America treats its military reflects how pretty and patriotic, yet empty “The Monuments Men” feels. It has echoes of being an amusing buddy caper complete with manufactured camaraderie and a role call of movie stars called into action one by one, not unlike Clooney’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” But it also wants to be a grave war drama and paints the melodramatic set pieces and themes of war, justice and serving your country with a broad brush. Continue reading “The Monuments Men”

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is a very gifted filmmaker, but he might be completely lost if it weren’t for Bill Murray.

The title character of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is an oafish, selfish, narcissist who is impossible to like, and yet Murray, as he’s done before in films like “Groundhog Day” and others, makes the character palatable, funny and even just a little relatable.

It’s the story of a nature documentarian trying to fund and make the second part to his most recent film, in which a mysterious creature he calls a jaguar shark eats his longtime friend and companion. Now he intends to document the hunt for the shark out of revenge. At the premiere of his film, he meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a man who claims to be Zissou’s illegitimate son. He and a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) accompany Zissou on his most recent nautical quest.

Anderson’s films have been criticized as cold and without emotional entry points, and “The Life Aquatic” may be the start of that. It’s a film obsessed with its colorful kitsch, the regal mixed with the cartoonish. It has acoustic covers of David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese as its soundtrack, it has stop motion animation done by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline”) to provide unexpected visual gags and it has dry, uptight characters not making jokes but acting as self-parodies.

When Anderson pans across an intricate set with the fourth wall removed in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or in “Moonrise Kingdom,” he does so to provide context of the depth of family or the spirit of fantasy and discovery. Here, Zissou’s boat looks especially like a movie set, and it’s used as a one-off joke. Like Zissou’s own corny, dated documentaries, he uses it to make a statement about how this nostalgia has lost its kitschy charm and appeal over time and become just a joke.

That’s because for how colorful “The Life Aquatic” is, all of it feels so flat. None of the colors are bright, only soft yellows and blues, and none of the frames have depth, just strikingly picturesque framing in two dimensions.

And yet Anderson’s control over framing and tone is consistently and surprisingly brilliant. He can invigorate the film with a completely nuts scene of Bill Murray going badass on a group of pirates that have invaded his boat. He can make time stop in a nearly Kubrick-esque sequence of a helicopter crash.

All of these moments too scream Anderson. It goes without saying that every Wes Anderson film is so Wes Anderson-y, and no director does it quite the same.

3 stars

Moonrise Kingdom

As “Moonrise Kingdom” begins, a boy is listening to a record of Benjamin Britton classical music compositions intended for children. A high-pitched, nonthreatening kid’s voice interrupts the song to explain the intricate layers of Britton’s piece, and the boy appreciates it all the more.

Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film is much like this record: an art house picture pieced together and slowly revealed to us like an elaborate opera. It has characters, themes and a silly tone that a child could embrace, and yet its presentation has complexity and maturity that may be beyond most adults. In this way, “Moonrise Kingdom” is one of the wackiest, most inventive, and most notably, the most heartfelt film Anderson ever made. Here then is a movie about growing up, independence, living above your age and loving the beauty of the more challenging and sophisticated pleasures of the world.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is the romance fairytale of Sam and Suzy (newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), two preteens who escape their parental care to elope on a hidden cove on their small island home of New Penzance. Sam is a nerdy orphan, the most unpopular boy amongst his summer camp Khaki Scouts (by a significant margin), and yet a skilled mountaineer and adventurer. Suzy is the oldest child in a dysfunctional family, and she’s at an age where her needs cannot be met by her two unhappy parents. The couple is tracked by the lone island cop Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), Sam’s camp counselor, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), and Suzy’s two parents, Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Continue reading “Moonrise Kingdom”

The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson doesn’t make deliberately quirky indie comedies or inscrutable art house films. He makes fantasies. “The Royal Tenenbaums” is just the story of a dysfunctional family, not an epic voyage to the bottom of the sea or the tale of an adventurous talking fox, and yet it feels as wonderfully strange and exotic as any of those.

That’s because just about every Wes Anderson film ever made is the most wholly Wes Anderson-y movie you’ve ever seen. His style drips over every moment in his framing, his tone and his quirky imagination. “The Royal Tenenbaums” more than any of Anderson’s films perhaps is like visual poetry in the way the film’s offbeat dialogue punctuates his quick cuts.

His shots are exploding with wild imagery. None of it is natural or has a purpose; it is merely beautiful to look at. One room has two giant murals on the wall featuring tigers and hunters, and another room reveals the head of a giant stuffed badger to be mounted on the wall. Continue reading “The Royal Tenenbaums”

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Why has Wes Anderson not been making movies like “Fantastic Mr. Fox” his entire career? This charmingly stop motion animated kids movie is as perfectly in Anderson’s style as any film he’s ever made, and his colorful and peculiar quirks fit in beautifully with Roald Dahl’s lovingly crafted story. Continue reading “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

Rapid Response: Rushmore

When Wes Anderson made “Rushmore,” his second film, he desperately tried to get it screened for the film critic Pauline Kael long after she had retired and was close to her death. I’m not sure if her reaction was good, but I imagine the reason he tried to screen it for her was because his film was simply so different. Being released in 1998, it’s not so much ahead of its time because it kicked off this style of film making for the next decade, but it feels very much like a 2000s movie.

How should Anderson have reacted if he had a feeling he was ushering in the next generation of the movies?

I’ve seen five of six of Anderson’s films, all of them in a peculiar order. “Rushmore” is the movie that put him on the map, along with the film’s co-screenwriter Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman (very young here) and would solidify the sorts of low-key older man roles Bill Murray would take until today.

But my first outing with the director was with “The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou,” a film that is equally odd and clearly identifiable in Anderson’s colorful yet distant visual style, but features Murray in the lead and seems more “classically” funny. Unlike “Rushmore,” it has what you would call “jokes.”

That’s not to say “Rushmore” isn’t funny; it’s hilarious. It’s to say “Rushmore’s” comedy is very much centered around attitude and absurd attention to detail in a quirky screenplay.

But in fact, all of Anderson’s films play and look in this fashion. That’s what makes him striking as a director. It is impossible to watch even a few moments of one of his movies and not recognize it as such.

The fans he established with “Rushmore” would say he fine-tuned his craft to perfection in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a film I’ll have to revisit but others have heralded as a cult masterpiece. Then he worked with Noah Baumbach (another disciple of his) on “Life Aquatic” and allowed that quirky attitude to meet situational comedy. And Anderson soon got to the point at which his “The Darjeeling Limited” was overstuffed in Anderson’s style that it felt like nothing more than a vehicle for Anderson’s quirks. Finally is “Fantastic Mr. Fox” what I feel is his finest film. That stop-motion animated picture felt so much like an Anderson movie without sacrificing any of its childlike charm that you wonder why he hadn’t made stop-motion animated films his entire career.

Watching “Rushmore,” it did become obvious that his movies have always felt like cartoons of sorts. “Rushmore” is hardly “about” anything, its characters fit into no reasonable human mold, its scenarios are largely absurd and overblown, yet the characters and the world in which they live are so richly “drawn” that it casts a spell nonetheless.

I’m glad I finally got around to seeing “Rushmore,” as I finally understand Anderson’s significance as a modern auteur of film.

Rapid Response: Ed Wood

Ed Wood is considered the worst director who ever lived. He held this title for so long, and it wasn’t until recently that my generation has established new cult heroes of awful cinema such as Tommy Wisseau and Uwe Boll and seem to have forgotten Wood somewhat. Beyond that, there is a belief that “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is actually not the worst film ever made but one of the BEST films ever made, that it’s awful sets, performances and effects and complete disregard for continuity was all brilliantly intentional and ironic. Only in the 21st century would such a mindset develop.

It doesn’t help that Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” despite being released in his heyday of the ’90s, despite being one of his most critically acclaimed films and despite starring his eternal frontman Johnny Depp, is one of his least known films amongst the many Burton fanboys still agreeing how great “Alice in Wonderland” was (it’s not).

In this film, Burton doesn’t necessarily vindicate Wood as a genius, but he is sympathetic to him, and he recognizes a certain level of genius (albeit one that doesn’t indicate something “good”) in him absent from most other directors of all time. Depp infuses Wood with a sheer level of optimism and grinning credulity for everything around him, and such was the way Wood directed his movies, in love with every shot and every line of dialogue as a work of art. It’s not that he was blind to his own failure as well as other’s greatness. In his mind, everyone was great.

The film is hilarious, one of my favorite lines being, “Aren’t you a fag? What? No, I’m just a transvestite.” Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, who starred in numerous Wood films, is terrific, as is Bill Murray as an arguably odd and unnecessary character, Bunny Breckenridge. The black and white cinematography has that great ’50s B-Movie vibe, and the scenes in which they recreate “Plan 9 from Outer Space” are priceless in their precision to the film (which I’ve seen, and yes, it is terrible in an amazing way).

I’m not sure on the accuracy of the film historically, but it’s great fun and actually one of Burton’s best.