Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

[flyonthewall2983]

I stopped seven minutes in

[The Narrator Returns]

His next movie sounds simpler than these last two (an espionage adventure with Benicio del Toro in "every shot"), but I'll buck the trend here and say that I think Anderson is only getting better and more moving in this increasingly ornate stage of his career. I adored French Dispatch immediately while this one took me two viewings to fully process, but both get at ideas of authorship, of one's own life as much as of one's art, I find incredibly profound and sad, and he could only get to those ideas via this abstracted, multilayered form. Anderson at his simplest was already such an acquired taste that I'm not going to bemoan anyone who bounced off this, but I am surprised to hear the complaints that Schwartzman blends into the Andersonian deadpan. Maybe this plays differently at home than in a theater, on a big screen his watery eyes were like lasers slicing through the understatement to reveal all the agony lying beneath. I can make myself emotional just thinking too hard about the scene with him and

Spoiler

Margot Robbie, especially if I then start thinking about Barbie in relation to it.

[pianocrash]

Can't disagree with all of the critiques here, even if I stopped begin an Anderson apologist following Grand Budapest (it's clear to me that he needs a distance from either his material or his mind, inasmuch that Fantastic Mr. Fox is the only rewatchable film I'll reach for when the fancy strikes).

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned here (and maybe isn't a total surprise) is that the majority of Asteriod City was essentially built out of composited shots, which was a necessity to the shoot due to COVID restrictions mounting up at the time. Whereas most filmmakers would have either balked or lost their mind under those kind of restraints, it played perfectly into Anderson's skill set to an unsettling degree, which is also one of those reasons why this became the most "Wes Anderson" film possible. I'll posit that the trademark detached humanity is intact, but it is also smothered by just about every other thing going on in this picture, and it takes a lot to laugh, and maybe a train to cry.

Despite it all, at least this picture earned us a great visit to the Konbini Video Club.