Binky and I saw Wes Anderson's latest on Sunday afternoon. I worship Rushmore and greatly enjoy The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (I'm not so high on Bottle Rocket - it's not awful, I just don't think it's all that special), so I guess I'm this film's intended audience. But be that as it may, I didn't love it. It lagged and didn't have the same kind of heart that the others films had. Nor did it have (to my ears) writing as sharp (he's no longer writing with either Owen Wilson or Noah Baumbach), and I don't know that leaving his more traditional settings really worked. I found myself wishing that he'd made a movie out of the scenes at the end involving the boys' immediate reactions to the stress of their father's death, and their relationship with their mother. Those seemed to me much more effective than the wandering around India bits. And I found his continued reliance on certain tics (especially the slow-motion, please, someone stop him before he uses it again) kind of eye-roll inducing, and the plot (and how it unfolded) painfully predictable.
That said, I do always enjoy his creation of his worlds, and I like how he uses silence and gestures and odd little moments and touches so effectively. And of course pretty much any film with Adrien Brody is worth watching - and hey, if he's wearing Marc Jacobs, little pink boxers, and great glasses ... well as Binky said, sometimes you just stop watching the movie and watch him. So it's not like it was a bad movie. But I didn't like it as much as some of his earlier work.
Posted by armand at November 27, 2007 02:28 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Movies