Over the course of eight films Wes Anderson has developed a style that is absolutely singular. He spins worlds out of the smallest details with an idiosyncratic style that some call twee and overly theatrical, but whatever you call it, one thing is clear: No one makes movies like Wes Anderson.
In his latest project, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he has once again created a movie that future film scholars will coin terms like Wesesque or Andersonian to describe.
Told in flashback, the movie is like a nesting doll, a story within a story, with in a story. Beginning in present day Tom Wilkinson plays The Author, an older man reflecting on one of his greatest books, the story of M. Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes), the legendary concierge at the Grand Budapest
Cut to the late 1960s. The Grand Budapest is no longer so grand, the home to a handful of tenants left over from the place’s glory days. One visitor is the Author, now a young writer played by Jude Law. One day in the steam bath he meets the hotel’s enigmatic owner Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). Moustafa agrees to tell the writer the story of the hotel and the legendary Gustave H over dinner.
Flashback to 1932, the heyday of the glamorous hotel. Gustave H rules the place with an iron hand when he isn’t sleeping with the older female guests. A flamboyant gigolo he has a special connection with Madame D (Tilda Swinton), an insecure but impossibly wealthy woman who has fallen for his unctuous charms.
When she is found dead at her home, Gustave H and his most trusted employee, Lobby Boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), visit to pay respects. At the reading of the will Gustave H is endowed with a priceless painting much to the displeasure of the deceased woman’s family. Angered, her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) frames Gustave H for murder.
Amid a whirlwind of hired henchmen (Willem Dafoe), helpful concierges (Bill Murray and Bob Balaban), talented chocolatier (Saoirse Ronan), tattooed criminals (Harvey Keitel) and mounting war on the continent, Gustave H is captured and jailed. With the help of his trusted Lobby Boy, must escape and clear his name.
In keeping with Anderson’s style, the story of Gustave H and the hotel is rich with nuance and detail but never feels overwhelming or tiresome. It’s a wittily whimsical story that feels transported in from a bygone era. It’s funny and elegant, feeling like a throwback to the Ealing Comedies complete with social commentary, farce and laugh-out-loud situational comedy.
At its twee little heart is Ralph Fiennes in a strangely mannered performance that not only provides many of the film’s best moments—his Benny Hill style escape from the police is hysterical—but also it’s heart.
Like the movie itself, the performance is original, unexpected and oddly affecting.
With “The Grand Budapest Hotel” Wes Anderson has found a balance between his highly stylized artistic vision, story and heart.
Too old for Nancy Drew? Too young for Jessica Flectcher? How about Veronica Mars?
For three seasons Kristen Bell played the title character on television’s “Veronica Mars,” a teen detective show about a young woman who solved crimes in the upscale town of Neptune, California.
She’s back on the big screen in the inventively titled “Veronica Mars,” co-starring with some familiar faces from the original show, in a reunion movie that sees the former teenaged private eye turned psychologist and Ivy League lawyer pulled back into the PI game when her high school boyfriend (Jason Dohring) is charged with killing his pop star girlfriend.
The movie, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, is as cinematic as you might imagine a movie based on a TV show to be. It plays like a longer, blown up version of the show, which will play well to the fans who are hungry for more of their favorite characters, but may leave the uninitiated wondering what the fuss is all about.
Veronica Mars is an engaging character and Bell wears her like a glove, tossing off some zingy one-liners—“You won’t shoot me,” says a bad guy. “Why does everyone say that?” Mars replies, pulling the trigger—and bringing an easy charm to the role.
It’s too bad the story plays like an old episode of “Murder She Wrote,” with none of the sophistication we would expect from a big screen outing. “Veronica Mars” is a character based piece, with the murder tagged on to give us a reason for watching, but it would have been more interesting if the death was more than just a McGuffin.
On the plus side there is a nod to Canada—in the form of a sloppy karaoke version of our national anthem—and there’s even a Barenaked Ladies gag.
“Enemy,” an art house thriller from director Denis Villeneuve and actor Jake Gyllenhaal, is an intriguing head scratcher that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.
When we first meet him the “Brokeback Mountain” star plays a history professor named Adam Bell. When not lecturing in class, he leads a normal, if somewhat repetitive life with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). One night while watching a rented movie he is astonished to see someone who looks exactly like him on screen.
After some research he discovers the actor’s name is Anthony St. Claire (Gyllenhaal) and that he lives in Toronto’s west end. Spooky similarities arise. Both have beautiful blonde significant others—Sarah Gadon plays Helen, Anthony’s six-months pregnant wife—but there’s more. Both even have a scar on their chests.
Adam and his doppelganger have completely opposite personalities, but their lives become intertwined when Anthony becomes interested in Mary and duo struggles to discover what connection they have.
“Enemy” is the kind of movie that, if it grabs you, you’ll want to see it twice to try and make sense of some of the more narratively opaque sections. If the slow build of existential dread doesn’t grab you, however, one viewing will be more than enough.
But, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” In other words “Enemy” is a challenge, a film that revels in its confounding story. Like Polanski on downers, it’s willfully difficult, taking the audience down a rabbit hole deep into the psyche of these unrelated twins. It’s a long strange journey with many rewards for the attentive viewer.
One of those rewards is Gyllenhaal’s interesting and varied work. He plays two parts of one person’s personality, but creates fully formed individual characters that, even though they are identical looking, are much different in the way they tick.
“Enemy” is stylish and sinister (with a big tasty dollop of mystery on the side) that will keep audiences guessing long after they’ve left the theatre.
SYNOPSIS: Based on the most successful racing video game franchise ever, Need for Speed is Aaron ‘Breaking Bad’ Paul’s first lead in a feature. He plays Tobey Marshall, a speed-demon mechanic, jailed for a crime he did not commit. Out of the hoosegow with revenge against adversary Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper) on his mind, he finagles a spot at the De Leon, a high-octane underground race that makes the Cannonball Run look like a Go-Kart sprint. You just know it’s only a matter of time until someone says, “We’ll settle this behind the wheel.” Between him and the race, however, are miles of hard road, bounty hunters and police. Will his dreams of racing and revenge come true? Or will his need for speed go unfulfilled?
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 3 Stars
Steve: 2 Stars
Richard: Steve, remember the Mazda commercials that were on a few years ago? I felt like the kid from those ads was sitting on my shoulder whispering “zoom, zoom” into my ear for the entire running time of The Hot Wheels Movie, er…. Need for Speed. This is a fast paced car race movie that zips along as quickly as you’d hope a movie with the word speed in the title would, but character wise, it’s not quite as fast or furious as you might like. The cars are the stars, while the characters are largely left in the dust. What did you think?
Steve: Yes, the way they’re upstaged by the racing sequences, the term “vehicular manslaughter” could easily apply to the actors. Sure, Aaron Paul showed us he had chops in Breaking Bad but that only makes the choice of playing a gravelly-voiced, vengeance-seeking street car racer all the more curious. After all, as much as Need For Speed tries to design depth in its characters, nobody in the thriller rises above conveniently routine. Or all that interesting.
RC: I liked the race scenes. They feel authentic and by and large done by brave speed demon stunt drivers without the use of CGI. They’re exciting, pedal-to-the-metal sequences that put the audience in the driver’s seat. You have to wonder about glorifying the romance of reckless street racing, but the movie isn’t a commercial for vehicular mayhem. There are some wild rides, but there are also consequences for many of the drivers and their need for speed. I just wish the characters were stronger. It says something when the movie’s most interesting character—the eccentric millionaire The Monarch, played by Michael Keaton—never gets behind the wheel of a car.
SG: He was definitely working the same oddball over-the-top angles as Nicolas Cage. Imogen Poots (That Awkward Moment) was appealing enough as a British assistant of the car’s owner who hitchhikes along with Paul for the nationwide ride. However, I couldn’t help thinking how contrived the entire plot was. Then again, I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising considering the story was culled from a video game—albeit a very successful video game.
RC: Need for Speed isn’t Downton Abbey. It’s a car crazy story where characters take a backseat to the action, but if you know what a Two Lane Grasshopper is, then you’ll probably get a kick out of the driving scenes.
SG: This movie definitely isn’t for graduates of Juilliard’s drama program. Its for high-octane gearheads who want to stuff their faces with over-buttered popcorn and watch innocent bystanders and cops get taken out in the careless (but cunningly choreographed) act of illegal street racing. It does a fine job there but I’m not sure I’ll remember much else about Need for Speed by tomorrow morning.
The Husband begins with a premise we’ve all heard before, a romantic triangle. There’s a husband, a wife and a lover but, as director Bruce McDonald points out, “in this case the lover is fourteen years old and the wife is in jail.”
The movie is a dark dramedy about Henry, (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, who also co-wrote the script), struggling to deal with the shame he feels when his wife is jailed for having an affair with a minor.
“The script really tries to understand what the male goes through in this crazy situation,” says McDonald. “It’s about regaining your mojo, about reclaiming your masculinity and power and it was written as a suspense story.
There was this ‘What’s this guy going to do’ thing all the way along. It was set up as a revenge movie. We meet our character and he is going through his day-to-day and one day, on the street, he sees the kid. The kid that did the deed. That sets off the movie, so it’s this cat and mouse game throughout the whole movie. I just loved the way it was constructed and the suspense of it. What is our character Henry going to do when he finally confronts the kid?
“He begins to do irrational things. First he’s trying to befriend this kid and get on his good side. To do what? And then other elements come into play where he is preparing something that you might think is a violent end to this confrontation. Henry is a mysterious and enigmatic character looking for some kind of closure on being the humiliated, cuckold husband.”
The edgy film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013. McDonald admits to being “very surprised at the reaction.”
“People were very taken with this movie,” he says. “They went in deep. I think they loved the oddness and the suspense of the story. They loved the situation and I think they loved how authentic and true it seemed to be in terms of the performances by Maxwell and Sarah Allen.
“Usually at the festival there’s two or three screenings. In this case the screening venues kept getting bigger and bigger which is always a bit frightening because the first screening is usually well attended and by the third you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen but our third screening was packed to the rafters.”
“Grand Hotel… always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”
That famous line from the Greta Garbo film Grand Hotel is only half right. Hundreds of movies have used hotels as a backdrop for the action because people come, people go, but despite the quote’s assertion, there’s always something happening.
This weekend’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is a case in point. Starring Ralph Fiennes as a concierge at a European hotel between the world wars, it features an all-star cast, including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Harvey Keitel and Edward Norton. They are all part of the fabric of the hotel’s history, which includes assassins, murder, riches and a mysterious painting.
Hollywood has always recognized that the transient nature of hotels makes for great drama.
New York City’s Plaza Hotel has played host to many famous movie scenes. Everything from Barefoot in the Park to Funny Girl to The Great Gatsby has used the iconic hotel as a backdrop, but it is probably best known as a location for North by Northwest. In the Alfred Hitchcock film Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government agent and kidnapped from the ornate lobby.
The opening shot of Goldfinger features a stunning aerial view of Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, which at the time was the most luxurious guesthouse on Miami Beach. Later in the film Bond Girl Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) dies of skin asphyxiation inside the hotel after henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) coats her whole body in gold paint.
In the 1920’s the Hotel del Coronado was a famous weekend getaway for Hollywood stars like Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn but the Victorian wooden beach resort found fame as the setting for several scenes in Some Like it Hot. Located on San Diego Bay across from San Diego, the beachfront location was the scene of one of the film’s most famous lines. When Jerry (Jack Lemmon) first spies Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) sashaying through the sand he says, “Look how she moves! It’s like Jell-O on springs.”
Stephen King was inspired to write The Shining after staying at the 140-room Stanley Hotel in Colorado. “I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years,” says Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) in the film version. “And not all of ’em was good.”
The Stanley has been used as a location for Dumb and Dumber and other films, but Stanley Kubrick chose not to showcase the place in his 1980 adaptation of the novel. Instead, much to King’s disappointment, he used Oregon’s Timberline Lodge as a stand-in for the film’s fictional Overlook Hotel.
Susan Smythe-Bishop is not only one of the country’s most talented film publicists, but she is also a mean cake designer and baker and a gifted artist. On her website www.theaccidentalvicepresident.com she showcases her story and her art. Most recently she kindly included Richard on her Wall of Fame, a collection of drawings of “the kind and hard working artists” she has worked with over the years. Other entries include Michael Caine, Bryan Cranston, Jackie Chan, David Cronenberg and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Have a look now before she changes her mind and replaces Richard with David Hasselhoff!
Thanks to Mr. Will Wong for this photo from the Canadian Screen Awards press room. Richard hosted the night backstage, interviewing everyone after they had won their awards. This is David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen with Richard tucked away in the corner. When Cronenberg was asked where the inspiration for his movies come from he looked out at the assembled press and said, “Just standing here is giving me all kinds of ideas for horror films.”
These are the shoes Richard wore to last night’s awards. Thanks to Teddy Wilson for the “F**king dynamite shoes!” tweet and all other who compared them to ruby slippers.
Another press room shot courtesy of Linda Barnard of the Toronto Star:
Over the course of eight films Wes Anderson has developed a style that is absolutely singular. He spins worlds out of the smallest details with an idiosyncratic style that some call twee and overly theatrical, but whatever you call it, one thing is clear: No one makes movies like Wes Anderson.
