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.
I root for George Clooney. He has a lot going for him; he’s good looking, has a villa in Italy and is good friends with Sandra Bullock. That’s a lot for anyone, but that’s not why I root for him. I’m on his side because even though he’s a superstar he takes chances.
As an actor he put nipples on Batman, starred in a remake of an obscure Russian sci fi film, played a fox in a Wes Anderson movie and has played the lead in a movie about paranormal goats.
As a director he’s just as edgy. He’s stood behind the camera for a black and white look at Edward R. Murrow’s battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, an old school football movie set in 1925 and an exposé of backroom politics.
He’s an a-lister who takes chances, and I applaud that which makes me sad to report I didn’t find as much to applaud in his most recent film as actor and director “The Monuments Men.”
Based on the book “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History” by Robert M. Edsel, the movie stars Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville as a motley crew of art historians, engineers and museum directors recruited to locate and rescue priceless art works stolen by the Nazis. When two members of their team are killed they are no longer observers but active participants in the war.
Helping in the mission to return the plundered cultural artifacts is Rose Valland (Cate Blanchett), a French art historian and member of the French Resistance who not only aids the Allied art platoon but also tries to work her Parisian charms on Damon’s character.
“The Monuments Men” is a wartime comedy. Think “Hogan’s Heroes” by way of Leonardo Da Vinci and you’ll get the idea. It has some mild laughs (the biggest laugh, for Canadians anyway, comes from the Parisians who blame Matt Damon’s terrible French on having spent too much time in Montreal) but also a great deal of reverence for the art and the work of the real-life Monuments Men. ”People can come back but if you destroy their achievements, their history,” says George L. Stout (Clooney), “they can’t come back from that. That’s why Monuments Men was created.”
The reverential tone is reinforced by old school pacing that focuses on the character and art over action and a rousing soundtrack that sounds air-lifted in from a classic wartime era movie. The cast is uniformly fine and Bill Murray shows, once again in a brief scene in a shower (NO SPOILERS HERE), how his understated style can move an audience.
No problems there, but co-writers Clooney and longtime collaborator Grant Heslov appear to have taken a dose of sentimentality pills before putting pen to paper. What might have been an edgy, exciting look at an underreported slice of World War II history is reduced to an elegantly directed but somewhat dull film.
“The Monuments Men” is an earnestly told story but the lack of any real energy or surprises undermines its effectiveness.
Taking a lead from last years’ “My Week with Marilyn,” a bio that concentrated on just seven tumultuous days in the turbulent life of Marilyn Monroe, and recycling a character seen twice in as many years on the big screen, “Hyde Park on Hudson” tells a time compressed story of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extramarital affairs and meeting with King George VI.
Based on true events the movie begins with FDR (Bill Murray) summoning his fifth or sixth cousin, Margaret Suckley (Laura Linney), “it depends on how you count,” she says, to keep him company at his country resort, Hyde Park on Hudson in New York. It’s June of 1939, the Depression rages on and World War II is mere months away.
FDR uses the country home to “forget the weight of the world,” and carry on an extra martial affair with Margaret. The quiet idyll of the retreat is disturbed when the President welcomed the King (Samuel West) and his wife, the Queen Consort Elizabeth (Olivia Colman), who came calling for American support should war erupt.
Despite the racy subject matter—FDR’s appetite for the ladies—there is nothing torrid about “Hyde Park on Hudson.” It is said over and over that the President needs peace and quiet, and that mantra establishes the tone of the film. Director Roger “Notting Hill” Michell has made a subtle film set in polite society, amongst the social class who treat each other with quiet restraint. That kind of restraint is the order of the day, both in the performances and story.
Some will find it slow and meandering but the movie’s beauty lies in its leisurely pace. It’s a study of a different time, a time, were respect and decorum ruled.
At the center of it all is Bill Murray. The supporting cast is good, in fact better than good, but Murray gives the kind of effortless performance that makes one wonder what might have happened to his career if his first dramatic outing, “The Razor’s Edge,” hadn’t been such a flop, forcing him back into comedy.
“Hyde Park on Hudson” is a quiet film that may make some noise at Oscar time.
Making a horror comedy is tricky business. Do it right and you get a classic like “Sean of the Dead,” a movie whose body count is offset by just the right amount of laughs. Do it wrong and you’ll wind up with “Repossessed,” a movie that is neither funny nor scary, just dull. “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer (whose next movie is to be called Psycho Funky Chimp) understands that horror comedies are neither fish nor fowl—they are both. For every decapitation you have to have a giggle and “Zombieland” delivers on both counts.
This post-apocalyptic zom com stars Jesse Eisenberg as a teenage curmudgeon who has survived a fast acting viral plague that turned his neighbors (and everybody else) into ferocious flesh eating zombies. Mad cow became mad person which became mad zombie disease! It should be a paradise for this videogame playing hermit—no facebook status updates!—but a life spent killing ravenous zombies has left him starving for human contact. When he meets zombie killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and two dishonest sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), he realizes for better or worse, they must stick together to survive.
“Zombieland” has the same over-the-top silly vibe that makes movies like “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” such guilty pleasures. It’s gross-out funny with plenty of action and zombie kills for the hardcores, but underneath the absurdity is a message about humanity. At the end of the movie Eisenberg’s character realizes that his solitary life was turning him into the thing he feared most. “Without other people,” he says, “you might as well be a zombie.” The sentiment may not be as powerful as George A. Romero’s zombie metaphors but it puts a nice little bow on this coming of age story.
Also strong is the casting. Eisenberg, a young actor second only to Michael Cera in playing awkward teens on film, is an unlikely action movie hero, but here he plays to his strengths—playing the witty self-conscious teen—and expands his range to include zombie serial killer.
Equally fun is Woody Harrelson as the Twinkie loving zombie hunter Tallahassee. Harrelson brings a swagger and some unexpected twists to the character and delivers many of the film’s funniest lines.
Both are ably supported by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin who don’t have as have much to do as the boys, but do a great deal to keep the story moving forward.
The showiest role in the film, however, belongs to a Hollywood superstar who has one of the most surreal cameos in recent memory. I’m not going to tell you who it is (it’s funnier if you don’t know) but his wild scenes alone are worth the price of admission.
“Zombieland” breathes a bit of new life into the sometimes stale zombie genre.
City of Ember, based on the 2003 book by Jeanne DuPrau, is the newest example of a brand new genre: post-apocalyptic kid’s flicks. Following hot on the heels of WALL-E, the Pixar cartoon about a robot in charge of cleaning up a deserted, dead Earth, City of Ember is another dark vision of an underground world solely reliant on one failing energy source (sound familiar?) that plays like a cross between a subterranean Nancy Drew’s Passport to Danger and Blade Runner.
At the beginning of the film, once again humans have destroyed Earth. In order to save mankind a group of forward thinking scientists—known as “the builders”— create a self-sufficient underground world, with the ultimate plan that after 200 years people would return to the surface and start again. Of course over time their plans get lost, only to be discovered, decaying and damaged, by twelve-year-old Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan), the great-great-great grand daughter of the seventh Mayor of Ember. With the help of Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) she must escape the clutches of the corrupt Mayor (Bill Murray) and find a way to the surface before Ember is plunged into darkness forever.
Think of City of Ember as Terry Gilliam lite. It breathes the same air as Brazil, his post-apocalypse masterpiece, but has had many of the rougher edges smoothed out to appeal to a teen audience. It features Disney-esque mild action, strong female role-models and engaging performances, particularly from Murray as the crooked Mayor and Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan, who is a natural in front of the camera. Best of all, the crumbling together city is beautifully rendered as a nightmarish vision of the future, complete with tilting tenement buildings, a giant gold generator that looks borrowed from the movie Metropolis and lots of futuristic grime and rust.
City of Ember drags a bit in its final moments, not really building the head of steam necessary to give the climax the edge-of-your-seat feel it should have, but it ends on a poetic note and should please the whole family from teenagers on up.
