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Film Features Film/TV

Asteroid City

This morning, as I was scrolling Twitter over coffee, I saw a user complaining about the avalanche of Wes Anderson parody TikToks. They posted the “Reading of the Will” scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel to prove that none of Anderson’s legion of sarcastic imitators could touch the genuine hilarity of Ralph Fiennes deadpanning, “I sleep with all of my close friends,” or the flurry of punches that ends with an iris-in on a snarling Willem Dafoe. I was low-key shocked at how many Twitter users responded with variations on “OMG, is this from a real movie?”

Anderson is now in that weird space of being famous for being famous. His distinctive style, which first came together in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, has been around long enough to be ripe for parody. Apparently, some clout chasers didn’t know what, exactly, they were laughing at. It was encouraging to see a couple of those responders chime in later to say they had sought out The Grand Budapest Hotel and found it hilarious and touching. You can imitate the surface with flat performance and fussed-over mise-en-scène, but the qualities that make Anderson one of our greatest living filmmakers are more elusive. His secret sauce remains secret — perhaps even from the artist himself.

Asteroid City is the follow-up to The French Dispatch, which is not just a career peak for Anderson, but in the running for the greatest film of the 2020s. (It’s early, I know.) So it carries a very heavy burden of expectations. Normally, this is the point of the review where I say something like, “It’s the story of blah blah, who must yadda yadda to avoid an oopsie.” But I’m not sure whose story Asteroid City is. Is it Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), the war photographer on a road trip to the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention who must decide when to tell his kids their mother died three weeks ago? Is it Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the closeted gay playwright whose latest play, Asteroid City, is an examination of grief and hope in a Nevada desert scarred by craters from atomic bomb tests? Or is it Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the director so obsessed with his production of Asteroid City that he sleeps in the theater? Or maybe it’s all of their stories, as told by Bryan Cranston, the host of a Playhouse 90-style anthology TV series that is staging a broadcast version of the play.

The basic plot of Asteroid City (the play) is “a stranger comes to town.” The stranger is an alien (seen twice as stop motion animation, and once as Jeff Goldblum’s cameo), and perhaps the story is really about the sprawling cast’s reaction to its arrival. General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) reacts by imposing a quarantine on the Junior Stargazer Convention. Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) just wants to study the alien. Augie, at his lowest point in life, discovers romance in the person of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress who likes to practice her nude scenes in front of her cabin window.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on. Each of the pieces of this sprawling puzzle works in their own way. Wright is Anderson’s new favorite monologist, and he delivers brilliantly. Schwartzman, Anderson’s longtime foil, pulls off a bewilderingly complex triple role as Augie, the actor who plays him, and Conrad Earp’s memory of his lost lover. Johansson, who has always had deeper chops than most of her roles require, lays on the affected mid-Atlantic accent of a spoiled, bored movie star reawakening her passions. Anderson goes from wide-screen to 4:3, and from a desaturated postcard color palette to stark black and white, fluidly and naturally. Practically every shot is perfectly composed joy unto itself.

The problem is, the parts don’t play well with one another. Cranston’s TV show, ostensibly the “top” layer of reality, adds too much metatextual complexity. The huge cast is fun, but it also means we don’t get to spend enough time with some of them.

Anderson superfans like me will have a grand time with Asteroid City, and hopefully, it will open up upon rewatch. But more casual viewers might end up lost in the director’s swirling cosmos.

Asteroid City
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Alien Invasions

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. 

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales. 

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.  

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

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News The Fly-By

MEMernet: Ja, Wes Health, and a Lost Car

Memphis on the internet.

Ja, Ja, Ja

Memphis sports fans shook their collective damn heads over the weekend. Grizzlies star Ja Morant flashed another gun in yet another online post, earning him yet another suspension from the NBA.

Wes Health

Posted to Facebook by Church Health

Church Health hopped on that Wes Anderson trend going around recently. A spot-on and funny Facebook Reel showed a perfectly framed employee getting on an elevator, admiring some art, and walking past, well, all kinds of things in true Anderson movie style.

Lost Car

Posted to Nextdoor by Lauren T.

“Good afternoon all!!” began the exclamation-point-laced Nextdoor post by Lauren T. last week. “This is incredibly embarrassing!!!! I seem to have misplaced my car on Monday [May 5th].”

The post perplexed neighbors, with many saying they could see the car sitting in the neighbor’s driveway.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Power of the Dog Named Best Film of 2021 by Southeastern Film Critics Association

The Power of the Dog swept the Southeastern Film Critics Association’s annual awards poll, earning not only the Best Picture award, but also Best Director for Jane Campion, Best Actor for Benedict Cumberbatch, Best Supporting Actress for Kirsten Dunst, Best Supporting Actor for Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Campion’s work transforming novelist Thomas Savage’s story for the screen.

“Jane Campion has been one of our finest directors for decades, and I’m thrilled that our members chose to recognize her exquisite work on The Power of the Dog,” says SEFCA President Matt Goldberg. “Campion has crafted a unique Western that gets to the core of the genre while still feeling fresh and vital. It’s an absolute triumph of mood, performances, and craft that will certainly go down as one of her finest movies in a career full of marvelous filmmaking.”

Kristen Stewart as Diana in Spencer.

Kristen Stewart won Best Actress for her portrayal of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, in Spencer. The Best Ensemble acting award went to Wes Anderson’s sprawling tribute to journalism, The French Dispatch.

Greg Frayser’s work on Dune earned him the SEFCA’s Best Cinematography award.

Best Original Screenplay went to Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza. The sci-fi epic, Dune, won Best Cinematography and Best Score for Hans Zimmer.

Best Documentary went to Summer of Soul, which also placed #10 in the overall rankings. Best Animated Feature went to The Mitchells vs. The Machines. In what must surely be a first, the experimental documentary Flee placed second in both the documentary and animated film categories.

Sly Stone performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series of the same caliber as Woodstock, but long buried in music history until now.

As a member in good standing, your columnist voted in the poll. You can see how my choices differed from the consensus choices in the December 23rd issue of the Memphis Flyer. Here is the complete list of awards winners for 2021:

Top 10 Films

1.     The Power of the Dog

2.     Licorice Pizza

3.     Belfast

4.     The Green Knight

5.     West Side Story

6.     The French Dispatch

7.     Tick, Tick…BOOM!

8.     Drive My Car

9.     Dune

10.  Summer of Soul

Best Actor

Winner: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog 

Runner-Up: Will Smith, King Richard

Best Actress

Winner: Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Runner-Up: Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Jeffrey Wright, The French Dispatch

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Best Ensemble

Winner: The French Dispatch

Runner-Up: Mass

Best Director

Winner: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza

Runner-Up: Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

Runner-Up: Tony Kushner, West Side Story

Best Documentary

Winner: Summer of Soul

Runner-Up: Flee

Best Foreign-Language Film

Winner: Drive My Car

Runner-Up: The Worst Person in the World

Best Animated Film

Winner: The Mitchells vs. The Machines

Runner-Up: Flee

Best Cinematography

Winner: Greig Fraser, Dune

Runner-Up: Ari Wegner, The Power of the Dog

Best Score

Winner: Hans Zimmer, Dune

Runner-Up: Jonny Greenwood, The Power of the Dog

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Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The French Dispatch

Mention director Wes Anderson, and eventually someone will say he’s “twee.” What does that mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster definition of “twee” is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The word itself is thought to come from the way a small child pronounces “sweet.” Anderson’s films, which began with Bottle Rocket in 1996, were sort of retroactively lumped into a poptimist mini-movement that arguably began with a 2005 Pitchfork article titled “Twee As Fuck.” 

But I’ve never thought of Anderson as particularly twee in the way, say, Shirley Temple was twee. Yes, he’s meticulous in his visuals, and childhood has been a recurring subject for him. You can tell he’s someone who has cultivated what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” staying in touch with the awe of youth most people lose as they grow older. But there has always been a darkness underneath the curated surface of his films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family trying to deal with the aftermath of growing up with an abusive drunk father. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is about failing to deal with failure. At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hero M. Gustav is summarily executed by Nazis, and the narrator Zero’s wife and child die in a flu epidemic. Moonrise Kingdom is … okay, I’ll give you Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s also a major fan favorite, and one of the director’s biggest financial successes. 

Anderson’s latest film is The French Dispatch. I’m going to go ahead and cop to being biased toward this one, because it’s about magazine writers, and that’s what I am. (Read me in the pages of Memphis magazine!) Befitting the eclecticism that is the magazine form’s bread and butter, it’s an anthology movie — an exceedingly rare bird these days. It begins with the death of publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a magisterial Bill Murray), whose will specified that his magazine, whose name is the film’s full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (okay, that’s pretty twee) would shutter after one final issue which re-runs the best stories from its long history. First, we get Owen Wilson narrating a cycling tour of the fictional French city of Ennui, which lies on the Blasé river, because of course it does. 

Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and a whole bunch of other people.

Then, Tilda Swinton delivers an art history lecture on the origin of the French Splatter-School Action Group. The wild painters were inspired by Moses Rosenthaler (an absolutely brilliant Benicio Del Toro), an insane, violent felon who takes up painting to pass the time during his 30-year prison sentence. His first masterpiece, a nude portrait of Simone (Léa Seydoux), a prison guard who becomes his lover and muse, is discovered by Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer imprisoned for tax evasion. 

Lyna Khoudri, Frances McDormand, and Timothée Chalamet on the barricades.

In “Revisions to a Manifesto” Frances McDormand plays journalist Lucinda Krementz, who abandons neutrality by having an affair with student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) of the 1968 “chessboard revolution.” Due to the students’ lack of demands — beyond unlimited access to the girls’ dorm — Krementz drafts the revolutionary manifesto herself. 

Jeffery Wright working on deadline.

“The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is the least coherent episode, but it features a killer James Baldwin imitation by Jeffery Wright as Roebuck, a writer whose assignment to do a profile on chef/gendarme Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) spirals off into a tale of kidnapping and murder, with very little actual food content. 

“Twee” implies closed off, hermetically sealed, and precious. The French Dispatch is anything but claustrophobic, even in the scenes set in an actual prison. This is Anderson’s most expansive and generous work, teeming with life in all directions. Heavy hitters like Willem Dafoe, Griffin Dunne, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss, and the unexpectedly dynamic duo of Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban appear for only seconds at a time. The dizzying array of faces flashing across the screen led me to count the acting credits on IMDB. I gave up at 300. While there are some great shots of the actual French countryside, most of the action takes place on soundstages. Nobody does set design like Anderson, and all kinds of wonders are on display, from tiny dioramas to livable multi-story cross sections. 

The French Dispatch is a love letter to the golden age of magazine journalism, and it made me think I was born in the wrong era. But the underlying theme is revolution in all its forms, from the students manning the barricades to new artistic movements springing from a prison riot. Maybe the critics are right, and all this stylized attention to detail designed for aesthetic shock and awe really is “twee,” but if so, it’s twee AF. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Isle Of Dogs

When you’re a film critic, you have to watch a lot of crap. It’s right there in the job description: I watch crap so you don’t have to. But what I don’t think I was prepared for was the sheer shoddiness of some of the films I see. I’m not talking about the kind of corner-cutting you see on low-budget pictures. I’m talking about poor craftsmanship in studio blockbusters. You’d think if you’re spending $200 million on a production, you would at least care enough to make it look good on screen. It’s disheartening to see stuff like Transformers: The Last Knight, where the special effects finale included terrible composite jobs and recycled stock footage. If they don’t care about their product, why should I?

That’s one of the reasons critics like Wes Anderson. His work can be truly great, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom; or divisive, like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or head-scratchingly misguided, like The Darjeeling Limited. But at least it’s never shoddy. Even when it doesn’t work, you can tell he and his team are paying attention to detail, making each individual shot look the best it can.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my reviews, even if you fail, you get points for honestly trying — and deductions for cynical, advertising-driven cash grabs that are directly proportional to the size of your budget. So when I see a film that is both as lovingly crafted and as emotionally resonant as Isle of Dogs, I’m gonna praise it like it was Medicare for All.

Wes Anderson celebrates his love for dogs and Japanese culture in Isle of Dogs.

This film is about two things: Anderson’s love of dogs, and his love of Japanese culture. Isle of Dogs‘ prologue is a Noh drama about “a little samurai” lovingly staged in flawless stop motion, complete with black-clad stagehands the audience is trained to ignore. Right from the beginning, Anderson uses layers and layers of artifice stacked together to reach for something higher. But his little curlicues, which have in the past threatened to overwhelm the bigger picture, are here focused on the story. The Noh bit sets up the history of the powerful, cat-loving Kobayashi family before flashing forward to the near future, where Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) rules fictional Megasaki City. The mayor uses the cover of a dog flu epidemic to banish all of the city’s dogs to Trash Island, which prompts his ward Atari (Koyu Rankin) to steal an airplane and fly to rescue his beloved pet, Spots (Liev Schreiber).

Atari’s landing skills are not great, so he quickly finds himself needing a rescue. Fortunately, he’s found by a pack of heroic dogs, voiced by Anderson regulars: Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). They take the “Little Pilot” under their paws and help him navigate treacherous Trash Island in search of his lost dog. Meanwhile, Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) and his assistant Yoko Ono (voiced by the actual Yoko Ono) search for a cure to dog flu, and an American exchange student named Tracy (Greta Gerwig) uses her school newspaper to unseat Mayor Kobayashi.

Anderson careens from one incredible set piece to another. Professor Watanabe’s lab comes right out of a Toho production like The Mysterians. The director uses Kobayashi’s brief visit to a sumo match as an excuse to create a fully realized arena tableau that echoes Raging Bull. The island where most of the adventure plays out provides endlessly varied environments, from orderly stacks of cubes made from compacted trash to a slimy toxic wasteland. Our canine heroes hide out in a hut made of discarded saki bottles that provide a luminous and colorful background. Unlike the finely polished (and criminally overlooked) Kubo and the Two Strings, Anderson foregrounds the stop motion process — like King Kong; the dogs’ fur is in constant motion, disturbed by the animator’s unseen fingers. But there are also some spectacular effects, such as when characters eyes well with artificial tears.

Anderson loves nothing more than making self-contained worlds that play by their own internal rules. But there’s an underlying melancholy to his work. His orderly creations are a way to provide escape from the chaos and pain of the real world, if only for a couple of hours. Isle of Dogs is twee as you would expect from Anderson making a movie about dogs, but the underlying hurt is much closer to the surface here than in an idyl like Moonrise Kingdom, and that gives it a fairy-tale vibe. This is a kids movie that knows the kids can handle the darkness better than the grown ups.

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Film Features Film/TV

Anderson rebounds with melancholy Tenenbaums coda.

As a practice, film criticism tends to imply objectivity gleaned from exposure to lots and lots of movies. But, the truth is that some filmmakers just hit you where you live. As a kid, about the only thing I obsessed over more than my baseball-card collection was the comic strip Bloom County, and filmmaker Wes Anderson’s best work reflects the sensibility of that strip like nothing else. The combination of near-utopian, intergenerational (if not interspecies) generosity, wry humor, and cultural obsessiveness that fuels Anderson’s work reminds me not only of the strip itself, but also of the experience of being a kid reading it.

And even though many of Anderson’s characters seem to come from old-money families that allow for leisure time and the accumulation of fascinating possessions without doing any apparent work, Anderson’s films also court my class-consciousness.

What is often missed about Anderson’s enthusiasm for the cultural touchstones of an upper-crust, über-educated upbringing — and what his best film, Rushmore, makes totally explicit — is how much the fascination is rooted in an outsider’s longing and romanticism: that of Rushmore‘s Max Fischer, the precocious barber’s son, rising above his cultural station in pursuit of artistic and educational stimulation.

I feel so much affection for Anderson’s work generally — in large part for the affection his films generate — that I’m prone to give his considerable quirks plenty of leeway. But, even then, I didn’t much like his last film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Anderson’s new film, The Darjeeling Limited, is a rebound — albeit a slight one. Stylistically, it’s his most rambling, spontaneous-feeling work since his feature debut, Bottle Rocket, while, thematically and emotionally, it comes across as a companion piece to his family drama The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a tale of three brothers — Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) Whitman — who embark on a train trip through India shortly after the death of their father. All three brothers are dealing with their own personal crises: Francis is wearing bandages around his head, the provenance of which is gradually revealed; Peter is struggling with conflicted feelings about his impending fatherhood; and Jack is dealing with a recent romantic dissolution. That the key prop in this scenario is the lavishly designed hand-me-down “baggage” the brothers share on the trip is indicative that Anderson’s symbolism is more than a little heavy-handed this time out.

If you think this basic set-up — the balancing of siblings’ personal and interpersonal problems with shared issues over their late father — suggests an unresolved coda to The Royal Tenenbaums, just wait until the mother pops up.

But if this is a rehash, it’s one that mostly works. The titular train that serves as the setting for much of the early part of the film — a rickety old locomotive with shabby but colorful cars — is a great Anderson location, though its meticulously designed bric-a-brac doesn’t carry as much character information or have as much emotional resonance as the spaces in his other films. And Brody makes a fitting new addition to the Anderson company, the director making great use of Brody’s long-limbed physicality, whether he’s rushing to catch the train or making a yoga-esque bid for mountaintop enlightenment.

The Darjeeling Limited

Opening Friday, October 26th

Malco Cordova and Studio on the Square