Film Club Summer Series: Directed by Wes Anderson

 Hey everyone! Summertime is here and in keeping with Film Club tradition, we have a new summer series. This summer we will be doing another Director Spotlight (it's been a few years since we've done that), and our highlighted director is Wes Anderson.

Like our previous Summer Series we will have 2 films a month for the months of June, July, and August. I will be out of town for one of the weeks of June, so, we'll have to flex the schedule a bit, but we'll make it work.

(This post will have a list of all the films we will be watching, but I'll have individual posts for each month as well as booklets here in the building.)

Wesley Wales Anderson (born May 1, 1969) is an American filmmaker. His films are known for their eccentricity and unique visual and narrative styles. They often contain themes of grief, loss of innocence, and dysfunctional families. Cited by some critics as a modern day example of the work of an auteur, three of Anderson's films have appeared in BBC Culture's 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000.

He gained acclaim for his early work Bottle Rocket (1996), and Rushmore (1998). During this time, he often collaborated with Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson and founded his production company American Empirical Pictures, which he currently runs. He then received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). His next films included The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and his first stop motion film, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) for which he received an Academy award for Best Animated Feature nomination, and then Moonrise Kingdom (2012) earning his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination.

With Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), he received his first Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Picture, and won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay. The next films included his second stop motion film Isle of Dogs (2018), and The French Dispatch (2021). His next film, Asteroid City, is slated for release in June, 2023.

Anderson's cinematic influences include Pedro Almodóvar, Satyajit Ray, Hal Ashby, and Roman Polanski.

Anderson has chosen to direct mostly fast paced comedies marked by more serious or melancholic elements, with themes often centered on grief, loss of innocence, dysfunctional families, parental abandonment, adultery, sibling rivalry and unlikely friendships. The plots of his movies often feature thefts and unexpected disappearances, with a tendency to borrow liberally from the caper genre.

Anderson has been noted for extensive use of flat space camera moves, symmetrical compositions, knolling, snap-zooms, slow motion walking shots, a deliberately limited color palette, and handmade art direction often utilizing miniatures. These stylistic choices give his movies a highly distinctive quality that has provoked much discussion, critical study, supercuts, mash ups, and parody. Many writers, critics, and even Anderson himself, have commented that this gives his movies the feel of being "self-contained worlds," or a "scale model household". According to Jess Fox Mayshark, his films have a "baroque pop bent that is not realist, surrealist or magic realist," but rather might be described as "fabulist".

Film Schedule

(click title to view trailer)

June

6/22-Rushmore

6/29-The Royal Tenenbaums

July

7/20-The Darjeeling Limited

7/27-The Fantastic Mr. Fox

August

8/24-Moonrise Kingdom

8/31-The Grand Budapest Hotel

May Film Club

Hello everyone! For the month of May I've decided to show a film by the incomparable Coen Brothers. I thought I'd show one that doesn't get as much attention as some of their others. So, we will be watching The Man Who Wasn't There by Joel and Ethan Coen.

 The Man Who Wasn't There is a 2001 American epic satirical crime film written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen. It stars Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, Richard Jenkins, Scarlett Johansson, Jon Polito, Tony Shalhoub, and James Gandolfini. The film is set in 1949 and tells the story of Ed Crane, a withdrawn barber who leads an ordinary life in a small California town with his wife, who he suspects is having an affair with her boss. Crane's situation changes when a stranger comes to the barbershop and offers him the opportunity to join him as a partner in a promising new business, in exchange for an investment of ten thousand dollars. Drawn to the idea, Crane plans to blackmail his wife's lover for the money. The film is in black and white and employs voiceover narration, honoring classic film noir.

The film received positive critical review. It holds a certified fresh rating of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert gave it 3/4 stars saying this in his review, "The Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There is shot in black and white so elegantly, it reminds us of a 1940s station wagon, chrome, wood, leather and steel all burnished to a contented glow. Its star performance by Billy Bob Thornton is a study in sad-eyed, mournful chain-smoking, the portrait of a man so trapped by life he wants to scream. The Man Who Wasn't There is so assured and perceptive in its style, so loving, so intensely right, that if you can receive it on that frequency, the film is like a voluptuous feast. Yes, it might easily have been shorter, but then it would not have been this film, or necessarily a better one. If the Coens have taken two hours to do what hardly anyone else could do at all, isn't it churlish to ask why they didn't take less time to do what everyone can do?"

We will be meeting Thursday, May 25th at 5:30 pm

Here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjO8u_9CqXI

Hope to see you there!