The classic knock on Wes Anderson is that his fondness for extreme stylization too easily overwhelms the story - and the senses. Or more precisely: While you're gazing up at the screen.īut what happens once once the film's over and the lights go up? Will that highly specific feeling of pleasure stick with you? Or was all that eye-candy just so much sugar floss that dissolves in the lightest rain? That's the real question before us. All that fastidiousness, all that assiduously symmetrical framing, all the sheer, cinematographic sweat-equity he puts into his movies for our enjoyment - not to mention the appearance of his go-to cadre of actors like Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton - can't help but leave you grinning from ear-to-ear as you gaze up at the screen. Let's agree: Anderson's films are a pleasure to watch, in the moment. Pop Culture Happy Hour 'Dune': A sweeping, spectacular spice-opera - half of one, anyway Eye-candy is still candy, after all The film employs several freeze-framed tableaux of crowd scenes for us to admire, and as Anderson's camera pans sloooowly across them, he wants us to notice that he's not employing a photographic technique - he's simply asked his actors to hold stock-still, unblinking. Know, for example, that The French Dispatch contains a sequence that shifts to animation to dramatize a high-speed chase, and another that transforms one character's memory into a literal theatrical production. He wants us to remain fully aware that we are watching his movies, to make us complicit in the act of observing. Anderson's films are all about artifice, about the theater of it all. Thing Two: It's never gonna let you forget about Thing One. A rigorous attention to detail and an exacting eye for a highly defined personal aesthetic will come baked into its every frame, from the set design to the cinematography to its color palette(s) to its dialogue to its performances. Thing One: It will be meticulously, painstakingly constructed. This means, even before the lights go down in the theater, you know two things about it already, and for certain: The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson's tenth feature film. Searchlight Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox Wes Anderson's love letter to The New Yorker is set in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blase.
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