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That was not very good.

There were some pretty good jokes in there. A photo of Edith Piaf, etc

Eh, it seems more like make a Wes Anderson reference than actually trying to see how his style would be applied to that setting.

Yeah I've seen people flipping for this all over the place and I guess it's visually one of the more convincing imitations but it's hardly a parody, just a series of quick disconnected callbacks to his other films. It'd be one thing if they looked at the legitimate character types and situations that Anderson does return to again and again and applied that to the horror genre, but there is little to no actual commentary or observational humor going on here. Maybe I'm just asking too much of SNL...

Pretty much every Wes Anderson "parody" on the internet is horrible, which shows that he's not as easily imitated as his detractors might assume. His own Amex commercial is the best WA parody.

Awful with nothing funny to say. Basically Epic Movie-style "hilarity" in terms of "Oh, here's a reference but not a comment on that reference." I mean, five of Anderson's seven films have been rated R, even the G thing makes no sense.

On a related note, I wish the Soup's pitch-perfect parody of these kind of things, Reference Movie, was available somewhere online. For some reason it has disappeared from everywhere it once was. Otherwise I'd link to that now!

Just the fact that this sketch made it look like the writers actually watched several Wes Anderson movies puts it a step above typical Seltzerberg fare. And come on, this is hilarious;

"Dear Homeowner,
Can we kill you?
The Murderers"

"Dear Murderers,
No you may not!
The Homeowner"

Yeah, I enjoyed it. I don't think it was as pitch perfect as the Wes Anderson Star Wars audition Conan did but it does look like a movie I'd genuinely like to watch, which is common to all the good parodies of him I've seen. It does seem like they mostly only watched Royal Tenenbaums, though.

I got a few chuckles from the trailer, but probably foremost among my problems with this conceit is that I would much rather see a horror film by Wes Anderson than, say, Rob Zombie or Alexandre Aja. I don't view the possibility posed by this send-up as absurd; on the contrary, it offers potential deliverance from tired contemporary horror tropes, even as its satirical manifestation here doesn't succeed.

Norton's Owen Wilson impression was the highlight. I get a kick when actors impersonate other actors on SNL.

Loved the New York Times review.

Here's the thank you letter Anderson wrote to James L. Brooks for writing the introduction to the Rushmore screenplay. I'm now thoroughly confused as to whether Anderson art-directs his personal life to look like a Wes Anderson movie or if his movies are indeed reflective of his own idiosyncrasies.

Maybe he's just like Gilliam and sees the world like that.

Jeff wrote:Here's the thank you letter Anderson wrote to James L. Brooks for writing the introduction to the Rushmore screenplay. I'm now thoroughly confused as to whether Anderson art-directs his personal life to look like a Wes Anderson movie or if his movies are indeed reflective of his own idiosyncrasies.

Is that real? My God, I like Anderson, but if a grown man sent me a letter that looked like that, I'd worry about them.

I dunno, looks pretty good compared to Tarantino's.

Yeeesh. Now when their detractors accuse them of arrested development, they have forensic evidence to back up their claims.

Rushmore will always be my Rushmore. There's something so crystalline-perfect about this film..the magically beautiful relationship between Max, Miss Cross and Blume, the pitch-perfect marriage of comedy and melancholy. The death of loved ones haunts every fiber of Rushmore: Max's mom and Miss Cross' husband. Max longs for his mom in Miss Cross and Miss Cross longs for her husband in Max. The look in Miss Cross' eyes as she removes Max's glasses in the end kills me every time.


Rushmore
Moonrise Kingdom
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Life Aquatic
The Darjeeling Limited
Bottle Rocket

Jeff wrote:Here's the thank you letter Anderson wrote to James L. Brooks for writing the introduction to the Rushmore screenplay. I'm now thoroughly confused as to whether Anderson art-directs his personal life to look like a Wes Anderson movie or if his movies are indeed reflective of his own idiosyncrasies.

Just rewrite it, Wes.

Aw, I thought that letter was charming with the "damn" crossed out for the more neutral "movie" books! And all of those 'mistakes' somehow add an extra weight to the sincerity of the "& grateful" and "had (and have)" final corrections!

Plus its a letter written to someone who has just done an introduction to a script of Rushmore. If anyone would be able to understand, appreciate (and value) a letter of thanks written in the same style, it would be them!

Good point -- Brooks would certainly be attuned to Anderson's sensibilities, whereas I bet he wouldn't send a letter that looked like that to, say, Gene Hackman.

Finally saw Steve Zissou (thanks to Netflix). It was a hit in our household. I actually liked this more than his earlier films. But nowhere close to Moonrise Kingdom.

Mr Sausage wrote:I found the criticisms somewhere above that the movie was too insular, or too unconnected with "other universes" (whatever they are), puzzling. Is there anything absent from this movie that you wouldn't find similarly absent from any movie that takes place entirely in and around a small community? The only difference is that Anderson imbues that town with his sensibility. He also never cheaps out by making the emotional beats simplistic. The 'first kiss' is admirably unsentimental; it precisely captures two kids' attempt to act grown up.

I don't know how those other criticisms were put, but Anderson's stylistic insularity seems like it would invite pretty polarized judgments. Which makes it surprising that this thread is so nearly free of any real dissent. One way of pursuing that critique, then, might look something like Dudley Andrew's review of Amélie (which appeared in Film Quarterly back when that film came out): that even as it made sympathetic allusions to the legacy of the nouvelle vague, and to the cinephillic pleasures of the "happy accident", Jeunet's film was itself stripped of any room for contingency or accident. Its mannered and manicured style asserted control over every inch of every frame, banishing any threat of unpredictability, and preferring an insular and fantasized Paris to the ungovernable complexities of the real city.

In that case, Andrew was able to charge contradiction (for starters): Amélie insinuated one set of aesthetic values while embodying another. But as a pretty outspoken exponent of Bazin, Andrew's critique seems more fundamental than that, recalling Bazin's own distinction between cinematic realists and imagists. I take for granted that Anderson's films, in style and in ethic, don't have much to do with Bazinian realism (or else I'd love to hear an argument to the contrary!) - and I also take for granted that Anderson's fans don't really care about that. But I wonder if it's really so puzzling why someone would be troubled by a film's (or an oeuvre's) systematic exclusion of the real world - that is, of "reality" as an aesthetic resource, or as a political content.

It's hard to know how to respond when you say both: A. you don't understand why I was puzzled, B. that you didn't read what I was responding to. That seems like something the context ought to clear up. Given that I was questioning the purpose of being unhappy that a movie, which takes place entirely in an isolated small town, refuses to take a widely encompassing point of view, you can safely assume I'm not addressing a larger argument about mannerism or realism or whatever.

I know very well why some people dislike mannerism and praise the illusion of accident or chaos or what have you, and my understanding of it is that it comes down to received ideas--that there is far less inherent value in those chosen terms than their proponants have you believe. I'd be very happy if film viewers themselves took a much wider, more historically encompassing view of style and became less dogmatic and more pluralist about style. I notice a lot of the criticisms of Anderson have a problem not with the idea that he does a mannerist style well or ill, but that he does it at all.