The Last Stand

The Last Stand (2012)
Dir. Kim Ji-woon
Written by Andrew Knauer
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Luis Guzman, Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker, Rodrigo Santoro, Eduardo Noriega, Peter Stormare, with Harry Dean Stanton and an old lady with a shotgun (yes, that old lady), and supposedly Sonny Landham is in there somewhere, too?

So, I guess the thing is now, that people don’t like fun. I get it; really, it’s been a long time coming. Years of shiny mopey vampires earning top dollar, fun concepts like THE MATRIX and PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN getting bogged down in convoluted overbuilt antinarratives, people accepting Matt fucking Damon as a action hero, James fucking Bond turning into a menopausal weepy melodrama, a remake of TOTAL RECALL starring Colin Farrell. I get it, it’s our fault. It’s not like we didn’t have the means: sure, we may not have had the adorable ‘roided-up übermensches of the past, but we got Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel and even Wesley Snipes. And what did we do with them? Wasted em on disposable, phoned-in-wannabe-hip postmodernist crapola. We locked up Snipes, let Statham star in a Uwe Boll movie, forgot Vin Diesel existed entirely, and were so starved for action heroes we never even noticed that Johnson didn’t even fucking get around to making a non-remake proper action movie until goddam 2010*! And even then, the poor guy has to make a bunch of grim, brooding revenge thrillers like FASTER and SNITCH that are fine but totally squander his naturally hilarious novelty oversized charm.

So I’m not saying I didn’t see it coming. But you know, I guess I didn’t realize how bad it was. I mean, there was the EXPENDABLES movies, they made a pile of money and even though they were pretty lazy gimmicky jokey cash grabs they sort of had a sense of fun to them on and off. And Stallone’s RAMBO and ROCKY movies did pretty well and managed not to totally shit on the legacy of their respective franchises. They even had those FAST AND FURIOUS movies which started off so laughably inept and gradually got kind of good. I don’t know, I guess they must have made some money since they’re now worming their way towards a seventh sequel. And let’s not forget the KILL BILLs, and fuck, they even let RZA make a Kung-Fu movie. So I sort of had reason to hope.

Guess not, though, because audiences avoided this one in droves. Apparently they don’t actually like fun; what they like is recognizable franchises they can recognize references to other recognizable franchises in, and if possible could it star some sad-eyed pretty boy hipster with a perpetually manicured five o’clock shadow he could wear in a misguided homage to actual manliness, that would be great, thanks. Lesson learned. But fortunately for this world, not that you ungrateful bastards deserve it, but it turns out there is one guy left around who likes actual fun, and as it happens he is also one of the best directors working in the world today. Ladies and gentlemen, androgynous layabouts of generation Y, I give you: Kim Ji-woon. Having directed A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, A BITTERSWEET LIFE, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE WEIRD, and I SAW THE DEVIL, Kim had already left a trail of genre masterpieces littered across the South Korean landscape and established himself as one of the world’s most fluent cinematic voices long before THE LAST STAND came calling; in fact, he’s so ludicrously overqualified for this kind of thing that it seems almost insulting to ask him, sort of akin to asking the Secretary General of the United Nations for help with your Spanish homework.

But, Kim knows the unspoken rule that all great Asian directors must endure the trial of an embarrassing Hollywood action debut before they can return home to make great movies again. For whatever reason, probably something to do with prophecies of a chosen one, Mr. Kim chose to make his American debut the same time that one Mr. Schwarzenegger decided to take a cue from Michael Jordan and come back off the benches for one last blaze of glory. They decided (I can only assume) to find the most ridiculous, cliche-laden action script possible and prove to the world that the age of the violent, musclebrained dinosaur could, nay, must return.

Well, it looks like that’s not gonna happen (poor Stallone and Walter Hill got it even harder when they tried to follow Arnold and Kim with BULLET TO THE HEAD, which was gone from theaters so fast I didn’t even have time to look up the showtimes). But it was a fun dream while it lasted, because THE LAST STAND turns out to be exactly what the title promises: an empty-headed but big-hearted celebration of shooting, car chasing, crashing, exploding, being Peter Stormare, muscles, shooting, wrestling, shooting, blowing up, and cowboying the fuck up. The last stand of the unironic action movie.

For some reason, this image didn't test as well as it might have a few months earlier.

Arnold stars as sheriff John Stand,** a small-town sheriff who is happily living out his golden years on the American side of the Mexican border, glad his violent days as a LA narco cop are well and truly behind him. Sommerton Junction, NM doesn’t see much crime, and in fact it seems like the majority of Sheriff Stand’s policing efforts are spent keeping his comically inept deputies in line. But that’s all about to change when a slick drug kingpin escapes the custody of hard-ass FBI agent Forest Whitaker and makes a run for the border in a racecar so fast it can outrun a helicopter. And he’s headed straight for sheriff Stand’s town. There are lines you just don’t cross. His border is one of them.

Right away, you got to be impressed by the simplicity of that premise. No gimmicks, no convoluted plot where everyone is trying to betray everyone and nothing is what it seems. Actually, everything is pretty much exactly what it seems. There’s this one asshole who’s heading to town to cause trouble, and only one man (and a few other people) who dares last stand in his way. That’s it. As clean and elegant as premises come, and hence a perfect instrument for an action movie, where the whole point is to make memorable detail out of the testosterone-fueled conflict. Honestly, this is the kind of thing that makes or breaks an action movie. It’s not the notes you play, it’s how you play them.

Train in Vain

Fortunately, Arnold is an old hand at this song, so he plays them pretty fucking perfectly. I was worried after his embarrassing anti-performance in EXPENDABLES 2 (which seems to consist entirely of a random patchwork of lines from his other movies) was so awful that I honestly might have preferred his computer-generated doppleganger from TERMINATOR: SALVATION. But my fears turned out to be ill-founded; given a real --if minimal-- character to play, the guy proves once again that he’s a human tentpole, easily able to support whatever action fabric anyone wants to drape around him through sheer teutonic charisma.

Obviously, Arny doesn’t exactly have the biggest range in the world, but he’s oddly believable as a regular guy who just happens to look like a cartoonish superman. Age has given his face some character, shaping his austere geometry into something weatherbeaten and full of history. There’s an interesting scene where a young deputy approaches him about his dream to leave this smalltown nowhere and find some action as a big city cop. Arnold sits back thoughtfully, agrees to help him pursue his dream, but also offers a word of caution about mistaking action for worth and meaning. It’s not a scene I think young Arnold could have pulled off, but this version finds something quietly sad in the perpetual allure of violence and youth and it comes through in his kindly but worth-weary delivery.

I swear, the guy's starting to look like Charlton Heston.

Obviously it’s not all so serious, but I appreciate Kim’s commitment to providing enough foundation that the action has substance. It’s all about icing, but he wants to make sure we have cake, too. And if you’re gonna make cake, you might as well make good cake, so Kim doesn’t let any of the background material feel obligatory or phoned in. It’s a good thing, too, because despite a number of well-choreographed action sequences peppered throughout, a lot of the film is about waiting for the enemy to arrive. Preparations on both sides, as we see the conflict draw inexorably closer. In fact, the film it mostly closely emulates (believe it or not) is HIGH NOON, with Arny taking the place of Gary Cooper as a sheriff who has to try and fortify before the storm arrives. Of course, he’s Arny, so unlike with Gary Cooper lots of people are gonna volunteer to help. Sorry Gary, but there’s a reason you’re not running America’s richest state. Just sayin’.

Those volunteers include Luis Guzman, Johnny Knoxville, Jaimie Alexander, Rodrigo Santoro, Zach Gilford, Forest Whitaker, and Harry Dean Stanton (presumably playing the same character he played in THE AVENGERS; you know, that guy who wanders into a scene and says something so that the audience can go, “hey, that’s Harry Dean Stanton!”). Those opposing him include Eduardo Noriega (ABRE LOS OJOS), Peter Stormare, and a bunch of heavily armed paramilitary dudes. Peter Stormare speaks entirely in what must be --in his mind, anyway-- a redneck accent. This is gonna be good.

I mean, hell, you had me at Luis Guzman. How often do you get to see such a crazy ensemble of fun character actors all shooting guns every which way? Not often enough, is the correct answer. Their performances range from outlandishly broad (Johnny Knoxville) to the more staid (Santoro as a troubled war vet) -- if not exactly realistic-- but seem to somehow comfortably occupy the same world together. A lot of critics complained that Kim’s limited English produced performances which are all over the map, but actually I think this is both completely intentional and fairly common for this kind of movie. After all, similar tones are visible in both Kim’s other works and (to an even more extreme degree) in a lot of Asian action cinema. You know those hardcore Thai asskicking films which suddenly turn into weepy melodrama and then wacky comedy? Or those endearing Chan-Wook Park films where there’s a bunch of goofy, awkward mugging and then somebody will get raped with a shark and find out they ate their own deformed twin brother who was actually their son by incest? Be thankful it’s not like that. This one merely sets the twin worlds of over-the-top ridiculousness and cornball earnestness side by side, happily dipping into each one at the appropriate time.

"Talk to me, Guz!"

LAST STAND is not exactly lacking in action, but you’d be forgiven for noting that I’m talking about the cast first. For a big dumb action movie, it’s ambitions to be the biggest spectacle on Earth seem surprisingly slight in the wake of the special-effects extravaganzas which have now destroyed Earth wholesale ad nauseum to the point where the full-scale annihilation of mankind has become rote. As the age of machismo died out in the 90s, our expectation of enjoying good action came to be replaced by our expectation of ever-escalating spectacle, and so I think a modest, focused movie like this can come off as underwhelming to some. Shouldn’t there be a gigantic CGI robot with a celebrity voice in there somewhere? I paid my $12, I want to see something that looks ridiculous and expensive!

I think, though, that those who are looking to be entertained rather than overwhelmed will find copious proof that Kim is one of the most intuitively gifted visual filmmakers alive today. Each action sequence is a tightly choreographed, eloquently communicated visual story, making certain to milk every drop of excitement out of the scenario by deftly communicating what’s happening, what’s at stake, and how the relevant players relate to each other spatially and emotionally. In a cinema which is increasingly defined by chaotic, handheld sequences which deliberately try to involve you by not clearly showing you the awesome stuff which may or may not be happening somewhere off camera, Kim manages to make certain you understand the significance of every shot fired, and --crucially-- he manages to do so without seeming the least bit retro or dated. He effortlessly creates dynamic, involving shootouts, car chases, fireballs, and hand-to-hand smackdowns by trusting that we’re actually interested in seeing the action play out, provided it’s stylishly and effectively presented. Even while mostly lacking in gimmicks, THE LAST STAND has a comfortable surfeit of memorable action beats, from the western-style gunslinger battle on main street to the police blockade busted with a semi outfitted like a train to the final, oddball automobile chase through a cornfield in zero visibility. Kim’s so good that it’s easy to forget what an impressive feat it is to successfully manage so many varied action tropes and have them all seem cohesive and exciting.

Arnold subtlety demonstrates his contempt for the subsidized US industrial corn machine.

If you get that right in a movie like this, almost anything can be forgiven. In this case you’re gonna have to overlook a script which seems to be cobbled together from cliches so tired that they’d been rejected by every other movie. I honestly think writer Andrew Knauer (nothing) arrived late to the meeting with his producers only to realize he’d forgotten to bring his copy of the script, so he has to quickly create a new one out of discarded pages from other scripts he found in the trash in the men’s bathroom at Planet Hollywood. Yes, they literally do have a sweet little old lady who whips out a shotgun to blow a baddie away.

Even so, Kim never directs it like it’s anything less than vitally important, and despite a few groaners in there he somehow manages to drag enough life out of these old dogs that they feel classic, rather than absurdly hackneyed. Case in point: there’s a scene in the middle where exactly what you know will happen in order to make the stakes more personal and establish an element of danger, happens. It’s exactly like you already know it will be in absolutely every detail except that it’s treated as a serious, tragic trauma. Arny --just like Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON!-- lowers his head in sorrow, fighting back tears, and then slowly looks back up at the camera. And I suddenly realized I was feeling a twinge of actual emotion in a movie where a mentally ill Johnny Knoxville fires a gattling gun out of a school bus. And Luis Guzman struts down a battle-ravaged main street blowing away anything that moves with a tommy gun. And a guy uses a souped-up racecar as a ramp to jump police SUVs off the road. And Arnold tells a drug dealing Brazilian that “You make us immigrants look bad.”*** And did I mention Peter Stormare talks in a redneck accent? And a guy gets blown up by a flare? And the villain has a butler with a full suit waiting for him to change into while he’s still breaking out of custody? And there’s a car so fast that the cops mistake it for a low-flying airplane.

You know what, America,  this movie is too good for you. Forget I said anything and go back to waiting for another remake of an 80’s TV property.

*Ok, maybe THE RUNDOWN counts. I shouldn’t be so mean.

**Just kidding. This is why it’s important to read footnotes. Actually his name is Ray Owens, which I like for some reason. Arny kind of looks like he could be a Ray, it seems right. But obviously they missed a perfect opportunity to turn the title into a lame pun, and for that reason I’m against it.

***To my knowledge, the only mention of Arny’s history as an immigrant in his entire filmography.

Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Dir. Wes Anderson
Starring Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, and also oh yeah I almost forgot Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Bob Balaban, and one other familiar face which will make you smile and is not Owen Wilson.

So what we got us here is the new one from Wes Anderson, that scion of emotionally stunted hyper-intellectual wealthy white people and their precocious kids. Anderson is a  frustrating figure for me, because despite his obviously enormous talent for cinematic language (everything from camera framing to narrative construction to music), he often cripples the experience with his obsessive desire to shoehorn in his particular fetishes for children’s plays, bathrobes, tents, pajamas, board games, irritating people, etc. Not that I fault the guy for having a recognizable --even iconic-- style; my problem is that once you get past the quirky trappings and arch performances, you often find that there’s not really much else there. Anderson is so busy swaddling his characters in quirks and quips that he forgets to fill in the inside. Consequently, watching his films can be a somewhat hollow experience.

    On the other hand, I have to admit that I like about as many of his films as I dislike. BOTTLE ROCKET still feels like a typical 90’s indie crime film, but it works on that level. When RUSHMORE came out, though, it blew me away. I thought Schwartzman’s character was brilliant and that Anderson got something really unique out of Bill Murray (at the time, his last three films had been THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE, SPACE JAM, and WILD THINGS). It was a unique and gorgeous film for its time, and seemed to herald a genuinely new voice. ROYAL TENENBAUMS was the first time I thought Anderson was getting a little cloyingly precious, but at least it does stay consistently entertaining (mostly due to Gene Hackman’s hilarious performance). LIFE AQUATIC was the first film where it seemed like people were turning sour on Anderson’s predictable bag of tricks, but actually it ended up being my favorite of his films due to its uniquely tight focus on one character (Murray’s Steve Zissou) and its lightly surreal touches. I thought I might be finally getting this Wes Anderson thing. But then came DARJEELING LIMITED and FANTASTIC MR. FOX, two films which I absolutely loathed. Not since M. Night Shyamalan went off the deep end has another artist I somewhat respect made such smarmy, self-satisfied pap and acted as if he was saying something deep. So, needless to say, I approached MOONRISE KINGDOM with extreme trepidation. The posters and ads didn’t exactly help. With its story-book font, precocious children, long list of big celebrity names, and self-consciously cutesy title, this one looked like it had every possibility of being sandpaper to my brain.

It's shit like this, Anderson.

But, I’m relieved to tell you it’s not all that bad. At least, it’s nowhere near as unbearable as DARJEELING or FOX, and probably better than BOTTLE ROCKET and even TENENBAUMS. It’s not that Anderson’s usual weaknesses are not in effect; they are. But by centering the thing on children, he adds a slightly different dimension that makes it work -to my mind- a little better. 

See, Anderson’s adults have always been children. That’s the entire thrust of literally all his films. They’re all emotionally stunted, petty, directionless arrested development cases who don’t understand themselves and don’t seem to be able to synch up their fantasies with the real world. All well and good, but 5 live-action films in its become rather painfully apparent that his characters, like his cinematography, are composed mostly of broad, primary colors. The subtlety is all superficial; their issues are one-dimensional and their reactions are cartoonishly broad. There’s not a lot of psychological richness there, just a quirky portrayal of basic childish petulance and hurt feelings. Honestly, it had been wearing a little thin, and the uniqueness the characters had as his style cemented with RUSHMORE wore off considerably as they appeared again and again to go through the same motions.

The genius of MOONRISE KINGDOM -intentional or not- is that even though the lead characters are exactly like that, they’re not childish adults but actual children. So it makes sense that they’re petulant, chaotic, uncertain, and pumped up with deeply felt but broadly defined emotion. In fact, rather than seeming buffoonish caricatures, they actually feel much more real than your typical Anderson protagonists. The adults in his movies (this one included) have failed to figure themselves out, and are caught in a constant doldrums of old injuries and stagnant intellectualism. But the kids are going through all this stuff for the first time, and they’re actually learning and growing. In fact, our heroes Sam and Suzy are probably the most proactive protagonists in Anderson’s entire live-action canon.* That makes them much more tolerable to spend time with, and also more emotionally resonant since we get to take in the richness of childhood experience through an actual child this time, rather than ironically through a bored, unfulfilled adult.

Forget all those big names on the posters, this movie belongs entirely to Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), a couple of pre-teen misfits who run away from their respective depressing lives on an East Coast island in 1965 to hike around the woods together. They don’t even get their names on the trailer, but they act circles around the adults here, giving guileless, complex performances which never seem trite or cutesy, even when Anderson’s writing threatens to drift in that direction. Remember those matching sweatsuit-garbed accessories to Ben Stiller’s character in TENENBAUMS? These are not those kids. These are actual characters, not props (there are a bunch of kids who do act as cutesy, lifeless props, but mercifully they stay mostly out of the limelight). Instead, Anderson gives a surprisingly earnest, unflinching look into the pain and wonder of early adolescence. These are kids struggling with a world of adult problems -- Sam is an orphan with anger issues, and Suzy is striking back against the loveless, regimented world of her lawyer-stereotype parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray)-- but Anderson wisely (maybe even perceptively) lets their pain simmer in the background and focuses more on their moment-by-moment experience of this strange, complex, and beautiful world.

Believe it or not, these two will fucking win your heart.

Terrence Malick’s TREE OF LIFE last year gave about the best portrayal of a young man’s subjective experience of the world that I had ever seen, and compared to that Anderson still seems like frothy kitch. But I think he does capture something real in his rich evocation of the the stunning natural beauty that the kids make their new home. His photography is by turns his most realistic (shooting on location, handheld, with natural light) and his most poetic (turning the natural world into a redolent feast for the imagination) but always reflective of his keen eye for using atmosphere to conjure time and place. Real childhood is often much more mundane, much less intense, much less adorable, but you can’t deny Anderson’s ability to evoke, here, the most magical moments of being a young explorer in a endlessly fascinating world. At least through the lense of nostalgia, it feel emotionally true.

The adults, sadly, don’t work nearly as well. Despite the big names, they’re mostly playing thinly written caricatures who, truth be told, seem kind of unnaturally forced into a film which truly belongs to the kids. Although Sam and Suzy are the only children who really get much development, the other kids at least seem like complete constructions of fantasy children. The adults, on the other hand, are simply ill-defined and --much more damningly-- not particularly entertaining. Anderson’s working with a remarkable fantasy cast here, but mostly uses them as props and plot devices, which would be fine except that there’s tons of them and the film keeps coming back to them as if their drama is important or meaningful. Anderson is wise to contrast the youngsters’ chaotic momentum with the adults’ resigned stagnation, but they’re so sparsely sketched that treating them as central characters seems more like paying heed to his talented cast than to the requires of the story. Bruce Willis’ police officer character is a lonely man, and so he lives on a boat, because he’s isolated, that’s why his house is a boat, because it’s a metaphor. That’s the level of development we’re talking about here. And yet, for some reason he shows up in the climactic moment of the film and for no reason makes a major decision which saves the day. To say that this redemption is unearned is beside the point -- it simply unwarranted. It’s like if Chewbacca showed up at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI and dueled Darth Vader while Luke sat around and watched. It’s a resolution to a narrative arc which simply is not anywhere else in the film.

Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, and Frances McDormand's eyes, and yet it's the thing that they're all looking at that's actually interesting. Who'd have thunk it possible?

Not that any of the cast is bad, obviously. Jesus Christ, it’s Willis, McDormand, Murray, Norton, etc, etc. I’m not sure they could be bad, even as an act of patriotic defiance against the tyranny of cutesy indie filmmaking darlings. It’s just that they’re given almost nothing relevant to do. Including, it must be said, be very funny. Most everyone is actually dialing it back here, and giving fairly restrained performances. Which again, would be fine except that it means they’re stuck with little to do except stand around and not be very entertaining. You can't save underwritten with underplayed, so the ones who succeed best are the ones who go for Anderson’s usual broad, quirky misfit template. Norton reprises his slightly-naive-nice-guy schtick from DEATH TO SMOOCHY with excellent success, even though he’s playing the most useless adult of all (Sam’s “Khaki Scout” troupe leader, who first discovers Sam’s disappearance and subsequently stands around for the rest of the movie doing the exact same thing as Bruce Willis). Jason Schwartzman has a small but highly entertaining role as a seedy Khaki scout on the inside who is not above selling Khaki gear for $72 in nickels. Oh, and Bob Balaban (who you remember as the director of the hallucinogenic childhood cannibal classic PARENTS) does a nice job of wearing one of those red beanie hats that Anderson likes so much and talking to the camera**. But poor Murray, Willis, McDormand, etc, are stuck in limbo, going through the motions without much of interest to add. It might not be so noticeable if they weren't Willis, Murray, etc, etc. But they are, and they can't help but stick out a little as unnecessary for this kind of role. The movie might actually work better with a bunch of low-key character actors in there -- at the very least, it would seem less like Anderson is trying to cram a bunch of big name stars into a story which doesn't really have much room for them.

Still, the bits with the adults only feel so unnecessary in contrast with the remarkable vitality of the children’s journey. Anderson explores, with uncharacteristic boldness, their burgeoning independence, understanding, and even sexuality. Exploring children’s sense of themselves as sexual beings is a dangerous thing to do in this puritanical society, but Anderson walks the line with subtle grace, imbuing Sam and Suzy with an autonomy to articulate their as-yet-unfocused desires in a way which neither mocks them nor presents them as falsely mature. Which is the genius of his whole approach, really. There’s a genuine warmth to the way he presents them as alternately ridiculous and surprisingly prescient. The kids reward him with really fucking stunning acting. When fantasy bookworm Suzy confesses to Sam that she wishes she were an orphan (“Most of my heroes are,” she says) Sam delivers a nicely composed Anderson-y line (which I won’t spoil) -- but its his face that really says it, simultaneously conveying a great depth of pain and a child’s understanding of how to express that pain.  

The film’s climax deflates a little bit because it switches to the adults’ (less interesting) perspective at a critical moment, but it must be said that the genuine power of the kids’ performances and the genuine power of their experience is strong enough to let the film easily coast to victory as Anderson’s most gripping and dramatic. It doesn’t entirely lose that saccharine fairy-tale quality which smells vaguely like detached irony, but I have to hand it to the guy for building some real momentum and tension and then trusting that to hold our interest without a bunch of indie trappings. It doesn’t entirely work (mostly due to the fact that it foolishly places the crux of the drama in the hands of those boring grown-ups) but by now you’re invested in the young protagonists enough that you’re genuinely concerned for them. Anderson sets the big climax in a spartan East Coast church during a raging hurricane. When the power goes out and you can just make out the kids hiding in the rafters wearing animal costumes (long story) you’re reminded of what a classic Stephen King setup this is. For once, Anderson cowboys the fuck up and treats this as a serious dramatic situation with setpieces, lightning flashes, the whole deal. It nicely suits the more primal, intense emotional experience of Sam and Suzy, who find that for once everyone else is on the same wavelength of extreme human drama that they are.

Where does Anderson go from here? I’m not sure. Of all his films, this one feels the most like the work of someone trying to tell a story through character, instead of someone trying to build a film around a bunch of artificial quirks. His ability to use cinema to evoke a variety of emotional states demonstrates more clearly than ever what a consummately skilled technical artist he is, but even now he can stumble over his myopic focus on telling similar stories about the same kind of (generally grating) people. Still, there’s a resolute genuineness about his portrayal of these characters; even when they’re ridiculous, he cares about them and never discounts or disrespects their real hurt, desire, and wonder, nor does he back away from allowing the audience to emotionally connect with them. Caring about things is the best antidote to that detached indie-hipster lazy irony which permeates his worst films. If he can care this much about little Sam and Suzy, I think he may be ready to trust his audience to care about things which have a little more weight to them. I’m not sure if he’s imaginative enough to write them or not, but for the first time in a long while, I’m excited to see what Wes Anderson does next.   

PS: Anderson recently did one of those Rotton Tomatoes "5 favorite film" columns, and his picks are very interesting. More than anything, its interesting that he picks things which don't necessarily reflect the cutesy sensibilities of his own films. I'm sure he appreciates Kubrick's deliberate production and camera placement, but for Wes Anderson to pick A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as one of his favs seems almost shocking, given its tone and content. I hope this is indicative that his interests are more varied than people generally give him credit for, and that as his career goes on he'll attempt some things which have a bit of a different feel to them.

*I don’t quite count FANTASTIC MR. FOX because it is fundamentally based on another artist’s vision. Yes, it’s a insipid debasement of everything that makes Roald Dalh great, but as much as Anderson tries to turn the whole thing into an irritating quirkfest of armchair psychology, he can’t entirely weed out Dahl’s impish feistiness.   

**This is 1965, so given his propensity for talking to the camera I’m going to assume we’re meant to assume this character is the father of either Wayne or Garth, I’m not sure which one would work better. I’m thinking he got tired of that stupid hat, so he moved the family to Aurora Illinois and let the next generation take over narrating duties.