the groundhog day project

Writing for The Atlantic , Christopher Orr sides with the more positive take on Wes Anderson's choice of a Japanese setting and having (mostly) Japanese-speaking humans in his latest film, Isle of Dogs . Yet, in passing mention of the other side, Orr makes an interesting error that both clarifies the positive take and suggests a whole other version of the problem... Let me backtrack. Orr writes (parenthetically): Unlike the dogs, the Japanese characters--which is to say all of the human beings save one--do not have their words rendered into English, except when explicitly restated by a translator voices by France's McDormand. I leave to individual viewers to decide whether this is a way of center-staging the hounds--my view--or sidelining the Asian protagonists. First, a small point: Orr's initial phrasing suggests that the dogs are not Japanese, which is either a mislabeling because they are obviously just as much from Japan as the human characters, or it is a cute sor...

Moonrise Kingdom , another Wes Anderson film, is playing right now. I was going to write about the deliberate artificiality again, how disconnecting the audience from what a film should be, and is expected to be, draws the audience in. But then I saw Detroit today, and I was inclined to get into a sociopolitical rant... But I've been trying to avoid that all month. I've even been toying with musical's or bad movies for next month, keeping it more enjoyable than triggering. And I find myself sitting here just watching Moonrise Kingdom ... I should be ranting. I should be raging. And people should see Detroit when it's in wider release next week and they should rage. We should all rage. We've got a president who asks what's going on in Chicago (with its high murder rate) and it seems like he really has no fucking clue why 1) poor people might exist, 2) why anyone would turn to gangs or violence to get by, 3) why systemic racism, and significant economic upheav...

I love the way The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou begins, and I really love the way Roger Ebert's review of it begins. The film begins with an announcer speaking Italian, with no subtitles. He introduces a documentary with Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau-esque explorer and documentarian played by Bill Murray. The movie separates us from the action by putting this initial footage on a narrower screen framed by curtains. We see the audience watching the footage. Within the footage, we see the film crew, a camera, the boom mic. (Plus the undersea life is blatantly fake--part of the whimsy of the film, not the documentary within the film.) And this is a Wes Anderson film, inherently artificial, deliberately stylized, and explicitly distancing itself stylistically from the usual film. Roger's review begins like this: My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things, does it have to work, too? Can...