After the success of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson is returning to the world of stop-motion animation. The Playlist reports that Anderson’s next film will be another stop-motion animation film and will be about dogs. Anderson previously used stop-motion animation for his film, Fantastic Mr. Fox. According to the site, the only plot details …
87 years into the ceremony, the Oscars are still unabashedly about the movies. Host Neil Patrick Harris along with Anna Kendrick performed a whizzbang ode to “moving pictures” in perfect Broadway musical style. And despite the fresh songwriting that seemed to give a nod to last year’s winners for Frozen and “Let it Go”, …
Why should I care about the Oscars? No, that’s a serious question. Because as much as I hate to admit it, I do. At their very best, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets it right by tripping and falling into a “Market Irglova & Glen Hansard” here or a “12 minute standing …
Not only is Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Wes Anderson Collection filled with richly detailed interviews and conversations with the man, the myth, Wes Anderson himself, but it’s also a glorious coffee table book, filled with beautiful illustrations by Max Dalton that bring the essence of Anderson’s movies to life. It’s a must-own for cinephiles. …
Though it feels as though Awards Season has already trudged on for months, the 72nd Annual Golden Globes from Sunday night showed the season has really only just begun. On their long road to the Oscars before nominations are announced this Thursday, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel struck a blow …
2015 is finally here and so are the Oscars and actual Awards Season. No more of this speculation and hype machine stuff around movies that haven’t come out yet or guilds that haven’t had their say. Oscar voting ends today, January 8, and nominations are revealed bright and early on January 15, one week from …
15. The Immigrant – If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of …
It’s been a great year for film music. I say that as someone who had to endure the laughably dated qualities of Alberto Iglesias’ Exodus: Gods and Kings and had to swallow the pill that is Howard Shore‘s latter days Middle-earth music. But it has been a great year. Clint Mansell gave us haunting, complex soundscapes in Noah, the …
I’m not sure what exact moment in Birdman it occurred to me that we were in the midst of a great Edward Norton Renaissance. Maybe it was when the walls of self-professed artistic integrity that his character Mike Shiner wears came crashing down in the face of Sam (Emma Stone), revealing the tragedy and isolation …
As the end of the year approaches, the number of question marks in the Oscar ranks continues to sink lower. This past week, Selma, American Sniper, The Gambler and A Most Violent Year all dropped at AFI Fest, leaving only movies like Unbroken (still presumed to be a front-runner in a crowded field), Exodus: Gods …
Far be it from me to make any grand sweeping statements on the year in film this early, but as of July 2014, I would argue it’s already been a fascinating year for scores. Just look at blockbusters. We’ve heard both the invigoratingly new and the depressingly dull. Ambitious combinations have even produced a commendable …
The Grand Budapest Hotel Composed by Alexandre Desplat ABKCO Records I have no clue which country, if any, “Zubrowka” is meant to represent in The Grand Budapest Hotel. I can, however, point it out on a map. Er, at least I can point out where it should be. Wes Anderson’s fictional European nation doesn’t exist outside …
More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.
Comedy is one of the longest-running genres in cinema, producing numerous screen legends from The Marx Brothers to Madeline Kahn, as well as numerous classics, from The Gold Rush to Hot Fuzz. Fans of the genre thus look forward every year to the new crop of films, eager to see what they may bring, and …