"I’m having little adventures, but yes, not on social media."

"I am painting, I am drawing, I’m doing photography. I’m climbing mountains and going on very long walks. I’m having little adventures, but yes, not on social media. I don’t think it’s something that would particularly serve my life, and I’m quite happy that I don’t have it."

Said Mia Threapleton, quoted in "Wes Anderson’s Newest Star Finds Inspiration Everywhere (Even a Napkin)/Mia Threapleton is Kate Winslet’s daughter but she’s intent on making her own way in Hollywood. That includes her deadpan nun in 'The Phoenician Scheme'" (NYT).

I hope young people today see that, but they'll only see it on social media.

"[Jackson] Browne had approved [Wes] Anderson's use of 'These Days,' but had forgotten about it completely by the time he bought a ticket..."

"... to see it at his local theater. 'When the scene started and the song came on, I thought, "Wow, I used to play just like that,"' Browne said, laughing. 'Then I realized it was me. I think the song had already taken on a life of its own, but it was definitely amplified by that movie.'"

From "The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum/Browne wrote 'These Days' at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: 'If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.'" (NYT).

Here's that scene from "The Royal Tenenbaums":

 

The song, written when Browne was 16, seems to be from the point of view of someone who's lived through many phases of life. It ends: "Please don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them."

The article quotes Jimmie Fadden, "a co-founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — which Browne briefly joined": "I don’t know what his failures were at that time — maybe it was his report card, or school credits or the authorities at Sunny Hills coming down hard on him. All these years later, it’s a perfect song for any of us in our 70s.”

"Wow."

Via Metafilter, where many comment "Wow"... because Owen Wilson says "Wow."

 

"... people are romanticising their lives by editing them like Wes Anderson and it’s honestly so creative and wholesome."

Girl on the train 🚂 pic.twitter.com/SR25LuSzir

— Zoë Crowther (@zoenora6) April 18, 2023

Miniature effects.

Beautiful attention to detail. Touching, actually. And I recommend the movie, "That French Dispatch," which I watched a few weeks ago. I found that "making of" video because I was looking for something specific in that movie, a view of the outside of a multistory building, where you follow a character walking up various stairways, through rooms, up to the top. You can see part of that sequence at 1:00.

I wanted to see that because, just by chance, I was watching the 1958 movie "Mon Oncle" last night, and there's this sequence, which is clearly what "The French Dispatch" was paying homage to:

"The French Dispatch" is a Wes Anderson movie. "Mon Oncle" is Jacques Tati. I did not realize, when I was watching "The French Dispatch," how much of it was done with miniatures. I have no idea how Jacques Tati made his movies. I'm not sure I want to know! Maybe there should be a spoiler alert on that "Miniature effects" video, because it would be better not to know what, exactly, you're looking at. The old saying is that it's better not to know how sausage is made.

I don't like to use clichés, but I'm saying "better not to know how sausage is made" because it fits with something in "Mon Oncle." Obscure humor at 5 in the morning. It shouldn't be obscure.

You can stream "Mon Oncle" on the Criterion Channel.

FIXED: The second video is now the right one. I'd had the first video repeated. I deeply regret this mistake! 

Movies that you have to watch twice to understand.

That's a title for a list I wanted and, googling, I found 5 things. Let's see if any fit my needs. I have come to believe that the best movie-watching experience is the second (or subsequent) watch, so that first watches feel like a test to see whether this is a movie worth watching at all. These days, if I watch a movie once and think it's good, I watch it again, within a day or two. That way, I have the greatest opportunity to see the most in this thing I've discovered is worth watching. Sometimes on second watch, I feel humbled by how much I missed the first time around. I'm practically laughing at myself for thinking I had seen the movie.

So let's look at what my search turned up.

The new Wes Anderson movie has sentence diagramming!

 

I made that screen shot from the trailer:

I already blogged about the new movie — "The French Dispatch" — in the first post of the day, here, but I had to open up a new post because... sentence diagramming!

This is one of my favorite topics. I've blogged about it many times... including the one where a reader took up my challenge to diagram a 46-word sentence by Camille Paglia, the one where a reader took up my challenge to diagram a 153-word sentence from "Paradise Lost," and this one, where I'd written a long sentence and somebody called it a "doozy," and I said "Diagram it. It looks really cool diagrammed," and when no one stepped up to that challenge, I did it myself and made a video of the diagram so you could see for yourself how cool it was:

And now there is a movie, not entirely about sentence diagramming, but with some vivid sentence diagramming in it. I don't think there's a film documentary about sentence diagramming. I wish there were. But that's okay. I am hoping that because of the great love so many people have for Wes Anderson, this movie will inspire a renaissance of sentence diagramming!

It might go nicely with the expanding home school movement.

"In considering the setting for his movie, [Wes] Anderson wanted something like Paris, but a version that doesn’t exist anymore outside of cinema..."

"... like the one of wonder captured by 'The Red Balloon,' and one of whimsy captured by Jacques Tati. One of the film’s producers, Jeremy Dawson, said that Anderson was looking for a place 'with nooks and crannies, corridors, passages, staircases, layers and ramparts.' The filmmakers began their scouting search on Google, digitally navigating the streets of towns that might fit the bill. Then they hit the road to visit a few of them. While in Angoulême, they came across a plaza with a small cafe. Dawson recalled that Anderson suggested grabbing lunch at the cafe. 'When he said that, I knew he’d picked this town,' Dawson said. Angoulême, in the southwest of France with a population of about 42,000, is no stranger to invasions; during the Hundred Years’ War, it was the site of battles between the French and English. These visitors were much more benign. During the shoot, the crew came up with various ways to give the town’s old-world collection of buildings, streets and facades a bit of an Andersonized touch — a cute little vintage vehicle parked here, a peppy striped awning set up there. And sometimes miniatures were used to help enhance the setting...."

From "When Wes Anderson Comes to Town, Buildings Get Symmetrical/For 'The French Dispatch,' the filmmakers set up shop in a real French city to create the setting for the movie’s fictional one" (NYT).

I like that they scouted for the location using Google "street view." At no cost, we can all scout for locations for our movies. What's yours? You have an idea of a foreign place, and, instead of researching and learning what that place is really like, you search for the real place that's closest to that image in your head. Is there something wrong with that?

The NYT excerpt has links to 2 trailers of old films — both of which have been on my list of selected films at the Criterion Collection for about as long as I've been a subscriber (2 months). There's "The Red Balloon":

 

And that "whimsy captured by Jacques Tati" is "Playtime":

I'm about a third of the way through "Playtime." Something I texted someone while I was watching it: "possibly the most artistic and sophisticated thing I’ve ever seen."

"The photographs in this book were taken by people I have never met, of places and things I have, almost without exception, never seen — but I must say: I intend to."

Said Wes Anderson, quoted in "When Life Looks Like a Wes Anderson Movie/An Instagram platform, now a book, documents real-life settings that look like frames from the director’s movies" (NYT).

Here's the Instagram page, for lots of cool photographs.

You can tell that the director's aesthetic has influenced many people to look at the world and see certain types of things and realize that they should be photographed and shared. Example:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @accidentallywesanderson on Jul 30, 2020 at 5:48am PDT

Since I began the morning with the story of an unsuccessful crossing of a river, let me give you this.

Go here to see video with full image.

ADDED: The embedded video from Reddit cuts off the lower part of the video and misses the whole point! I've had to replace it with a link.

AND: As long as I'm sending you to Reddit, here's a nice subreddit: Accidental Wes Anderson.

I watched the announcement of the Oscar nominations....

... and you can too:



Did any of you watch that? I'm sure you can easily find the list of nominees somewhere. Feel free to comment about the specifics and try to resist simply saying you don't care about Oscars or you don't like Hollywood generally. I know!

I'll just say:

1. I've only seen 2 of the movies under discussion — "The Isle of Dogs" (nominated for best animated movie) and "RBG" (nominated for best documentary and for some song that I don't remember). The only one I saw in the theater was "RBG," and that's also the only one I saw in its entirety.  I'm still only 2/3 of the way through "The Isle of Dogs" on Amazon Prime, and weeks have past since I paused it and realized I didn't much care exactly how the dogs completed their mission, and now I forget what the mission was. Anyway — dogs on an island in Japan, having a hard time but being feisty, as visualized by the ever-quirky Wes Anderson.

2. Viggo Mortenson got a best actor nomination! I think that was unexpected. I'll have to look up who was "snubbed" to give him recognition. I haven't seen his movie "Green Book," and I doubt I'll go to the movie theater to see it when I'm just a few weeks from getting cataract surgery and am no good at seeing anything right now, but I just happen to love Viggo Mortenson because I loved him in "Captain Fantastic." I'm better with TV — and frankly, better with things I've already seen before (or with new episodes of the old TV series "Friends" because it's easy to recognize the 6 recurring characters and to get the hang of what they're up to) — so maybe I'll just watch "Captain Fantastic" again.

"Before you see the latest animated feature from your barista's favorite director, relive his meticulous works from the past that made you kind of happy, kind of sad, and kind of unsure - It's Every Wes Anderson Movie!"

My preference for fictionalized historical movies, with a particular note on the ones with a fictional country.

I'm thinking about why I don't want to see the movie "Selma" and why the only movie from last year that I took the time to watch was "The Grand Budapest Hotel." I also don't want to see "American Sniper," and I avoided the movie "Lincoln," even when it was staring me in the face on television and even though I love Daniel Day-Lewis. Maybe I just don't like to watch actors pretending to be particular historical figures. It's too much of an impersonation, and invention and originality is problematic. And maybe it's the distraction of the distortions done for dramatic effect, which seems to be the case with the character of LBJ in "Selma." I'm fully interested in history and am, right now, thoroughly immersed in the series of Robert A. Caro books about LBJ. I want to get as close to understanding the great historical character as I can, and any 2 hours immersed in those books serves that interest better than watching dramatic scenes in "Selma."

Here's the earlier blog post where I talk about the Maureen Dowd column criticizing the movie for making a "faux" "villain" out of LBJ. And here's a new piece in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson saying "Why 'Selma' Is More Than Fair to L.B.J." I dislike LBJ and regard him as a great villain (even if his particular form of villainy put him on the good side of some issues), and I don't really care whether the film is "fair" to him or not. If I saw the movie, it would be to pursue my own  interest in the way media massages the story. I'd write a blog post. The post would quote the line: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."



That's the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a great, great movie with a historical setting and a fictional story. Jimmy Stewart plays the part of a made-up U.S. Senator, Ransom "Ranse" Stoddard. The West, of course, was a real place, not a fictional place, and so it doesn't fit the category I really want to talk about in connection with "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" has a fictional historical story, set in a fictional Eastern European country, Zubrowka. (The name Zubrowka comes from the traditional Polish bison-grass flavored vodka.) Here's Wikipedia's plot summary for the movie — a lot about a vaguely explained war in the 1930s and its impact on a posh hotel. It is completely weird and fantastical and yet it conveys quite deep emotions about love and loss, and the resonance with history feels profound and comical. One feels history without needing to fuss over the accuracy. There can be no accuracy. I love that.

Zubrowka is the last country named on Wikipedia's "List of fictional countries," which I found because I was thinking about how great it was to have a fictional country in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and wanted to think of other movies with a strong feeling of history in a particular place, where the place is fictional. Before looking, I thought of the great comedies "The Great Dictator" (Tomania) and "Duck Soup" (Freedonia and Sylvania). Wikipedia's list of fictional countries doesn't have "The Great Dictator," and not everything on the list has a fictional country used to tell a historical story. So I'm not looking for things like Florin (in "The Princess Bride") or Oz, because these are fantasy lands, not any kind of stand-in for a real geographical place on Earth, or Eastasia and Oceania in "1984" or Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale" because these stories are not set in historical time but in the future.

So there's a category of movie that I want to say I love, that I want to put above the usual historical movies, but I haven't found enough examples to make a proper category. Perhaps "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is too original to define a category. In that case: grand!

"Wes Anderson is a genius, but ... come on, people! Get a life! Make your own style."

"Pretentious hipsters of the world, unite!"/"My favorite detail in this article are the piles of old books used as wedding table centerpieces."

Comments at a NYT article about an interior decoration trend inspired by Wes Anderson movies. Click on the slide show to see what the results actually are.

Photos...

By Bill Wyman:



The one of Brian Jones, seen in a rear view mirror, is very evocative. Brian Jones looked so smudged up just before he died. I think of his picture here:



When that album came out I was shocked to see how bad he'd come to look, like some shrunken gnome.

(This is the album they play in the tent in "The Royal Tenenbaums." Though they are playing the vinyl disc, the right song doesn't follow "Ruby Tuesday" -- very striking to someone who's played the album more than a thousand times.)

ADDED: I'm just reading over quotes from the movie "The Royal Tenenbaums." I love that movie.

I did find it odd when you said you were in love with her. She's married you know.

Yeah.

And she's your sister.

Adopted.

So much better than "Match Point," which we watched last night. Why compare them? Just because we watched "Match Point" last night, and something today reminded me of "The Royal Tenenbaums." They do both have a lot of tennis in them -- and loving the wrong person -- but they play out quite differently. And TRT is immensely better.

"Match Point" quotes:

I don't know what I'm doing with you, you're never going to leave Chloe!

Maybe I will.

Stop playing games with me!

Keep your voice down.

Huh? That was typed in as "memorable"? Pathetic.

MORE: Hmmm.... I knew I'd blogged about "The Royal Tenenbaums" before. And it's true that the right song doesn't precede "Ruby Tuesday."