I suppose if one definition of "auteur" is a filmmaker who makes the same movie over and over (Kurosawa: The powerful vs. the powerless; Welles: The corrupt vs. the naive; Scorsese: The outsider vs. the insider; etc.), then Wes Anderson fits the bill, as he here offers up yet another charming rogue father, another long-suffering and lied-to mother, another squad of over-achieving anxious children, and yet more strangely ineffable mid-century-meets-thrift-store-meets-80's-era-preppy art direction. This time, of course, everyone's a puppet, but it doesn't make much difference. Enjoyable but not great, and certainly not worth the billion hours it must have taken to shoot.
May 13, 2010
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson (2009)
I suppose if one definition of "auteur" is a filmmaker who makes the same movie over and over (Kurosawa: The powerful vs. the powerless; Welles: The corrupt vs. the naive; Scorsese: The outsider vs. the insider; etc.), then Wes Anderson fits the bill, as he here offers up yet another charming rogue father, another long-suffering and lied-to mother, another squad of over-achieving anxious children, and yet more strangely ineffable mid-century-meets-thrift-store-meets-80's-era-preppy art direction. This time, of course, everyone's a puppet, but it doesn't make much difference. Enjoyable but not great, and certainly not worth the billion hours it must have taken to shoot.
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2 comments:
I think it was worth the billions of hours it took to shoot! Especially when seen with your kids....
It is actually pretty great for that and other reasons.
This was the first movie-on-a-screen movie my kids saw, in an old-timey rundown picture house in Worthing. Saturday matinee. Packed house. Completely silent--not a sound from a single kid through the whole movie. Stick that up your pixar. And plenty engaging for us grownups, I thought.
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