The Grand Budapest Hotel Movie Review

I’ve just written about Rushmore and touched on the great stylistic difference between Wes Anderson’s earliest films and the techniques he uses in his latest. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a great example of how Anderson’s stylized world, whimsical flights of fancy, and self-conscious artifice have grown and joined together to blend into a harmonious vision.

I was a true Anderson enthusiast through The Royal Tenenbaums, but he lost me until Fantastic Mr. Fox, which struck me as the absolute perfect representation of what he has always tried to accomplish. The Grand Budapest Hotel has brought him back completely into my good graces and though it contains moments that are so previously Wes Anderson-y that it risks becoming a parody of his own style, it somehow reached me in surprising and new ways.

From My Collection: Rushmore Movie Review

Wes Anderson’s filmmaking style has evolved over the years to such extremes of whimsical fantasy that to revisit his second feature, 1998’s Rushmore, feels tame and almost like a regular movie experience. He was just beginning to hone his skills at symmetrical and perfectly fastidiously set-dressed diorama-like compositions. Compare it to the brand new Grand Budapest Hotel or even The Royal Tenenbaums, his follow-up to Rushmore, where you’ll see clearly compartmentalized sets that resemble a doll’s house, and the earlier film reveals an artist who was learning what kind of worlds he wanted to create on film.

The Grand Budapest Hotel trailers

First I watched this trailer for Wes Anderson's latest film, due in March:

And my first thought was, "This looks like a Wes Anderson parody." Seriously, you can hear the Honest Trailers voice say, "Starring: Every single actor who's ever been in a Wes Anderson movie!" And they're saying and doing things that are just so...singularly Wes Anderson. He's devolved into self-parody. Maybe some people already thought he'd done so years ago.

But then this trailer mellowed the experience a bit:

I'm a fan of Anderson, I really am. I loved Rushmore back in the day (I even just bought the Criterion Blu-Ray of it). The Royal Tenenbaums is one of my favorite movies. Since then my opinions of his work have vacillated between "didn't really care for it" (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) to "yeah, I really enjoyed that" (Moonrise Kingdom). Not exactly damning or glorifying statements. His style was unique for two movies (which is quite a feat when you think about that logically). But now you realize he makes exactly one kind of movie and just alters the story and characters. I don't know. We'll see. I'm sure it will be good. I just find it difficult to get really excited about this. 

Moonrise Kingdom Movie Review

The whimsical world of Wes Anderson has returned in Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature film and just the latest to be populated by characters from a fantasy vision of the world that lies just beyond anyone’s actual experience of it. Anderson likes to set his films in veritable islands unto themselves: a Manhattan mansion that seems part of a fictionalized New York I’ve never seen; a private school that offers a most ambitious student a lot of leeway; a train across the Indian subcontinent; a submarine (that one offered up his most capricious film to date); and now a literal island that looks (on the map presented by Bob Balaban’s on camera narrator) a little like Fisher’s Island, NY.