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.

25 Years Ago This Month: August 1988

Cheers, Jesus.

The films I've seen

The most significant movie release of the month was The Last Temptation of Christ. Martin Scorsese had been trying for a decade to adapt Kazantzakis' controversial novel and finally got it made with Willem Dafoe in the starring role and Harvey Keitel as a Brooklyn-accented Judas. Of course it was idiotically boycotted by Christian groups, most of whom had probably not even bothered to watch the film to find out exactly what they were objecting to. It has since become one of the more important films in Scorsese's body of work and has been canonized by Criterion into their collection.

The biggest money maker was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which I reviewed last year. It made nearly $50M at the box office and finished 19th for the year.

Now I loved Young Guns when I was a kid. I only ever saw it on cable, but it remains to this day a serious guilty pleasure of mine. Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid and then there's Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Casey Siemaszko, and a young Dermot Mulroney as his friends. Terence Stamp and Jack Palance add a veneer of respectability, but just a little.

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.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Reservoir Dogs

The performances in Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature Reservoir Dogs are so good they may be the real glue that holds the film together. Tarantino’s writing, both structurally as well as dialogue, is fantastic, but I wonder where it would have taken him as a director without the phenomenally believable acting of his ensemble cast. The first step in the right direction was getting what might be the perfect cast. The principal leads are Harvey Keitel, who was instrumental in getting the film made after reading the screenplay, Michael Madsen, who has since gone on to a modestly successful Hollywood career, and Tim Roth, a virtual unknown before Reservoir Dogs. Reports suggest that James Woods fired his longtime agent for not bringing the project to his attention after learning that Tarantino wanted him for Roth’s role.

"I'm Winston Wolf. I Solve Problems.": Pulp Fiction Analysis Part XXII

Go to Part XXI: "Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face."

Jimmie is upset at the possibility that his wife will come home soon from her graveyard shift at the hospital to find a dead body in the garage. So the clock is ticking on these guys to get their mess cleaned up fast. Jules talks to Marsellus who lets him know he’s sending The Wolf (Harvey Keitel). Jules already knows Wolf by reputation.

JULES: You sendin’ The Wolf?

MARSELLUS: Don’t you feel better, motherfucker?

JULES: Shit, negro. That’s all you had to say.

Then we see The Wolf on the phone. Again (like Marsellus early in the film), we have a character whose face we don’t see right away, thus adding to the mystery surrounding the character. The Wolf is in a tuxedo at some kind of cocktail party early in the morning. In the background you can hear a dealer talking about laying down bets. More than likely this was some kind of all night gambling party.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Pulp Fiction

As a special treat to celebrate my 100th movie review posted to this site (I've actually written more than 100, but they haven't all been posted here) I decided to write a full length review of the film that got me interested in film in the first place.

Additionally, over the next few weeks I will post, in pieces, the full analysis I did on the film several years ago. Keep your eyes open for that starting this week.

It’s amazing to me that after roughly twenty viewings from beginning to end plus an exhaustive shot-by-shot study of it, there are still moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that make me smile, chuckle or even downright surprise me: The Wolf’s smile of appreciation for the delicious coffee served up by Jimmy; Mia Wallace’s tomato joke to break the tension after an intense scene. Incredibly, watching it again for this review, I even pulled out something new that I had never picked up on before. And it wasn’t even a minor detail, but one that ties into one of the major themes of the film.