Xixax Film Forum

Mr. Fox postponed, india movie next (http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2006/07/wess_india_film.php)

does anyone know about the steven brill/ sex lies and videotape story that's mentioned on that site?

I forget the exact details, but they promised to star in each other's first films, or something like that. There was a wickedly humorous element to the bargain, I think, but I forget what it was and I don't have the diary or the DVD to reference at the moment.

Soderbergh and Brill went through school together, and they made a pact that whoever made a movie first would cast the other in it.  Luckily for Steven Soderbergh (who would have had to appear in "Heavyweights"), he made "sex, lies..." first, and Steven Brill played the character of Barfly.  Soderbergh tells the story on the DVD, this is just a pieced-together memory of listening to the commentary a few years ago.

The following is just a tiny tidbit, a morsel, a hint of what Wes Anderson's project after the upcoming THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX will be. Under most circumstances, such a small mention would not be blown up into full story but since we're talking Wes "I'm one of the best filmmakers working today" Anderson here (he insists people use that nickname at all times), I think we can make an exception. In an interview with CNN, frequent Anderson collaborator Owen Wilson said this: "But I am going to do a movie with my friend Wes [Anderson] in India, and that's not going to be a buddy comedy movie. [I play] one of three brothers, and they go on this journey in India. I haven't really spoken to Wes yet in regards to what I can really talk about." Fair enough. Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

it's hard for me to picture him doing a movie set in India unless he changes styles drastically. then again, Life Aquatic was shot in Rome.

i don't think wes has ever accomodated his style to fit the setting of his films. if anything his trademark style allows him to shoot anything quite easily without consideration to where it is. visionary directors like him find their biggest challenge in different genres, or to be precise in the dissolution thereof. by incorporating their style to the limitations set by pace requirements and different thematic tones.. the most exciting parts of Life Aquatic were not when he departed from his "look" -- which is impossible for him i think because it includes costumes, set decoration, and all that stuff -- but when he pursued a different film altogether than that which he has done before.

compare Fernando Meirelles, what would appear as insurmountable weight of style and visual flare in City of God was done away with in Constant Gardener. GT called this a departure from genre in his style, mostly i agree in that the fault and blessing was his marriage to the material and expansion of all the themes in the story by stripping down his own style and using what was necessary to sell it. it's still markedly a meirelles film.  ultimately wes feels like the kinda guy who will make the same movie no matter what. so yeah i hope he does try new things in india, if the mere fact of being in india is not sufficient novelty.

he remains true to scorsese's own appointment of him as his successor, and in the same way scorsese has not disappointed when telling the same story in many different guises, i can't say i'm tired of wes' story yet.

Quote from: Pubrick on July 20, 2006, 12:57:56 PM
he remains true to scorsese's own appointment of him as his successor, and in the same way scorsese has not disappointed when telling the same story in many different guises, i can't say i'm tired of wes' story yet.

He's certainly told some diverse and interesting stories while repeating only his style.  I'm waiting for the next good film from him after Life Aquatic disappointed me.  I have to remind myself that it was just one film and not necessarily a "slump."

me too.  i lost a little faith with TLA, so this is really make or break time for me.

I didn't lose shit.  so FUCK you all.

to those that were disappointed - did you at least see the film a second time?

I hated it and yet I saw it twice. The first time was in theaters and the second time was with friends on video.

Was the movie still beyond me on second viewing? Should I have gone that third viewing for complete revelation?

I'll jump in and say that it took me a few viewings of random scenes last month when it was on constant rotation on Starz and TLA really has grown on me...yeah, I was severely disappointed when I saw it in the theater.....but alas, my faith is still there and even more so with the AMEX commercial.

when i saw TLA the first time in theaters i left a little underwhelmed, but there's just so much fun stuff in there. i know of several people who love all Wes A films with the exception of TLA and i just can't really contemplate how it's just such a deviation from the prior 3 films.

Quote from: bigideas on July 22, 2006, 05:13:38 PM
to those that were disappointed - did you at least see the film a second time?

Not yet.  A friend of mine "gave" me the DVD of TLA and 2 other movies in payment for losing my DVD of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, but I haven't watched it again yet.

Wilson & Anderson Reunite for Darjeeling
Source: Production Weekly

Production Weekly reports that Owen Wilson will reunite with his long-time friend Wes Anderson on the director's next project, The Darjeeling Limited.

In the script, by Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, Wilson will play one of three brothers who journey through India.

The project is eyeing a December production start. Wilson and Anderson previously worked together on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore (with Schwartzman), The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

wow.  bye bye Noah.  i guess this means schwarzman will likely be in this film?

Quote from: modage on August 04, 2006, 10:56:13 AM
wow.  bye bye Noah.  i guess this means schwarzman will likely be in this film?

I certainly hope so.

Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody: The Missing Wilson Brothers?
Source: Cinematical

It seems like just the other day we were telling you that Owen Wilson had finally confirmed that he will be starring in Wes Anderson's new flick, The Darjeeling Limited. We know very little at this point about the film other than it's about three brothers, it's going to be filmed in India.

Now we have new news on the film, straight from Wilson's mouth to the ear of Australian paper the Herald-Sun, that his brothers in the film will be played by Adrien Brody and the film's co-writer, Jason Schwartzman:

What are you doing next?

I think I'm working on a movie about these kids who are getting bullied and they hire me as a bodyguard. Then there's a movie I'm going to do with Wes in India, that Wes wrote and is directing. It's about three brothers -- with me, Jason Schwartzman and Adrian Brody.

But it's not a Bollywood movie?

No. It's going to be wild. Wes assures me it's great, and I kind of believe him because I think of myself as more likely to go some place where I'd be roughing it before Wes. He likes staying in five-star hotels, and nice things.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,19994426-5006123,00.html


In related minutiae, a West Hollywood casting agency has posted this L.A. craigslist ad:

SEEKING ALL INDIAN/SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN, ACTRESSES AND NON ACTRESSES, FOR NEW WES ANDERSON FILM, "THE DARJEELING LIMITED". Shooting in India December-February 2006/2007.

Seeking the following roles:
RITA- 20's-mid 30's-Indian/South Asian. Attractive, intelligent and articulate, she is a stewardess on a train in India. English speaking, Hindi a plus but not necessary.

This sounds fucking great. Does anyone have any clue what the title means?

not sure how i feel about adrien brody.  better than heath ledger, but i cant really picture it.  it may be time for everyone to go back and revisit CQ though.

Quote from: Ultrahip on August 05, 2006, 05:00:43 PM
This sounds fucking great. Does anyone have any clue what the title means?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darjeeling

Imagine all the Kumar...

Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on August 07, 2006, 08:40:39 AM
Imagine all the Kumar...

EXACTLY what I'm thinking.   :yabbse-grin:

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 05, 2006, 10:35:42 AM
In related minutiae, a West Hollywood casting agency has posted this L.A. craigslist ad:

SEEKING ALL INDIAN/SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN, ACTRESSES AND NON ACTRESSES, FOR NEW WES ANDERSON FILM, "THE DARJEELING LIMITED". Shooting in India December-February 2006/2007.

Seeking the following roles:
RITA- 20's-mid 30's-Indian/South Asian. Attractive, intelligent and articulate, she is a stewardess on a train in India. English speaking, Hindi a plus but not necessary.

The full ad

From: Geeta Citygirl, NY

Subject: CASTING - THE DARJEELING LIMITED (South Asian Woman)

"THE DARJEELING LIMITED"- UPCOMING WES ANDERSON FEATURE FILM – Starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman

SEEKING ALL INDIAN/SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN, ACTRESSES AND NON ACTRESSES,

FOR NEW WES ANDERSON FILM, "THE DARJEELING LIMITED". Shooting in India December-February 2006/2007.

Seeking the following role:

RITA- 20's-mid 30's-Indian/South Asian. Attractive, intelligent and articulate, she is a stewardess on a train in India. English speaking, Hindi a plus but not necessary.

Talent may contact the office directly however they must identify who passed on the information so that they can be sure you are legitimate talent. Code word is "Geeta Citygirl" and "Nouveau IDEA".

If INTERESTED IN BEING CONSIDERED FOR THIS FILM, please send snapshot and letter (non-returnable) ASAP to:

Cindy Tolan
"The Darjeeling Limited" Casting
609 Greenwich Ave, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10014

Email-dlcasting@gmail.com

Or Call - 212-430-5094

Quote from: edison on August 05, 2006, 08:45:07 PM

Quote from: Ultrahip on August 05, 2006, 05:00:43 PM
This sounds fucking great. Does anyone have any clue what the title means?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darjeeling

it's also my favorite tea...


and...
poor cindy tolan('s office bitches)...

I got a feeling that Sheetal Sheth (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0792888/) will end up as Rita.

http://www.steelydan.com/heywes.html

Quote from: Those lunatics from Steely DanYou could go with some kind of "film within a film" or even a "film within a film within a film" or some such pomo horseshit, just like Godard's "King Lear" or whatever.

Out of that whole mess, this one sentence had me laughing out loud.  But seriously, Steely Dan, get a new hobby.

Fox joins Anderson on 'Darjeeling'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Fox Searchlight is getting into the Wes Anderson business. The Fox specialty division will be the home of the writer-director's latest project, "The Darjeeling Limited," which will star Anderson vets Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody. Principal photography is set to begin at year's end in India.

The three will play brothers on a spiritual journey through India after the death of their father.

"Darjeeling" is based on a screenplay from Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola. Anderson and Coppola will serve as producers on the film.

Searchlight specializes in offbeat, quirky fare, which happens to be Anderson's trademark. Anderson's previous films, "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," were all made for Touchstone Pictures under the guidance of Nina Jacobson, former president of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group.

Scott Rudin is producing through his Scott Rudin Prods. shingle in addition to Lydia Pilcher and her Cine Mosaic label. Pilcher recently partnered with Searchlight on Mira Nair's "The Namesake," also an India-based production based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Wilson has appeared in all of Anderson's films, going back to his debut, "Bottle Rocket." He also co-wrote "Rocket," "Rushmore" and "Tenenbaums."

Schwartzman starred in "Rushmore." He will next be seen in Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette."

Brody, the newcomer to the Anderson fold, will next be seen in "Hollywoodland."

wow, fox searchlight still fighting to be cool.  the new paramount should've grabbed this one up so it could have both andersons under one roof.  i had a feeling disney would not be distributing his films anymore after TLA was more expensive and less profitable.

Source: MTV

"Shopgirl" co-star Jason Schwartzman recently shot down rumors that he'd be appearing in the cartoon version of the Roald Dahl classic "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," but confirmed that he's reuniting with "Rushmore" writer/director Wes Anderson for a quirky flick set in India. "We're doing just this one movie called 'The Darjeeling Limited' that I wrote with Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson. Wes is going to direct it — and Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody will play brothers." Schwartzman is tight-lipped about the script — which will also star him as one of the three brothers seeking spiritual enlightenment after their father's death — but he did insist that it'll be unlike anything he's ever done before. "We wanted to do something different. It's a new experience for all three of us, writing this movie. It was very hard, but I loved every second of it ... I can't wait to go to India."

I just saw Jason Schwartzman on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson promoting Marie Antoinette.  He said that he was going to India for his next picture and that a week earlier he'd received all his vaccinations for the trip.  Does xixax have any scouts in that part of the world to report back from the set?

Quote from: ASmith on October 27, 2006, 12:45:39 AM
Does xixax have any scouts in that part of the world to report back from the set?

ravi's too busy with his bollywood commitments.

met a girl from the uk a few days ago who auditoned for this with schwartzman a couple of weeks ago.  she did not get the part.  that is all.

how big were her boobs

not big enough.

what are boobs?

for some reason the listing on imdb is for pro members only, but i found this link to the board:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0838221/board/threads/

From someone who lives in India on IMDB:
The tabloids here report that they are currently shooting in Udaipur and Jodhpur, both cities in the desert-palace state of Rajasthan. It also mentions that its a story about three brothers - Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman - who journey through India. "The script has been co-written by Roman Coppola , son of Francis Ford Coppola, and Schwartzman. We hear that Wilson and Anderson took a ride in the second-class compartmnet of an Indian train for research. The crew is expected to shoot in India till February. Actress Anjelica Huston and Natalie Portman also star."

The quoted statements are taken from the article which appeared in HT Style (December 10, 2006), which is a supplement of one of India's top newspapers Hindustan Times.

natalie portman!?  that would be crazy.  :ponder:

how big are her boobs?

Quote from: Slightly Green on December 11, 2006, 08:44:00 AM
how big are her boobs?

Larger than the grains of sand, but smaller than the desert.

Or, more specifically, about this big:
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi35.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fd179%2Fpolkablues%2F246-np3.jpg&hash=0893c61d73fa23d2fa6a94bd53299c96065217f4)

Quote from: polkablues on December 11, 2006, 06:17:26 PM

Quote from: Slightly Green on December 11, 2006, 08:44:00 AM
how big are her boobs?

Larger than the grains of sand, but smaller than the desert.

Or, more specifically, about this big:
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi35.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fd179%2Fpolkablues%2F246-np3.jpg&hash=0893c61d73fa23d2fa6a94bd53299c96065217f4)

HOLY CRAP!

Those are what boobs are?

Oh... the embarrassment...

First picture from the set!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg237.imageshack.us%2Fimg237%2F8805%2F4dnirupqs3.jpg&hash=67771bfeeef3b8e53a866df3da0894c50669d308)

from this blog:
http://jessechappelle.blogspot.com/2006/12/what-you-find-in-rajasthan.html

yeah... that looks about right.

Quote from: edison on December 11, 2006, 10:00:33 PM
First picture from the set!

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg237.imageshack.us%2Fimg237%2F8805%2F4dnirupqs3.jpg&hash=67771bfeeef3b8e53a866df3da0894c50669d308)

Let's not let this get lost to the previous page, 'cause it's fucking awesome...

EDIT: Is Schwartzman holding a fish finder?  What the hell is that thing?

DOUBLE EDIT: On second thought, I'm pretty sure it's a portable monitor.

I'm I ever glad you re-posted this.

they really look like brothers.

no, no, that's their day job

that's a tenenbaum in the background.

Darjeeling screens (already).  First test review here...

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32130

could you copy and paste please? it says i must register.

they must have taken down the entire review.  i found it elsewhere...

    Hi Harry,

    Long-time reader. I wanted to be the first to post a review of Wes Anderson's new film, "The Darjeeling Limited." Now, I am a big fan of Anderson's films - The Royal Tenenbaums is one of my favorites, with my favorite Hackman performance to date, which is saying something. I did not like The life Aquatic, I thought it was too dry and cutesy for its own good and I'm suspect of anything that Anderson does not write with Owen Wilson, which is the case with The Darjeeling Limited.

    I saw the film last week at its first test-screening and the whole scenerio felt like a focus group, with the filmmakers really looking for some feedback. Anderson was present.

    The film itself really starts out fantastic - all of Anderson's signature quirks are recognizeable from the start. The movie is split into two parts; The first is a short with Jason Schwartzman sitting in a hotel room, feeling sorry for himself, and ordering a grilled cheese. Natalie Portman shows up, hot as ever, and the two speak in very stilted dialoge. It is really a very weird short that does connect to the main storyline, but without much consequence - there is no big revelation.

    The main film begins in India, with a cool Bill Murray cameo reminescent of Jason Strathem's cameo in Collateral - sort of hints at something that never comes to fruition; another story, another place. Murray is racing for a train and finds himself running next to Adrian Brody, who is running for the very same train.

    Brody turns out to be one of three brothers. The other two are played by Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman. The three interact on a cross-country train ride, as Wilson's character attempts to manufacture some kind of profound, spiritual awakening between the brothers. Their father has recently died and their mother has split.

    That is basically the film and I don't want to ruin the few surprises that are littered throughout. The main problem with the movie is that it really goes nowhere. The ending leaves a lot to be desired and the film plays like its 2 and a half hours long, when in reality, its only an hour and a half. It was truly very slow, much like The Life Aquatic.

    The first hour, though, is quite funny, with all the dry humor that Anderson is famous for. All of the essentials are there too; the slow-mo, the British hits from the 60's, and a pretty good comedic performance from Owen Wilson. Brody and Schwartzman aren't particularly great, but wilson's timing saves the day.

    I think that Anderson needs to find an ending and possibly figure out a way to save the last half-hour of the film because it drags, but there is something there and occasionally, Anderson mines some of his best material out of it. Hmm, I guess I don't really know how I felt about the film because some people I was with thought it was a bomb, others saw something they liked, but they didn't know what. I think I saw a grab-bag of ideas; some that worked and some that didn't. A true work in progress.

    J.M. McClane

and for those who really like spoilers, the script is online (http://www.natalieportman.com/picstemp/Darjeeling%20Limited.pdf).

when was that review sent, April 1st?  prolly not legit.  prolly why they took it down.  yes i stole p's prollies. 

thats possible.  it went up on April 2nd but that could mean it was sent on April 1st and that would explain them taking it down to save the embarrassment of posting a fake instead of the usual "REMOVED AT REQUEST OF FOX" type notices.  i guess we'll know for sure the next/first time this thing screens and they can confirm or deny some of the details.  but in all reality if it had actually screened you would have been there to see it.

some interesting speculation (from the script)...


The Darjeeling Regression
Source: The Hot Blog

I almost never do this, but I danced through the screenplay for The Darjeeling Limited this weekend, comfortable that whatever is on the page of a Wes Anderson movie will be something altogether when I see it on a screen. Story movies, he does not make.

What first caught my eye were his co-writers - Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman – and the retro tone of the whole enterprise. Then, it smacked me in the face was that this trio of characters was oddly familiar. The three brothers...

Francis... Ford Coppola
Peter... Bogdanovich
Jack... Nicholson

The trio all worked for Roger Corman in the early 60s.

Francis Coppola is, obviously, a relative to two of the screenwriters and his distinctly verbose and controlling lead role in the movie makes sense. The character is loaded with quirky, detail oriented quirks. One wonders whether anyone in the family actually ever called him "Frannie."

Peter Bogdanovich is the fussy one, as he is in the script. And as in the script, got pregnant with his girl, then Polly Platt, early on... and went on to divorce her before their firstborn daughter was 3. (The relationship is not part of the movie, thus, not a spoiler. But the discussion is in there.)

I considered whether Jack was Jack Hill, but he isn't the legendary character and girl chaser that Nicholson is. In the script, the character is always on the make and somehow, still, a good guy, and pretty much willing to indulge his "brothers," so long as he can keep his game going.

The script reads like either a story about a trip the Coppola boys heard as kids and are fictionalizing in their heads or just a pure fiction developed after a late night of binging on whatever, when someone said, "You know what would be really cool? Can you imagine is Francis and his appetites and Bogdanovich, before the cravats, and Nicholson were actually brothers? They'd be cooler than the Marxes, the Howards, and the Ritzes combined. So we put them on a train all together, forced to be together." "Cool." "Cool."

Of course, we know from Roman's first film that he is interested in that 60s period. Anderson too. And they grew up around these men, all of whom went on to legendary status in the industry.

Interesting, huh?

Well... maybe... to some of you...

http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2006/08/the_darjeeling.html

So I'm guessing that Schwartzman is the Coppola character, Brody is Bogdanovich, and Wilson is Nicholson?

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filmmakermagazine.com%2Fblog%2Fuploaded_images%2Fdarjeeling_poster-708027.jpg&hash=29c4420c123a583318b1b7bf344751b1f1dfcada)

is that the poster? if so yes please.

Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on April 10, 2007, 04:29:36 PM
is that the poster? if so yes please.

i think i found that through the IMDB board and the blog i saw it on said it was an April Fool's joke done by Portman's website.

Quote from: Ghostboy on April 10, 2007, 03:56:34 PM
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filmmakermagazine.com%2Fblog%2Fuploaded_images%2Fdarjeeling_poster-708027.jpg&hash=29c4420c123a583318b1b7bf344751b1f1dfcada)

that tiger looks like it was drawn by oldmate Bruce Lee as part of his "Wandering Eye" (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=6619.msg153196#msg153196) series.

Quote from: bigideas on April 10, 2007, 08:40:57 PM

Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on April 10, 2007, 04:29:36 PM
is that the poster? if so yes please.

i think i found that through the IMDB board and the blog i saw it on said it was an April Fool's joke done by Portman's website.

That's great. Everyone will praise it, but when everyone finds out it was just a mock poster, the distinction between a quality Wes Anderson poster and a bullshit one is lost.

It doesn't matter if it's legitimate, bullshit, parody, finger-painted or whatever.  It's a great fucking poster.  If it's not official, they should pay the artist whatever it takes to make it official.  Otherwise we're going to end up with a big ol' sepia-toned sheet with Brody, Wilson, and Schwartman's giant heads half-smiling as they gaze wistfully downward upon an old-fashioned train cruising along with the Taj Mahal just barely visible in the distance.

I mean, we're going to end up with that anyway, but at least hold it off until the DVD.

Quote from: polkablues on April 10, 2007, 11:23:57 PM
with the Taj Mahal just barely visible in the distance in a peekaboo.

fxd

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on April 10, 2007, 10:47:53 PM

Quote from: bigideas on April 10, 2007, 08:40:57 PM

Quote from: A Matter Of Chance on April 10, 2007, 04:29:36 PM
is that the poster? if so yes please.

i think i found that through the IMDB board and the blog i saw it on said it was an April Fool's joke done by Portman's website.

That's great. Everyone will praise it, but when everyone finds out it was just a mock poster, the distinction between a quality Wes Anderson poster and a bullshit one is lost.

huh? i like the look of it too, just telling everyone what i read.

"print the legend," eh?

Quote from: polkablues on April 10, 2007, 11:23:57 PMI mean, we're going to end up with that anyway, but at least hold it off until the DVD.

...when they tack on the Criterion 'C'.

that's an interesting... opinion...

anyone else feel deja vu?

i'm feeling that john is no longer editing his posts.

Anyway, we should make a new marquee:

"XIXAX: We almost definitely changed the world"

Uh, yeah....

Sorry about that. There were supposed to be quotations and ideas more tangible than they were presented.

Apparently, I'm not the most lucid drunk at three in the afternoon.

Back to our regularly scheduled program...

Quote from: john on April 12, 2007, 11:35:26 AM

Apparently, I'm not the most lucid drunk at three in the afternoon.

That's okay with me.

Quote from: Pubrick on April 10, 2007, 08:51:11 PMthat tiger looks like it was drawn by oldmate Bruce Lee as part of his "Wandering Eye" (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=6619.msg153196#msg153196) series.

hahaha oh man. hilarious all over again.

Who wants to bet that West Coast from Schwartzman's album will be appearing in the movie/soundtrack?

http://www.myspace.com/coconutrecords

Quote from: overmeunderyou on May 09, 2007, 12:27:19 PM
Who wants to bet that West Coast from Schwartzman's album will be appearing in the movie/soundtrack?

http://www.myspace.com/coconutrecords

i had no idea he had a new band until i read that they were on the Spiderman 3 soundtrack.
someone was pointing out how Spidey 2 had a lot of butt rock bands (nickelback) and this one has a lot of indie rock (flaming lips, etc).

i'm willing to bet $15 that it wont be

It's a deal.

wagers on xixax never work out. 

I think first ILaM needs to prove he even has $15.

proof: i have $15

that doesn't work. except for something like this..

i post on xixax.

proof: this is a post on xixax.

anyway ILAM's right, that song's not showing up in darjeeling. wes is going scoreless.

Quote from: Hedwig on May 09, 2007, 08:56:18 PM
wes is going scoreless.

not again...
(Thinking of the madness that overtook the 'There Will Be Blood' thread.)

Quote from: overmeunderyou on May 09, 2007, 09:58:41 PM
not again...
(Thinking of the madness that overtook the 'There Will Be Blood' thread.)

Stop killing our joy.

no new news really but TDL has a page up at Fox Searchlight. 

http://content.foxsearchlight.com/films/node/939

just confirms that it will be released this year and the hilariously descriptive synopsis.


THE DARJEELING LIMITED

Release: 2007
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola
Produced by: Scott Rudin, Lydia Pilcher, Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Cast: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman

THE DARJEELING LIMITED starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman is an emotional comedy about three brothers re-forging family bonds. The eldest, played by Wilson, hopes to reconnect with his two younger siblings by taking them on a train trip across the vibrant and sensual landscape of India.

well as long as its an emotional comedy across a sensual landscape THEN i'm interested.

From the new "EW:"
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv318%2Fremi%2Fredremi%2Fewtdl06290706.jpg&hash=6386a4aa7b31d77c240a99d57192eb05c17210c6)

i really hope they're not looking for a white tiger.  because that macguffin is way too closed to a jaguar shark.  i wonder if "more raw" means more of the shambling awkwardness that nearly crippled TLA, or if it will set him free!

Is anyone else worried that this might end up being a teensy bit racist in a regular comedy-set-abroad-look-at-the-funny-customs-of-the-locals type way?

yeah but wes'll do it in style. i'm assuming he's gonna put a permanent red dot in the centre of every shot.

i'm just worried about the noses

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'Darjeeling' kicks off N.Y. fest
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- Wes Anderson's comedy "The Darjeeling Limited" will premiere in the prestigious opening-night slot of the 45th annual New York Film Festival, while Joel and Ethan Coen's drama "No Country for Old Men" joins the fest as its Centerpiece film.

Two other features in the lineup -- Cristian Mungiu's Festival de Cannes Palme d'Or winner "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and Lee Chang-dong's's "Secret Sunshine" (which won the Cannes best actress award for Jeon Do-yeon) -- also were unveiled Wednesday, due in part to leaks about their inclusion.

"We announced them now to squelch rumors so that the filmmakers can plan accordingly," said Film Society of Lincoln Center chairman and program director Richard Pena. "The information is less valuable if it seeps out early."

Pena and his fellow selection committee members have chosen eight of the approximately 25 films in the Sept. 28-Oct. 14 fest and will unveil the complete lineup by early August.

Anderson's "Darjeeling" follows three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the film with Anderson and Roman Coppola) who attempt to reconnect with one another on a journey through India. "It represents a big step for Wes," Pena said. "I hate to use the word 'matured,' but the humor and whimsy he uses is sharper, better focused and used more effectively."

Pena noted that the director has a long history with the fest, which premiered his breakthrough comedy "Rushmore." "We're very proud we showed it at a moment it was almost ready to be shelved," he said. "With a little cajoling, the studio allowed us to screen it, and I'd like to think our showing it helped in getting it out there."

Pena also said that Anderson often sees more than half of the NYFF films shown every year. Fox Searchlight will release the film in New York a day after its Sept. 28 debut.

Although it was held back from the media, the NYFF committee screened the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's intense crime novel "No Country for Old Men" before its Cannes premiere in May. "It's their best movie in years, certainly my favorite since 'Miller's Crossing,'" Pena said. "I was a little surprised it didn't win (at Cannes)."

The Miramax Films/Paramount Vantage release will screen Oct. 6 and hit theaters in November.

The acclaimed Romanian abortion drama "4 Months" will be given a day-and-date theatrical/VOD domestic release by IFC First Take sometime after its to-be-determined fest slot. The South Korean romance "Sunshine" has no announced U.S. distributor.

Pena said he is especially proud of this year's festival sidebar honoring Brazilian writer-director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, best known for his 1969 feature "Macunaima." The Film Society also will salute New Line Cinema co-chairmen and co-CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne on their company's 40th anniversary.

This year's selection committee includes Pena, Film Society associate director Kent Jones and film critics Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum.

Quote from: children with angels on June 25, 2007, 06:06:55 AM
Is anyone else worried that this might end up being a teensy bit racist in a regular comedy-set-abroad-look-at-the-funny-customs-of-the-locals type way?

oh like lost in translation?

Quote from: Pubrick on October 22, 2004, 12:15:37 AM

Quote from: rudieob(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv158%2Fchelseagirl_eh%2Fweshead.jpg&hash=b1bc1e66834e926a2856577172464727419b5d80)

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FOX's website has announced a September 29'th release date for this.

do you suspect it will be a (darjeeling) limited release or wide?

limited = me screwed

(aaaaaaarrrrrrrr.........i kill me)

:yabbse-grin:

Quote from: MacGuffin on June 27, 2007, 11:43:05 PMFox Searchlight will release the film in New York a day after its Sept. 28 debut.

that's quite vague, but Life Aquatic did open here on Christmas, so i would hope this would show here as well.

vague?  vague would be,  Fox Searchlight will release the film in New York a day or so after its Sept. 28 debut.  another example of vague:
dear pozer,
im hearing word that there will be a darjeeling screening in the near future.  ill let you know as soon as i know.
love,
your friend on the inside

Quote from: pete on June 29, 2007, 09:07:55 PM

Quote from: children with angels on June 25, 2007, 06:06:55 AM
Is anyone else worried that this might end up being a teensy bit racist in a regular comedy-set-abroad-look-at-the-funny-customs-of-the-locals type way?

oh like lost in translation?

Yeah, exactly like Lost in Translation.

Quote from: pozer on July 02, 2007, 11:49:58 AM
vague?  vague would be,  Fox Searchlight will release the film in New York a day or so after its Sept. 28 debut.  another example of vague:
dear pozer,
im hearing word that there will be a darjeeling screening in the near future.  ill let you know as soon as i know.
love,
your friend on the inside

telling me it opens in one town is quite vague on the part of Searchlight as it gives little info unless said receiver lives in New York.

So there should be a trailer appearing for it right...about...

...now?




....still waiting...

.. NOW

Pozer, how'd you like to take a SoCal xixax buddy to that vaguely inevitable secret screening?

Quote from: MacGuffin on July 01, 2007, 10:22:44 PM

Quote from: MacGuffin on June 27, 2007, 11:43:05 PMFox Searchlight will release the film in New York a day after its Sept. 28 debut.

Oops. Missed that.

Quote from: Ghostboy on July 02, 2007, 03:20:40 PM
Pozer, how'd you like to take a SoCal xixax buddy to that vaguely inevitable secret screening?

i would love to, buddy, you know this!  seriously would be awesome to catch an advanced flick with some xixax buddies.  my boy mac literally lives a couple towns away.  wed all have to wear our avatar masks of course.

anyway, this dude has done this before with the hype up, and so far has only been right (or has let me known when the time actually came at least) about the fountain.  but when/if the time comes, you know ill throw it out here.     

which meet-up is the winner:

1. pozer, ghostboy, and mac.
                  vs
2. cine, hedwig, and modage.

YOU decide.

pogomac all the way!

via Rushmore Academy...

According to Fox Searchlight, The Darjeeling Limited will open September 29, 2007 in New York and starting October 5 in other cities.

who will be the first to remark that this statement is vague........takers?

I wonder how Brody fit in with everyone else. It's like being the new kid in school, but you carry popularity baggage from your other school.

In other words, A Kool Kid Kocktail.

Quote from: Pubrick on June 25, 2007, 10:45:48 AM
yeah but wes'll do it in style. i'm assuming he's gonna put a permanent red dot in the centre of every shot.

Maybe this time the Indian characters will have actual names, unlike Pagoda.

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The brand new one-sheet for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29). The trailer apparently isn't online yet, but it will be exclusively attached this weekend to two Searchlight pics -- John Carney's Once and Danny Boyle's Sunshine (which opens this weekend).

i'm not seeing Mothersbaugh on there anywhere... :ponder:

No, but there's something about Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory.

Quote from: matt35mm on July 19, 2007, 10:46:09 PM
No, but there's something about Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory.

it's too small for me to make anything out of it.
i wonder why he broke the MM tradition?

Quote from: bigideas on July 20, 2007, 11:26:50 AMit's too small for me to make anything out of it.

Featuring Music From The Films Of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory.

Quote from: MacGuffin on July 20, 2007, 11:57:56 AM

Quote from: bigideas on July 20, 2007, 11:26:50 AMit's too small for me to make anything out of it.

Featuring Music From The Films Of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory.

Thanks, Mac.

Interesting, though not surprising because Wes Anderson has made it known that he adores Satyajit Ray.

Since Ray wrote the music for most of his movies and wrote a few things for some Merchant-Ivory thing, it's sort of being scored (at least partially) by Satyajit Ray, which is a neat thing.

and they'll prob be some Indian pop, too...

Wow, I really liked the look of this trailer (and I'm no apologist -- I didn't like the Life Aquatic trailer at all). Three cheers for Indian stereotypes!

Quote from: matt35mm on July 20, 2007, 12:20:59 PM
Since Ray wrote the music for most of his movies and wrote a few things for some Merchant-Ivory thing, it's sort of being scored (at least partially) by Satyajit Ray, which is a neat thing.

Ray composed the music for M-I's film Shakespearewallah.  There is a CD from India called Music of Satyajit Ray (http://www.biswas.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?cat=MD&srchby=&p=20) that features selections Ray's scores, if you are curious and don't want to wait for the soundtrack of The Darjeeling Limited.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/thedarjeelinglimited/

HOLY SHIT.

he's using my favorite Kinks songs! (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=4176.msg158621#msg158621) 
This Time Tomorrow and Strangers. 
if he is amazing, he will also use A Long Way From Home.

I like it, I like it a lot!

Thanks for the link mod!

This is going to be NICE!!!  :-D

Is it wrong to be looking forward to this just thaaaat much more than There Will Be Blood?

Quote from: SPARR•O on July 24, 2007, 10:32:37 AM
Is it wrong to be looking forward to this just thaaaat much more than There Will Be Blood?

Nothing's stopping you from out doing mod's traileratar.


And what happened to Trailer A?

First... I agree with Ghostboy... I like the look of this trailer and it seems it will be better than Life Aquatic

Quote from: SPARR•O on July 24, 2007, 10:32:37 AM
Is it wrong to be looking forward to this just thaaaat much more than There Will Be Blood?

of course it isn't "wrong" ;HOWEVER, this trailer looks like it could be a well-made parody of a Wes Anderson film trailer... it's just full of all the stuff we like from his films, but There Will Be Blood has a different feel than PT's others.

We'll see though... and I'm glad we'll see.

thank you wes anderson  :cry:

Quote from: RegularKarate on July 24, 2007, 02:52:41 PM
HOWEVER, this trailer looks like it could be a well-made parody of a Wes Anderson film trailer... it's just full of all the stuff we like from his films, but There Will Be Blood has a different feel than PT's others.

That's kind of it.  It's like with Darjeeling, it's an old friend you haven't seen in a while and you know it's going to be business as usual, like they never left.  But with There Will Be Blood, it's like an old friend who went off to war and now he's back... and you don't know what he's going to be like because he's been in the shit.  Is he going to be able to tell you about what he's seen or will he just have a thousand yard stare?  You just don't know.

Quote from: SPARR•O on July 24, 2007, 03:44:31 PM
But with There Will Be Blood, it's like an old friend who went off to war and now he's back... and you don't know what he's going to be like because he's been in the shit.  Is he going to be able to tell you about what he's seen or will he just have a thousand yard stare?  You just don't know.

That is nice.

This looks like it'll be REALLY similar to Life Aquatic.

On the plus side (not that Life Aquatic is bad - just don't want it again), "featuring music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory" sounds like a promisingly weird and interesting twist.

It's a useful trailer. It tells the skeptics of Wes Anderson not to get their hopes up too high. The theme of a disjointed family coming together looks the same as Life Aquatic and Royal. This film also looks to have exactly the same filmmaking scheme as those films as well. Hopefully the finished product shows some growth from Anderson.

Quote from: children with angels on July 24, 2007, 03:48:58 PM
On the plus side (not that Life Aquatic is bad - just don't want it again), "featuring music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory" sounds like a promisingly weird and interesting twist.

Weird, yes, but the question is: will there be a point? I'm afraid Anderson is doing this for the tie in of both a cultural and filmic reference. No bother that both references have little do with each other or even Anderson himself, but hopefully it has something to do with the story besides the generic. It will be a tough sell.

SPARR•O you are on fucking fire today. brilliantly put.

Quote from: modage on July 24, 2007, 09:08:34 AM
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/thedarjeelinglimited/

HOLY SHIT.

he's using my favorite Kinks songs! (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=4176.msg158621#msg158621) 
This Time Tomorrow and Strangers. 
if he is amazing, he will also use A Long Way From Home.

brody's almost always in the middle. whatever that means. lots of red dots in the middle too.

there will be who?

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on July 24, 2007, 04:40:36 PM
Weird, yes, but the question is: will there be a point? I'm afraid Anderson is doing this for the tie in of both a cultural and filmic reference. No bother that both references have little do with each other or even Anderson himself, but hopefully it has something to do with the story besides the generic. It will be a tough sell.

I'm skeptical too, given that this is film score music being reused and not pop tunes, classical music, etc. but I think Anderson will do something interesting with Ray's music.

This looks amazing. In my opinion, he's at his best while pouring on the drama. Quirky characters will only get you so far.

is that Eric Chase?

"i don't know, i guess the train's lost."

I think so.

i wonder if eric chase and wes would've been friends in real life, not as brothers but as people.

i dunno.

they'd prob not be sure of trust between each other when one borrowed a belt without asking first...

What's the other song on the trailer? Besides Mod's favorite Kinks' song (aka Strangers)?

my other favorite kinks song "This Time Tomorrow" from the same lp.

In what films did Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory use The Kinks?

Quote from: MacGuffin on July 25, 2007, 11:26:49 PM
In what films did Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory use The Kinks?

All of them.

"How can a train be lost? It's on rails." made me snort





snort rails. hwoefdhlsajoj

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Sorry but this looks like The Life Aquatic in a train. There are no visible signs of growth anywhere in this trailer. It would be the third film dealing with the exact same family problems and altered universes.

i forgot to say, i dig the ringo, beatlesque look on schwartzman.
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Quote from: Alexandro on August 03, 2007, 09:52:19 AM
Sorry but this looks like The Life Aquatic in a train. There are no visible signs of growth anywhere in this trailer. It would be the third film dealing with the exact same family problems and altered universes.

Yep

Quote from: Alexandro on August 03, 2007, 09:52:19 AM
Sorry but this looks like The Life Aquatic in a train. There are no visible signs of growth anywhere in this trailer. It would be the third film dealing with the exact same family problems and altered universes.

yeah, but fug it, it looks damn good.

i have a feeling he will do these movies for the rest of his career unless he adapts a book or something.

i know, i know, the Dahl story, but that's stop motion.............i mean his movies with living people...

I still hope the film carries a couple of surprises, I don't care if those are pleaseant or unpleasant, as long as they don't feel like a deja vu.

I was searching for the perfect adjective to describe what Wes Anderson's movies have become, and I've finally settled on "hackneyed", the definition of which is specifically "lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite".  He seems incapable of anything other than falling back on the same set of tropes and mannerisms over and over again:  Characters standing in rigid, geometrically-arranged groups of twos and threes staring straight into the camera with forlorn and melancholy expressions on their faces?  CHECK!  Brightly-colored, overly art-directed backgrounds filled with trinkets and kitschy props?  CHECK!  British Invasion-era pop songs?  CHECK!  Quirky facial hair and costumes?  CHECK!  Tracking shots in which the camera whip-pans back and forth, as if to mimic a bystander looking back and forth?  CHECK!  The presence of Owen Wilson or Jason Schwartzman? CHECK!  Stories about dysfunctional families attempting to reconcile and live with each other?  CHECK!  I really must say he's one of the most overrated filmmakers working right now.  I love Rushmore like most people, but this has become so tired...

he also needs actors who will rebel against his vision from time to time. like gene hackman. one of the reasons royal tenembaums works so well is because hackman breathes a lot of life into his performance and pretty much looks like the only one who's not so stiff all the time, cause that would go against his instincts as an actor (we all know that wasn't his favorite acting experience, but looking back he made it a lot more fun that what it could have been with someone more tamed in the lead, like bill murray).

Gene Hackman is good in Royal Tennebaums, but I don't think he makes the rest of the film good. He's still outnumbered 8 to 1 with the rest of the cast. They don't share his ability to get beyond the model acting. Hackman's a bright spot, but it doesn't cast a light over the film.

I'm just glad a few other people are sharing some of my sentiments. There seemed to be more disagreeance with PTA on the board than Wes Anderson, but I now know I'm not alone.

Quote from: adolfwolfli on August 07, 2007, 12:09:41 PM
I was searching for the perfect adjective to describe what Wes Anderson's movies have become, and I've finally settled on "hackneyed", the definition of which is specifically "lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite".  He seems incapable of anything other than falling back on the same set of tropes and mannerisms over and over again:  Characters standing in rigid, geometrically-arranged groups of twos and threes staring straight into the camera with forlorn and melancholy expressions on their faces?  CHECK!  Brightly-colored, overly art-directed backgrounds filled with trinkets and kitschy props?  CHECK!  British Invasion-era pop songs?  CHECK!  Quirky facial hair and costumes?  CHECK!  Tracking shots in which the camera whip-pans back and forth, as if to mimic a bystander looking back and forth?  CHECK!  The presence of Owen Wilson or Jason Schwartzman? CHECK!  Stories about dysfunctional families attempting to reconcile and live with each other?  CHECK!  I really must say he's one of the most overrated filmmakers working right now.  I love Rushmore like most people, but this has become so tired...

I think it's far too early to call him "one of the most overrated filmmakers working right now". In my opinion, he didn't go off the track until The Life Aquatic. I don't think you can call his first three films 'overrated'. I think they stand up with just about anyone's first three. While I agree with alot of what you're saying, in my opinion, we need to see darjeeling before we can make the claim that he's wildly overrated.

Maybe it's a personal thing but Hackman is, to me, a joy to watch in Tenembaums. I remember when watching it on the big screen he was also the one getting the widest audience response, meaning people of all ages were laughing at his stuff, as opposed to the rest of the cast, whose dead pan expressions got enthusiasm mostly from the 20 something crowd.

Hackman is at the center of Tenembaums and I think that's why his approach works, as he seems to be the character everyone else revolves around. Although I like The Life Aquatic, sometimes Murray's performance is too contained for me. He's contained, Owen's contained, everyone is, so it becomes kind of slow after a while.

man, fuck y'all.

Quote from: pete on August 08, 2007, 07:43:25 PM
fuck y'all.

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I wonder if this will end with a slow motion shot.  :ponder:

does the pope shit in the woods?

SPOILERY PREDICTION

the slow motion shot in the trailer is probably the ending. :shock:

Quote from: squints on August 12, 2007, 10:53:16 PM
does the pope shit in the woods?

"Does the pope jerk off?"

"I can shit in the woods but I can't jerk off."

Kudos to anyone who knows what that movie is from...Mac probably knows.

The Big Chill methinks.

I'm psyched about Darjeeling. Anything Mr Anderson does has my interest. Trailer got me more excited and the three seem great together. Don't usually like Adrien Brody but if the trailer's anything to go by I may be converted.

to go back to my earlier comment...I know all of us over here think we're way past director's trademark stylistic bullshit now, and therefore it's really easy to attack someone like Wes Anderson who seems to have endless trademark bullshit shots to toss around, it's also might be true that maybe he's stopped "growing" as a filmmaker much earlier than most or whatever things people like to say about him and his sameness. 

however, those are great movies. it seems like it'll be as funny and as heartbreaking as it's always been.  I can definitely see his progression even when others don't see it and I think the effortlessness that comes with his films makes his challenges less visible.  I have been reluctant to compare schmucky criticisms of him to schmucky criticism of Woody Allen (or maybe I've already done it but forgot about it) but fuck it, I see him as a guy trying to work out his problems and insecurities in life that result in very personal films with enough accessibility for whoever else interested.  He seems to come from a very privileged, elitist, and comfortable world, but, unlike that Sophia "Full of Shit" Coppola, his films have much more compassion and soul, which is all I ask for in going to the movies.
it's also very easy to get cynical about him the same way people are about Tarantino - 'cause we also tend to blame the dozens of shabby knock off films over the years on them.  chill out with that too, ty'all.

Goddamn right, Pete.

Well, save for the Sofia Coppola dig... to each their own, I suppose.

I just watched the Life Aquatic again at the Castro only to be reminded how sweet, slight, and occasionally affecting that film is. I can acknowledge that people believe Wes Anderson has fallen into a certain predictable, redundant, but I don't see it that way.

It reminds me of a Fellini quote, "At bottom, I am always making the same film, I am telling the story of characters in search of themselves, in search of a more authentic source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will more closely relate to the true roots of their individuality"

Which, I guess, can be applied to many directors. The degree to which they vary their continuing themes changes, certainly.... but at least with Anderson he doesn't seem passive about his cinematic obsessives.

You could even argue the same about David Lynch. He works with the same themes, and often variances on the same images.... perhaps just expanding them.

I think Anderson has expanded his view. I think, in pacing and in tone, he has become more daring and more experimental.

And I certainly don't think he's just playing it safe. Sure, there's always an audience there just for his quirks and soundtracks.... almost like a hipster version of Kevin Smith's audience... but those fuckers don't bring up the box office receipts. Life Aquatic didn't do well financially and critically, for that matter. It probably even ended his relationship with Touchstone... so, to make a film like Darjeeling (or what I imagine Darjeeling to be like, based on the bit of script I've read and the trailer), isn't the case of a director coasting at all.

I'm sure he knows there are critics and a good portion of the audience that are already sharpening their knives over this one. Yet he proceeded anyway, and made the film he wanted to make.

That's the kind of filmmaker I'm interested in.

i said earlier that he prob won't change much unless he adapts a book or takes on someone else's screenplay (and prob doesn't cast Owen) but i didn't say that that bothered me.

i love all his films and will be there opening day if possible.

(i saw TLA 3 times in the theater)

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weird shoes. dude must look horrible naked.

i may also have said this before, but it was obvious since the time Scorsese labelled him the next scorsese, there was a reason he did that. scorsese had been telling the same story in almost the same way his whole career until this millennium, with superficial exceptions like yeah the dalai lama is not the same as herny hill, but whatever. pta practically remade boogie nights with magnolia, you know? i can't even think of a good director who i WOULDN'T want to see remake his best films. except hitchcock, he needs to shut the hell up. fiiivve dollaauurs? gettouttaheerre,...//

Quote from: Pubrick on August 14, 2007, 10:21:03 PM
i may also have said this before, but it was obvious since the time Scorsese labelled him the next scorsese, there was a reason he did that. scorsese had been telling the same story in almost the same way his whole career until this millennium, with superficial exceptions like yeah the dalai lama is not the same as herny hill, but whatever. pta practically remade boogie nights with magnolia, you know? i can't even think of a good director who i WOULDN'T want to see remake his best films. except hitchcock, he needs to shut the hell up. fiiivve dollaauurs? gettouttaheerre,...//

Wow, the side of Pubrick I haven't seen.

Quote from: SiliasRuby on August 13, 2007, 12:24:45 AM"Does the pope jerk off?"

"I can shit in the woods but I can't jerk off."

Kudos to anyone who knows what that movie is from...Mac probably knows.

Godfather III?

Wes Anderson's passage to India
Source: The Guardian

Wes Anderson - the director of Rushmore, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Royal Tenenbaums - is to premiere his latest comedy, The Darjeeling Limited, at the Venice film festival. It will be accompanied by a 12-minute short called Hotel Chevalier, which acts as a prequel to the main feature.

Written by Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, The Darjeeling Limited stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Schwartzman as three brothers who embark on a train journey across India in a spiritual quest after their father's death. The short is about one of the brothers and a relationship that goes awry.

As Anderson admits, "Every movie I make is about someone who can't fit in, can't make things work or is dealing with failure."

No way Jose. And I like Anderson's movies. The one I have slight problems with is Life Aquatic. Most filmmakers do the same film over and over, but the comparisons to Scorsese and Woody Allen don't hold up at the moment. They may have common themes among their output, but I don't think Woody Allen started to get this predictable by his fifth film.

In fact,  he has tried a lot of different things in his career, even if he never gets out of his intellectual new york old fashioned music vibe. His visual style has changed throughout all these years, as his approach to directing actors. Just compare something like Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex with Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry...really, the criticisms towards him can be easily rebooted, but not with Wes Anderson.

And of course, the Dalai Lama is NOT Henry Hill, I don't think I have to explain why Scorsese has been doing the same movie in radically different ways all his life. In fact, I wouldn't call him the new Scorsese now.

I understand Pete´s point about going your own way and being faithful to your vision. I admire Wes Andeson for that, and I admire a lot of other filmmakers for that. He may not be playing it safe with the studios and critics, but I think he could be playing it safe with himself a little bit. I don't wanna be too obnoxious on this, cause I think he's very talented and I do prefer his same old same old to most of what's out there, but to me his films have become increasingly stiff and therefore have had less emotional impact on me. I just don't get that emotional with The Life Aquatic because everyone looks so fucking afraid to move outside the carefully planned frame.

The Coppola bashing I don't get. She has certainly taken more risks with everyone, including herself, trough her first three films. In my view, each one better than the last one.

Quote from: Pubrick on August 14, 2007, 10:21:03 PM
weird shoes. dude must look horrible naked.

i may also have said this before, but it was obvious since the time Scorsese labelled him the next scorsese, there was a reason he did that. scorsese had been telling the same story in almost the same way his whole career until this millennium, with superficial exceptions like yeah the dalai lama is not the same as herny hill, but whatever. pta practically remade boogie nights with magnolia, you know? i can't even think of a good director who i WOULDN'T want to see remake his best films. except hitchcock, he needs to shut the hell up. fiiivve dollaauurs? gettouttaheerre,...//

hahaha!  right after i read the first line, i was gonna quote it saying 'drunk post?'  then the awesomeness of the rest of it followed.  im suprised you didnt write horny hill. 

Behind The Scenes:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809823973/video/3715425/

Quote from: Pubrick on August 14, 2007, 10:21:03 PM
weird shoes. dude must look horrible naked.

i may also have said this before, but it was obvious since the time Scorsese labelled him the next scorsese, there was a reason he did that. scorsese had been telling the same story in almost the same way his whole career until this millennium, with superficial exceptions like yeah the dalai lama is not the same as herny hill, but whatever. pta practically remade boogie nights with magnolia, you know? i can't even think of a good director who i WOULDN'T want to see remake his best films. except hitchcock, he needs to shut the hell up. fiiivve dollaauurs? gettouttaheerre,...//

i'll drink to that.

Alright, it looks like I limited my criticism. Not only do I think Wes Anderson has stalled as far as ambition is concerned, but I also think his last two films have been degrades over Rushmore and Bottle Rocket.

I enjoyed both of those movies for their comic characterization and light heartedness. I liked the interplay between the characters. I didn't enjoy Royal Tennebaums or Life Aquatic because Wes Anderson allowed production effects to take over the story. During Rushmore, I thought it was clever to have the final stage production by Max Fischer be an over the top recreation of real life. The audience being shocked a nice play turned into a dramatic war story was funny.

Anderson took his success of that play with effects and recreation and made a story out of it with Royal Tennenbaums. The actors have as much realistic mobility as the play-actors on Max Fischer's stage. They are defined by costumes and make up and do well to simply stand and mouth their lines. They do not inhabit their characters but instead just model them. Like I said, the only actor who seemed to break out of the shell was Gene Hackman. Everyone else was a stiff. And considering The Royal Tennenbaums had the most dramatic moments of any Wes Anderson film, I was a little put off.

Life Aquatic wasn't as excruciating as Tennenbaums, but it still was more memorable for production effects. The hope with Darjeeling Limited is that it does at least get back to what made Rushmore good. I don't ask for genius from Anderson. A film about characters and with jokes that don't fall flat would be a start.

Quote from: Alexandro on August 15, 2007, 10:59:17 AM
He may not be playing it safe with the studios and critics, but I think he could be playing it safe with himself a little bit.

how can you even determine that?  it's one of those jabs that critics always make.  first of all, how does wes anderson's inner turmoil concern you, and who the fuck are you to speak for his personal creative journey.  secondly, this is exactly the thing I hate about "serious" film criticism, it stresses on these non-matters and keeps on trying to turn filmmaking into some type of hurdling event.  first by ascribing these non-existent records, and then shitting on the filmmakers when they don't break the records.  I can understand that from a consumer's perspective; as a consumer, you hope your loyalty to a brand pays off.  however, you cannot let your capitalist expectations taint your understanding of the creative process.  and you cannot turn your lack of understanding of the creative process into deceptive words where their only usefulness is in making some dude who can see through your bullshit feel better typing this last paragraph.  and all of this is especially ironic coming from the guys who use the same three or four sets of words to describe every single film on this board.

now I have to admit that I'm being presumptious when I'm addressing you primarily as someone who doesn't make films, not even bad ones.  maybe alexandro and gold trumpet the filmmakers make films that look nothing like their words.  and I certainly hope that's case.  but as far as my instincts can be trusted, I think you're being unfair to the players in a game you don't participate in by making up rules that only make sense to you.

as for the coppola bashing.  I take shots at her whenever I can.  she's a substance-free director, born of wealth, who loves to celebrate ignorance.  her gleefully privileged POV sickens me.  glamorous banality wrapped in sundance chic.  I know a lot of the filmmakers I love are fans of hers, but fuck them on that one.  Christopher Doyle is on my side (though he's tight with gus van sant and fuck that guy too).  she's sensitive towards the things and people that she cares about, unfortunately they are usually about rich people and their self-inflicted problems.  these problems can be fascinating too, if only has the capacity or the soulfulness to relate them to people whom aren't like (or maybe "whom aren't as good as") her.

I'm not working on a need to prove you anything basis. Don't hang the "understanding the creative process" bullshit argument over me. It distorts the argument because no one here is guilt free in taking positions against filmmakers that places standards in what they expect them to achieve. Wes Anderson can make films about the same characters and be the best filmmaker out there if he just made them better. I gave reasons about why I didn't like his films. You bashed Sofia Coppola for a weird reason that can be neither argued or defended. That doesnt look good after your rant.

Pete, relax man. I'm not attacking you. I'm not even attacking Wes Anderson. I like his movies, I don't find them boring or anything. But I think he can do better than remaking The Royal Tenenbaums again, which is what may be the case.  I'm not gonna say what I already said. I don't think I'm being unfair. And I'm sorry but we're supposed to discuss films here and give opinions.

However, this has nothing to do with me or GT making better films than anyone. This has to do with Wes Anderson's movies. I'm sure he has all the best intentions. I don't think he sits down and thinks how he's gonna scam all of us again. I do think his last film, as much as I loved it when I first saw it, don't really hold up to me on repeated viewings. And that trailer makes it look as if this is more of the same. I'm not a critic, or a filmmaker, I am part of the audience and can certainly expect from a promising filmmaker to give me a film that I can watch again with no problems. Simple as that. Is not a non issue to me. And I didn't say I knew he was playing it safe on himself, I said I think he does, and I still thinks so. This is not some game I don't participate in. This is an art. If you're repetitive, it should work as well as the first time. It has nothing to do with capitalism fur sure.

By the way, your criticisms of Coppola are just the same every other critic out there uses to trash her.

 I don't think Hackman's performance was a revolt against Anderson's direction or style. If it's incongruous to the actions of everyone around him, I think it's inherent to the plot and can be attributed both to Anderson's direction and to Hackman's fine performance. Regardless of whether their personalities clashed on set, I think what was ultimately delivered was of Anderson's design. And, if that performance was memorable enough to give Hackman the credit for it, I don't think the film could be entirely described as "excruciating".

I don't think Anderson's playing it safe, either. In tone and in pacing, I think he experiments in every film. Though, I kind of covered that in my last post. To expound on the Life Aquatic, emotionally, is just that - an emotional argument. It made me laugh, and the sense of melancholy also stuck with me. How you reacted to the film, I can't argue with. It's an argument that is personal more than anything else. For me, production effects certainly weren't the first thing I think of when I remember the movie.

Though, I'm not against hearing opposing opinions on Anderson. He's one of the few filmmakers working today that I rarely hear someone take criticism too (not in the press, but rather in the groups of people I associate with.)

I get more enjoyment reading a dissenting opinion, so long as it's thought out* - than praise without merit.

I also think it's a little premature to say Anderson's ambition has stalled. The fact that he's still making films and that the one following Darjeeling is a stop-motion adaptation. Of course, I'm a sucker for the director's I like, and unless he makes American Pie 5, or starts directing CSI - his ambition is his and his alone, without me to question it.

So, yeah, I still agree with you, Pete.... save for the Coppola bit**. I wouldn't attack her films for making films about rich people with self-inflicted problems - to some extent Anderson does the same.... not to mention Whit Stillman, who in his limited career has told the same story, of the same affluent people, three times. Each to rewarding effect.***

*Unlike this one which is, really, just a slightly-drunk, late night ramble.
**And the Van Sant bit. I mean, goddamn, My Own Private Idaho... Drugstore Cowboy... these films don't do anything for you, man?
***Though, I do admit to not giving much of a shit about Last Days of Disco.

I think Tenenbaums is a masterpiece. I also agree that he'll make little funny movies like this for the bulk of his career. I'm ok with that. I'll watch them for the same reason I watch a Sturges flick. I love the humor and don't feel a great need to chart his artistic growth. I do think that there is some truth to the Woody Allen comparisons as well, in terms of the tone of each film being quite similar. 

I do think we need to see Darjeeling before we can hash this out effectively.

The Darjeeling Limited will be the closing night Gala at the London Film Festival this year.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2260060.ece

Exclusive Featurette: 'The Darjeeling Limited'
Source: MTV

We're anxiously looking forward to Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited," so we're quite thrilled to be teaming up with Fox Searchlight to roll out a series of exclusive behind-the-scenes featurettes from the film, which stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as three brothers who travel to India. We're also psyched that Anderson himself wrote a description for us of the featurette, which follows below...

"We started our shoot in the middle of one of the busiest and least accessible (by anything other than bicycle or auto-rickshaw) parts of Jodphur. Luckily, our key grip Sanjay Sami introduced us to his "rickshaw dolly" which became our favorite piece of equipment."


http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/08/17/exclusive-featurette-the-darjeeling-limited/

just realized now that from now on whenever i order darjeeling tea, the hipster dipshits that work at tealuxe are all gonna be, dude, did you see that movie? wes anderson rawks! it must be why you like that tea so much!



or not.

The Darjeeling Limited
Source: Entertainment Weekly

Several years ago, Wes Anderson ran an idea by his Rushmore star, Jason Schwartzman. ''Wes said, 'How about a movie with three brothers on a train?''' Schwartzman recalls. ''I was like, 'Uh, yeah, it sounds great!' And he said, 'Just think about it.' I didn't think it was an invitation to help him write it.''

Turned out it was. Anderson, who scripted Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums with Owen Wilson and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou with Noah Baumbach, collaborated on this one with Schwartzman and the actor's cousin Roman Coppola (CQ). Over the course of two and a half years, meeting in various locales around the world to write, the three friends crafted a tale about a trio of estranged siblings — played by Schwartzman, Wilson, and Anderson-repertory newcomer Adrien Brody — who, after the death of their father, undertake a ''spiritual journey'' on a train through India. ''The movie's about how you can be in a beautiful place,'' says Schwartzman, ''and someone you love can push your buttons, and you're like, 'I can't believe this is happening! Not here, not now!'''

Anderson got the idea to set the movie in India from Martin Scorsese, who years ago showed him a print of The River, Jean Renoir's 1951 film about the subcontinent. ''Seeing that was the moment that made me think I really needed to do this,'' says the director, who also credits the films of Satyajit Ray for inspiration. ''I owe a debt [to Scorsese], definitely.'' Even though the production — based in Rajasthan on the country's northwest coast — used a real train, and the movie is packed with the director's usual eyepopping attention to meticulous and funny detail, Wilson emphasizes that it's about brothers not a wacky train ride through India. ''Sometimes people focus on the eccentric stuff in Wes' films,'' says Wilson, ''and the other stuff gets lost, that there's a real emotion in his work. It's definitely there in this one.'' All aboard. (Opens limited Sept. 29; goes wide in October)

Exclusive Featurette: The Slithery Star Of 'Darjeeling Limited'
Source: MTV

Alright, the clip below may seem a little random. It involves a snake but more importantly it involves Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited." And for that reason alone I'm interested.

Here's how Wes himself wanted to introduce the exclusive clip you'll watch below:

"We originally wanted to cast a little, red, spectacularly posoinous species called a Krait for the snake in our story, but unfortunately the only one we had actually seen (which had been captured by the manager of a tea estate in Darjeeling) had just been re-released into the wild. The most readily available snakes in Rajasthan seem to be cobras."


http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/08/22/exclusive-the-slithery-star-of-darjeeling-limited/

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2007/07/wes-anderson-and-satyajit-ray.html

7/30/2007
Wes Anderson And The Satyajit Ray Connection

Ever since Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" trailer was released online there's obviously been a lot of chatter about the film. One uniformed blog naively speculated that the credits that indicated the use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory might even be a joke on Anderson's part.

Far from it. As we noted earlier last week, Anderson's preoccupation with India goes back as least as far as 2002 when he screened Jean Renoir's India-set film, "The River" with Martin Scorsese (who was instrumental in getting the film re-released on DVD by Criterion). But in fact, Anderson's been a long-time admirer of the venerable Indian master Ray and dedicated the 'Darjeeling' movie to him.

"[Ray's] work has been an enormous influence on ["The Darjeeling Limited"]... He was my inspiration for coming to India in the first place," Anderson said in a January 28, 2007 with a local Rajasthan paper, the Statesman. "He is the reason I came here, but his films have also inspired all my other movies in different ways, and I feel I should dedicate the movie to him."

While North Americans are often fond of the Bollywood pumped out of Mumbai with rather prodigious aplomb, Anderson admitted he's not very familiar with the genre and again Ray, was his window to India."My main knowledge of Indian films is Ray's films, which I learned about from renting "Teen Kanya"(Three Daughters) on Betamax in my video store in Houston, Texas, when I was about 15. I also love Jean Renoir's film "The River," which was made by a French director, but is a very beautiful Indian film," he said. "Ray's films, along with "The River" and Louis Malle's documentaries, were essentially all I knew about India before coming here. I became somewhat obsessed with the India I learned about from those films."

Wes was pretty much hooked on Ray ever since and a quick scan of 'Life Aquatic' interviews shows that Wes was already thinking of shooting something in India by the time 'Aquatic' was complete.

"Ray is one of my favourites," Anderson said. "His films (which were usually adapted by him from books) feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of "The Adversary" ("Pratidwandi"), "Company Limited" ("Seemabaddha"), and "The Middleman" ("Jana Aranya"), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and "Days and Nights in the Forest" ("Aranyer Din Ratri"), which I relate to the kind of movies and books that completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think "Charulata" ("The Lonely Wife") is one of his most beautiful films, and also "Teen Kanya" (especially "The Postmaster") and the Apu films."

Those trying to speculate what Anderson might use musically (and there have been many), need only look at the posters' obvious "featuring music from the films of" Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory" credit.

As we noted a few weeks ago, this could likely mean the use of Ravi Shankar (who scored Ray's Apu Trilogy) and Ustad Vilayat Khan (another Sitar maestro) who scored many of the early Merchant Ivory films set in India (while their films are generally known for their reserved British dramas, Ismail Merchant was born in Bombay and didn't leave India for the United States until he was 22. Little known fact: Merchant Ivory were not only film producers for over 40 years, they were lifelong "partners." Merchant passed in 2005.)

But almost certainly, we should expect the music of Satyajit Ray himself. After 1961's aforementioned "Teen Kanya," the director became frustrated with outside musicians and began composing much of his own music for his films.

Anderson loves the aforementioned 1964 Ray film, "Charulata" (aka The Lonely Wife") so much, that he appropriated the movie's Ray-composed song, "Charu Theme" for the beginning of "The Darjeeling Limited" trailer (the song that appears before the Lola Vs. Powerman... Kinks tracks).

So the use of songs composed by polymathematic Ray are a strong bet, though at the time, even Anderson was having a hard time tracking down all the originals scores he wanted.

"I listened to Ray's scores continuously during [the film's writing] process, and I have selected numerous cues that I think are perfect for my story. I would love to hear more however, I would love to listen to the soundtrack from "Kanchenjungha" " he told the Statesman. "I would like to fill the movie with Ray's music, and in some places I have ideas to sculpt the scenes around the music rather than vice-versa. I would like to use the Ray scores exactly as I would use an original score written for my own film."

the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

Production Day #6:

http://video.aol.com/video/movies-the-darjeeling-limited-behind-the-scenes-clip-no-2/1962450

Quote from: bigideas on August 23, 2007, 04:17:41 PM
the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song. :shock:

Quote from: Hedwig on August 24, 2007, 11:22:34 PM

Quote from: bigideas on August 23, 2007, 04:17:41 PM
the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song. :shock:

Quote(i won't post for spoiler reasons)

Quote from: I Love a Magician on September 01, 2007, 01:53:14 PM

Quote from: Hedwig on August 24, 2007, 11:22:34 PM

Quote from: bigideas on August 23, 2007, 04:17:41 PM
the soundtrack listing can be found here (i won't post for spoiler reasons)

http://www.rushmoreacademy.com/index.php/2007/08/23/darjeeling-limited-soundtrack-news/

it ends on a Journey song. :shock:

Quote(i won't post for spoiler reasons)

word scramble.

god damn you jokin sons of bitches

i know now that this is the actual film song list, not the listing for the CD soundtrack.

rushmore academy has a press kit.

The Hammer Museum's next Big Time is Oct 4 and it's the Darjeeling Limited.

I requested the day off of work.

Owen Wilson, Alive and Ill On-Screen
By RICHARD CORLISS; Time Magazine

*SPOILER WARNING - READ AT OWN RISK*

It's a shock, but not a surprise, to see Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, the new semi-comedy from Wes Anderson that had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last night. As Francis, the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, he's clearly in physical distress. His head is wrapped in two thick bandages, one horizontal, one vertical, as if to keep his brains from seeping out. The nose Wilson's fans know to be charmingly broken has a Band Aid on it. His right hand and wrist are taped, and he uses a cane to walk.

He looks a mess — funny, in the context of the film; not so, given Wilson's hospitalization a week ago for what was described as a slashed-wrist suicide attempt. The actor was released Saturday and is in his Santa Monica home, People.com reported, under 24-hour watch by friends and family, instead of on the red carpet in Venice.

In the movie, Francis is a man on a quest: to reconnect with his brothers Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman). They've met in India, on a long train trip, for what Francis hopes will be a three-way spiritual quest. "I want us to be completely open," he tells Peter and Jack, "and say yes to everything, even if it's shocking and painful." OK, then, Peter has an open question for Francis:? "What happened to your face?"

He had an accident, Francis replies, and banged himself up pretty severely. Of his surgeons, he says, "They did all the procedures right, the result of which is I'm still alive." He admits he has "some healing to do," to which Jack cheerleadingly says, "Gettin' there, though," and Peter offers the compliment, "Gives you character." Later Francis reveals that the incident was not quite an accident: "I smashed into a hill on purpose on my motorcycle."

This — along with the fact than Wilson is one of three brothers (Andrew and Luke are in movies too) — concludes the witness report on the coincidences between Francis Whitman and Owen Wilson. Enough already. I feel creepy just passing this information along, as if a critic were auditioning to be a coroner.

Yet, sad as the news is about Wilson's medical condition, what registers most strongly in Darjeeling is his sweet deadpan charm. What's amusing about all his bandages, which make his head as turbaned as that of the Sikh fellow who runs the train the brothers are on, is now how he wears them but how he ignores them; it's as if Francis is having a bad hair day everyone notices but him. Speaking in an intense whisper, Wilson unleashes all kinds of crackpot or domineering suggestions that somehow make momentary sense. He's what actors have to be: salesmen of dreams, carriers of seductive toxins. Wilson always makes the improbable plausible.

But I fear Darjeeling, which opens the New York Film Festival Sept. 28 and will play in major cities shortly thereafter, is beyond even Wilson's powers of persuasion. It's basically the story of three well-heeled guys on one of those self-help vacations that upper-class searchers took in the 60s. Go to India and get your life validated by the Maharishi. Or get good drugs at fire-sale prices. This could have ended up as a Midnight Express nightmare, except that the Whitman boys' luck is a little better, a little weirder. One of them finds romance with a train hostess (lovely Amara Karan). Two of them save local children from drowning. They meet up with their mother (Anjelica Huston) — the source, we soon realize, of some of the boys' bad habits. ?

Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so super-cool, it's chilly. In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by with the camera point-of-view shifted 90 or 180 degrees — which is geometrically groovy, no question, but pretty quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy, but not the aptitude. His films are museum artifacts of what someone thought could be funny. They're airless. Movies under glass.

Wilson has appeared in all five of Anderson's feature films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the new one) and co-wrote the first three — the ones I prefer in the the director's oeuvre. The script here is by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola (Francis' son, Sofia's brother) and it doesn't add luster to anyone's reputation.

The Darjeeling program includes a related 13-min. film, Hotel Chevalier. Schwartzman's Jack seems uneasy when he gets a call from an ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) who insists on showing up in his swank hotel room. He draws a bubble bath for her. They flirt and parry and wind up in bed, exchanging dialogue that we hear again, at the end of Darjeeling, as part of a story Jack has written. It's a beguiling vignette that, as Closer and My Blueberry Nights did, shows Portman as a comic actress in fresh bloom. I wish that she, and some of the feeling and wit of the short film, had been in the long one.

Actually, there's a bit in Darjeeling — it lasts just a minute or so — that shows what Anderson is capable of. The camera tracks down a corridor of train compartments; in each is a different character, glimpsed for just a few seconds. The Sikh trainman, the hostess, Peter's wife, Jack's Paris assignation...and Bill Murray, as a businessman seen briefly at the film's opening. It's a gracefully composed series of snapshots into the lives of Darjeeling's subsidiary characters, and it made me yearn to dip more fully into their stories. I wanted to be in their movies more than in the one about the Whitman brothers.

Maybe Anderson could make a film, at least a short, about each of these characters. It'd be fine by me if his collaborator on the screenplays was Owen Wilson. It could be therapeutic for all of us.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hollywoodreporter.com%2Fhr%2Fphotos%2Fstylus%2F9357.jpg&hash=07d713b95a751e1e4d0ac93e0f81c976b7ed6cc6)


Review: The Darjeeling Limited
Bottom Line: A train ride without laughs or charm.
By Ray Bennett; Hollywood Reporter

VENICE, Italy-- The whimsical and insightful charm that Wes Anderson and his filmmaking pals have displayed in such films as "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" curdles ruinously in the Indian sun that shines so brightly in their smug and self-satisfied new film "The Darjeeling Limited."

Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman star as brothers on what is supposedly a spiritual journey to the sub-continent. Their father has been dead for a year and their mother (a cameo from Anjelica Huston), who has found religion in the sub-continent, discourages a visit and warns of a man-eating tiger in the vicinity, although it is never seen.

The eldest brother, Francis (Wilson) has planned a detailed itinerary, however, that will allow them to see their mother and on the way hit all the key Indian sources of spiritual renewal on brief railway stops aboard the titular train. If it's Rajasthan, it must be enlightenment.

What ensues is like a third-rate Hope and Crosby picture with no big laughs and nothing to say as the completely self-involved threesome ride the rails in a circle back to their dull and uninteresting lives.

"The Darjeeling Limited" will need all the help it can get to find audiences beyond the stars' committed fans.

The pretensions surrounding this production begin with a 13-minute short film titled "Hotel Chavalier" that was screened ahead of the main feature at the Venice International Film Festival. It will be shown at other festivals and on the Internet, and be included on the eventual DVD, but it will not play in theaters when the picture is released.

Set in a hotel in Paris, the short film shows a brief encounter between the youngest brother, Jack (Schwartzman) and his on-and-off girlfriend (Natalie Portman). It has no significance though except as a platform for the great 1960s anthem "Where Do You Go to My Lovely?" by Peter Sarstedt.

The feature begins with middle brother Peter (Brody) catching the train at the last minute and joining his siblings in their first-class carriage. Childhood rivalries and irksome personality ticks immediately surface, although they all agree on the need for cigarettes and the best of India's over-the-counter medications.

The Darjeeling Limited is a train especially mocked up for the film, a hybrid of the old U.S. 20th Century Limited and the Orient Express with regional patterns and colors, and not remotely like the air-conditioned models of modern India. The boys jump off and on quite a bit and run up small hills trying to communicate with ancient spirits.

While Francis and Peter needle each other, Jack has sex with the train's attractive Indian stewardess (Amara Karan), no doubt because Schwartzman had a hand in the screenplay. They visit bazaars and temples, and in one excruciating sequence are involved in an incident on a swift-moving river in which a little boy is killed.

They stay for the funeral but appear oddly unmarked by the experience, being keen to get on with their search for mom. Huston shows up late in the picture as a kind of nun to explain why she didn't go to their father's funeral, the circumstances of which are revealed in a stilted flashback.

There's an interesting soundtrack with lots of excerpts from the scores to films by Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory along with some Kinks and Rolling Stones tracks. The colors are beautiful and well captured by cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

But when current affairs are in such a parlous state, it's almost unforgivable to make a film about stupid American men traveling abroad with not the slightest awareness of or reference to anything that's going on in the world. The film is overly pleased with itself and the characters are way too self-absorbed. There's never a man-eating tiger around when you need one.

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Review The Darjeeling Limited
By ALISSA SIMON; Variety

Three estranged brothers bond and get rid of some literal and figurative baggage during a trip across India in Wes Anderson's colorful and kinetic seriocomedy "The Darjeeling Limited." Breaking no new ground thematically, pic comes closer to "The Royal Tenenbaums" than "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," but without achieving the poignance of "Rushmore." Inventively staged pic should satisfy the upscale, youth and cult auds Anderson has developed, though it's unlikely to draw significantly better than his earlier work. Following its Venice and New York fest bows, Fox Searchlight item will go into limited U.S. release on Sept. 29.

India's vibrant landscapes and varied modes of travel, in particular the confined space of the locomotive, prove extremely congenial to Anderson's brand of visual humor and widescreen setups. Framing, choreography and physical comedy reference classic train flicks ranging from "Twentieth Century" and "A Night at the Opera" to "A Hard Day's Night."

After a short prologue that neatly epitomizes India's color and chaos -- and offers a cameo for Anderson regular Bill Murray -- pic settles into a first-class sleeping cabin aboard the Darjeeling Limited, where the Whitman brothers have gathered. Francis ( frequent Anderson collaborator Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (co-scripter Jason Schwartzman) haven't spoken since their father's funeral one year earlier.

Clearly, the siblings all have some healing to do. Francis, the eldest, is swathed in mummy-like bandages resulting from a motorcycle accident (an image that could have unintended resonance for auds who have followed Wilson's recent personal crises). Middle child Peter can't come to terms with his wife's pregnancy. And Jack, the youngest, is so obsessed with his ex-girlfriend he continually eavesdrops on her answering machine.

Armed with a supply of Indian pain relievers, the brothers play catch-up and fall into familiar family patterns. Francis tries to impose his itineraries and menu decisions, Peter flaunts their father's possessions and implies he was the favorite child, and Jack tries to avoid their quarreling through a whirlwind affair with comely train stewardess Rita (Amara Karan).

After they're ejected from the train for egregious rule-breaking, Francis reveals an ulterior motive behind the trip: He wants them to visit their mother (Anjelica Huston), who's now a nun in a Himalayan convent, but she seems less than keen to see them. The convent scenes humorously establish the source of Francis' most irritating mannerisms and pave the way for spiritual healing.

Here, as in his two prior outings, Anderson's arch, highly artificial style gets in the way of character and emotional development, rendering pic piquant rather than profound. Despite intense perfs by Wilson and Brody, Francis and Peter come off as not particularly nice. Schwartzman and Huston fare best at humanizing their characters, while newcomer Karan makes a strong impression as the sexy "sweet lime" girl.

Script gets sibling dynamics down pat, with oft-repeated lines accumulating meaning throughout pic.

Tech credits are top-notch, with particular kudos to Mark Friedberg's gorgeous, intricate production design and Robert Yeoman's nimble lensing. A specially designed, numbered luggage set from Louis Vuitton plays a significant role.

Music track effectively sets the mood with selections from Indian film scores alternating with choice rock tunes.

In Venice, pic screened with a nifty 13-minute short, "Hotel Chevalier," identified in the end credits as "Part 1 of 'The Darjeeling Limited.' " Completed in 2005, pic shows Jack and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in the titular Parisian hotel.

Short provides a potent prologue that further serves to make Jack the most sympathetic of the brothers and adds resonance to visual motifs that recur in the feature. Per Anderson, "Hotel Chevalier" will not be shown in theaters, but rather on the Internet, at festivals and on DVD.

Nice start... we didnt need to read that or see the film to say that!

Venice Film Festival 2007 diary part four
Wes Anderson has made a name for himself as a purveyor of smart, postmodern comedies. Dave Calhoun reviews his new film, 'The Darjeeling Limited', from the Venice Film Festival and finds the talented director on good form but very much playing to the gallery.
Source: TimeOut London

The Wes Anderson international troupe of tragic-comic players – minus Owen Wilson – rolled into Venice on Monday for the world premiere of 'The Darjeeling Limited', which Anderson shot last year almost entirely in India. Not only did Anderson make the film in India, but he was often shooting on a moving train, with Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzmann playing three brothers who embark on a journey through the sub-continent a year after their father's death: they haven't seen each other since the funeral and they hope that India will bring them closer together as friends and brothers.

It's a Wes Anderson movie from the off: the sound of The Kinks and the Stones mixed with the music of Satyajit Ray; the marriage of colour, costume and production-design to create a vivid impression of the real world; and, of course, the presence of Wilson and Bill Murray – even if Murray, a veteran of 'Rushmore' and 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' appears cryptically for only a few minutes as 'The Businessman' (probably a reflection of the brothers' father) and barely utters one word. As ever with Anderson's work, the comic and the melancholic work together, and while 'Darjeeling' is lighter on its feet than 'The Life Aquatic' because of its speedy pace and the relative simplicity of its camerawork, still we encounter the familiar sight for a Wes Anderson picture of privileged but troubled young men struggling to find a place for themselves in the shadow of their family.

Before the Venice screening of 'Darjeeling', Anderson presented a seventeen-minute short film called 'Hotel Chevalier', which he originally conceived to play before the main feature, although there's now talk that it will only be available to see online come the film's UK release in November. This wistful and maudlin short story offers some background to the main attraction as Schwartzmann and Natalie Portman play a pair of estranged lovers who square up to each other in the sumptuous surroundings of a Parisian hotel room.

Those fifteen minutes are classic Wes Anderson. His camera moves with grace and precision through the room as Schwartzmann, with a sad look on his face and a stark moustache above his lip, waits for Portman to arrive. Sitting on the floor is a beautiful tanned-leather trunk decorated with colourful images of elephants (one of a set crafted especially for the film by Marc Jacobs). On the stereo we hear Peter Sarstedt's wistful ode to Paris, 'Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)', and all around there's evidence of the same deep orange that characterises Schwartzmann's hotel dressing-gown, from the thick duvet on the bed to the towels in the bathroom. If there's one element of 'Hotel Chevalier' that's surprising for Anderson, it's a strong sense of romance and sexuality: in one shot, Schwartzmann gently pulls off Portman's clothes to reveal her naked body from behind, and a later shot has Portman, nude, standing still in a doorway, one foot up against the frame. It's a beautiful shot, and one that's made even more pertinent by Sarstedt's melancholic lyrics on the soundtrack. It's the sexiest thing that Anderson has ever done.

Yet it's more business-as-usual in 'The Darjeeling Limited', where sex and sensuality are barely in evidence among the sibling trio, even if Schwartzmann's character has a brief explosion of passion with a train hostess (Amara Karan). Mostly, this is a story of men who are apart from women and who are fighting to communicate and find a balance between each other, even if one brother insists on ordering food for the others and can't bear the idea of lending another his expensive belt. There's Peter (Brody), whose reticence to admit that his wife is seven-and-a-half months pregnant betrays the fact that he can't cope with the idea of fatherhood. There's Jack (Schwartzmann), whose romantic life is in tatters, although he can't help but use the phone to hack into his ex-girifriend's answering machine, for which he still has the code. And there's Francis (Wilson), a wealthy businessman, the instigator of the trip and a control-freak who has a personal assistant travelling in another carriage of the train who delivers laminated schedules under his cabin door every morning. When Francis first appears, his head is swathed in bandages after a serious motorcycle crash back in America; it's much later that we learn the true cause of his injuries.

There's much in 'Darjeeling' that's familiar from many road movies: stand-offs, arguments, fights, apologies, shared experiences, lessons learnt and relationships strengthened. We discover more about each of the brothers as we go along, but there's less of the intricate background and layering of some of Anderson's other films, particularly 'The Royal Tenenbaums', which delighted in the complexity of its biographies. Instead, much is left to the moment and the landscape: Anderson sucks in the sights, colours, oddities and details of India, from the way that tickets are checked on the train to visits to a shoe-shiner and a holy temple. There's a particularly moving episode involving the funeral of a child that the brothers encounter, which allows for one of Anderson's trademark slow dolly shots cut to the sound of The Kinks.

As ever, Anderson's humour is rarely laugh-out-loud, which sometimes feels awkward: the set-up, with three depressed Americans travelling on a train in a foreign country, at least superficially calls for comedy. Instead, the effect of the film is subtle as it invites us to share in the characters' slow transformation, culminating in a late scene in a monastery, where the boys encounter their mother, played by Anjelica Houston. Structurally, the film isn't entirely sound, and the emotional depth of both 'Hotel Chevalier' and certainly 'The Royal Tenenbaums' and 'Rushmore' is never quite achieved. But 'The Darjeeling Limited' has much charm, is a sensitive piece, is occasionally very funny and further shows Anderson to be a storyteller with a touch for the visually and aurally hip that you imagine he couldn't shake if he tried.

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 04, 2007, 12:13:06 AMJack has sex with the train's attractive Indian stewardess (Amara Karan), no doubt because Schwartzman had a hand in the screenplay.

This is the kind of criticism that makes some film critics sound plain stupid.

'Speed,' 'Darjeeling' take early Venice nods

VENICE, Italy -- Ed Radtke's coming-of-age drama "The Speed of Life" won the Venice Film Festival's first Queer Lion award while Wes Anderson's "Darjeeling Limited" took home the Golden Lion Cub, an award selected by school children.

Radtke's film -- about a group of New York youths who steal video cameras and make films from the tapes inside -- screened in the Venice Days sidebar for up-and-coming directors. The story was judged to have featured the most accurate portrayal of a gay character out of the 57 new feature films screening in Venice.

The Venice Gays jury, which awarded the prize, issued a statement calling on the festival to include more films that portray gay characters in a truthful way in future editions.

"Darjeeling Limited," a comedy about a trio of brothers on a trip across India, was awarded its Golden Lion Cub by a jury of local youths studying at the Agiscuola, near Venice's Lido. In 18 previous editions, the school children have correctly picked the winner of the festival's top prize -- Golden Lion -- seven times.

In other prizes announced Friday, the City of Venice Award for a director from an underdeveloped country went to India's Murali Nair, the director of last year's acclaimed drama "Unni."

"Redacted," the Iraq War film from Brian DePalma, won the Digital Award from the Future Film Festival, as the Venice event's best film made using digital technologies.

The main prize-winners will be announced Saturday

Quote from: reporter on September 08, 2007, 01:51:46 AMAccording to trade reports, the short will only be shown during festival screenings and will not accompany Darjeeling when it hits theaters on September 29th. I can't say I understand the logic of not including the short in the theatrical release, it's not like Wes Anderson fans would not be willing to sit in their seats for 17 more minutes -- if anything, the addition of the short could help generate a little extra buzz for the film. Although some are saying that Natalie Portman goes nude -- in the flesh -- for the first time, but the film is already rated R so I'm not sure that' *rereads last sentence, abruptly dashes away from keyboard to get to a festival*

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 07, 2007, 07:33:57 PM
Wes Anderson's "Darjeeling Limited" took home the Golden Lion Cub, an award selected by school children.

Wow, that is some serious damning with faint praise.

I had my hopes on the short being included... but I'm not surprised that it won't.

On the Bittersweet Road to Oscar, Again
Source: New York Times

TAKE a handful of damaged characters. Put them on a road to some unexpected place, like the Central California wine country or the never-never land of a kiddie beauty pageant. Squeeze for laughs until everybody hurts.

And you might have the sort of movie — like "Little Miss Sunshine" last year, or "Sideways" two years before — that has twice brought Fox Searchlight and its allied producers within heartbreak distance of a best-picture Oscar.

If this is finally to be the year for the robust specialty unit that was formed by 20th Century Fox some 13 years ago, "The Darjeeling Limited" is likely to be the film to make it so.

Directed by Wes Anderson and written by Mr. Anderson with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, the latest happy-sad road trip from Fox Searchlight is set to make its American debut at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28. It will be released commercially the next day.

"Darjeeling" carries Mr. Anderson's distinctive mark: As in his films "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," familiars like Anjelica Huston and the recently hospitalized Owen Wilson populate a bit of space made personal by its crosshatching of eccentricity and family ties. But it also sticks closely to some conventions — the road trip, the bittersweet comedy — that have done well for its studio. This time around the damaged heroes are a trio of brothers played by Mr. Schwartzman, Mr. Wilson and Adrien Brody. They travel by train through the Indian subcontinent in search of a mother, Ms. Huston, who has become a nun. Along the way they inflict a fair amount of pain on one another.

But the real jolts come from encounters with the alien universe around them, perhaps lending just enough scope to let Fox Searchlight work its magic once again with voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Peter Rice, the studio's president, declined to be interviewed for this article. Still, some who have worked closely with Fox Searchlight noted that Mr. Rice and his team have followed one basic rule with their best picture bets in the past: Let the audience lead.

"They don't try to sell what's not there," said Albert Berger, who with his partner Ron Yerxa was among the producers of "Little Miss Sunshine." The Fox Searchlight method, Mr. Berger said, has been to let a picture "explode, if it was going to, into academy consideration."

Ten years ago the company's first best-picture nominee, "The Full Monty," did exactly that. A modest British comedy about unemployed steelworkers doing a striptease act, it had no major stars and was directed by the relatively unknown Peter Cattaneo. But it turned into the art-house equivalent of a blockbuster when it scooped up $46 million at the United States box office during an unusually long eight months in theaters.

Academy voters got on board about halfway through that run, nominating the picture, along with its director, screenplay and music, for Oscars. (Only the last was a winner, as "Titanic" swept the awards that year.)

Something like that pattern repeated itself with "Sideways" and "Little Miss Sunshine," Fox Searchlight's only other best-picture nominees to date. Both of those started as critic- and crowd-pleasers. Both carried what many in Hollywood are beginning to see as the ministudio's trademark bittersweet comic sensibility, a signature that has emerged during Mr. Rice's nearly eight-year tenure with the unit, which he took over in early 2000.

"People do matter, as much as those who run big corporations want to think otherwise," said Mark Gill, a producer who was previously at Warner Independent Pictures, referring to the personal mark that Mr. Rice and other executives have put on their respective companies.

Miramax, Mr. Gill noted, has shown a bent for Anglocentric fare like "The Queen" and "Becoming Jane" under its president, Daniel Battsek. And Sony Pictures Classics, under Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, was long an outpost for foreign-language films, like the 2001 best-picture nominee "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and last year's "Lives of Others," both of which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Fox Searchlight's soft spot for off-center comedy has gotten the studio on tiptoes but never quite kissed come Oscar night: voters may love their beautiful losers, but serious pictures like "Crash" or "The Departed" tend to go home with the prize.

When it comes to awards, however, Mr. Anderson has some history on his side. Together with Mr. Wilson he was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2002, although the prize went to Julian Fellowes for "Gosford Park."

One of Mr. Anderson's producers, Scott Rudin, has been involved with several recent Oscar contenders. Last year Mr. Rudin was an executive producer of "The Queen" and "Venus," Miramax releases that captured seven nominations between them and a best-actress Oscar for Helen Mirren. Fox Searchlight's "Notes on a Scandal," of which Mr. Rudin was a producer, received four nominations.

For the Fox Searchlight formula to work, the audience will have to get on board with "Darjeeling Limited," something it has not really done with Mr. Anderson's past work. Of his previous films, only "The Royal Tenenbaums," which took in about $52 million at the domestic box office when Disney released it in 2001, has approached the commercial success of "Sideways" and "Sunshine."

But Mr. Rice can always turn to "The Savages," another tragicomic trip he has tucked in his hip pocket for the year's end. This one is written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, whose husband, Jim Taylor, shared an Academy Award with Alexander Payne in 2005 for writing "Sideways."

It finds the damaged heroes Laura Linney (an Oscar nominee for "Kinsey" and "You Can Count on Me") and Philip Seymour Hoffman (a winner for "Capote") rushing from Manhattan and Buffalo to the off-center environs of a retirement community in Sun City, Ariz., and back, in the service of a mentally deteriorating father played by Philip Bosco.

In the way of these things, a good time, and bad, is had by all.

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 04, 2007, 12:13:06 AM
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Review: The Darjeeling Limited
Bottom Line: A train ride without laughs or charm.
By Ray Bennett; Hollywood Reporter

VENICE, Italy-- The whimsical and insightful charm that Wes Anderson and his filmmaking pals have displayed in such films as "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" curdles ruinously in the Indian sun that shines so brightly in their smug and self-satisfied new film "The Darjeeling Limited."

But when current affairs are in such a parlous state, it's almost unforgivable to make a film about stupid American men traveling abroad with not the slightest awareness of or reference to anything that's going on in the world. The film is overly pleased with itself and the characters are way too self-absorbed. There's never a man-eating tiger around when you need one.

What an incredibly dumb cunt. NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO MAKE A MOVIE NOW WITHOUT A REFERENCE TO CURRENT POLITICAL AFFAIRS -- and characters can't be self-absorbed, because NO ONE is actually like that in real life... yeah, nice one.

Fuck you, Ray Bennett. Why do newspapers and magazines have such little respect for films as an art form that they send douchebags like this to review movies?

[Bennett -- walking into a Picasso exhibit]: "How come none of these look like the people I saw outside? Geez..."

I hope there is a seriously torturous level of hell for fucks like this.

thanks for highlighting that review, i don't know how i missed it. it is fucking stupid.

what kind of statement was he looking for? instead of looking for huston they end up looking for osama? is he SERIOUSLY proposing that every movie must have a reference to the politics of the time?

ray bennett, you're going on the list.

These are the moments where I dont understand fucking critics... I mean its so subjective... who the fuck cares about some idiots opinion? The fact that he has watched a billion films does not make him an expertt in judgement. I mean, look at Pubrick :)

But seriously, I realized I NEVER, EVER read reviews before going to a movie. I may watch trailers, read some opinions here and there, but that is never a factor for me to see it or not. They are wrong so many times, that for me its not even fun to read them and it does not influence my decision on what to see at all.

For some reason though, I'm not excited about this. I've been dying to go to India and make a trip like these guys for years, so I was very much looking forward to this (especially after Life Aquatic, which I loved). I'll still see it but I'm not as excited as before... I think the trailers didnt do it for me.

I don't think the dude was looking for osama in wes anderson's films - I mean, he did love Rushmore and Tenenbaums.  I'm Wes's biggest fan, but it is certainly possible that he's made an indulgent film with self-centered characters told from a smug, hipster POV.  And when you put that smug hipster POV in another part of the world, it might come off as a younger, hipper versions of dumb Americans.  I mean, everyone here should know what film I hate more than the devil himself, which'd definitely exhibited the same ignorance even though it was made by and starred respectful people.  Wes Anderson is awesome, but he's not above such criticisms.
I still doubt what the guy says is true though.

I hope it's as good as lost in translation. It probably won't be though. Nothing is.

Quote from: Stefen on September 12, 2007, 06:39:36 PM
I hope it's as good as lost in translation. It probably won't be though. Nothing is.

Adding insult to injury eh... :p

Exclusive Featurette: The Friendly Skies Of 'Darjeeling Limited'

What happened when castmates Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman attempted to film their scenes in a busy Indian airport? Find out by watching the video below.


http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2007/09/13/exclusive-featurette-the-friendly-skies-of-darjeeling-limited/

there's a screening tonight.  really wanna go but im sick as a dog.  at the moment, only chair meal bee would get me out to a movie in la.

Quote from: pozer on September 17, 2007, 02:45:59 PM
there's a screening tonight.  really wanna go but im sick as a dog.  at the moment, only chair meal bee would get me out to a movie in la.

There is? Where? Do you have to be someone famous to go?

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desperately seeking caption (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=6285.msg250099#msg250099)

Los Angeles residents:

http://www.americancinematheque.com/archive1999/2007/Aero/Wes_Anderson_Aero_2007.htm#HE%20DARJEELING%20LIMITED

Is anyone else going to this?  I'm going to try to unless it is already sold out...

Movie clip:

http://video.aol.com/video/movies-the-darjeeling-limited-clip-no-1/1973756

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/09/21/travel/tmagazine/23profile.1.ready.html

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The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson
On a spur-of-the-moment train ride to Rome with the filmmaker whose reality bears a distinct resemblance to his movies.
Source: NYMag

Wes Anderson did not know where he was going. The problem was not that he was lost, but that his mind kept wandering, darting off in too many directions at once—a common and not entirely unwelcome problem for the 38-year-old director. Part of him wanted to stick around Venice for another day or two, now that the Venice Film Festival was over and the promotional business surrounding The Darjeeling Limited, his new film, was behind him. He liked Venice, liked the whole idea of wandering the catacomblike streets of a city that should have been swallowed up by the Adriatic centuries ago. But there was talk of moving the party elsewhere—to Paris, maybe, where he has kept an apartment since 2005; or perhaps to Rome, where some friends were heading. Eventually Anderson would have to figure out a way back to Manhattan, his other semi-permanent residence, in time for Darjeeling to open the New York Film Festival, but logistical details like that were, for the time being, best left out of the picture.

"I'm thinking Rome," he eventually said, as if Rome were an appetizer he frequently orders, and twelve hours later he finds himself here: on a train bound for the Eternal City, joined by Roman Coppola and his girlfriend, Jennifer Furches. Coppola and Furches are the director's old friends who, like most of his old friends, double as frequent collaborators. This is the dynamic at the heart of what those close to him affectionately refer to as "Wes's world," which resembles a vaudevillian family by way of Evelyn Waugh. Coppola, for example, is the cousin of Jason Schwartzman, the star of Anderson's Rushmore, and together the three of them wrote the script for Darjeeling. (Furches was script supervisor.)

That we happen to be traveling by train to discuss a movie that takes place on a train was not part of the original plan, though I'm starting to think of it as yet another example of Anderson's knack for retouching reality with an idiosyncratic gloss. (It may be connected to his fear of flying as well; until recently, Anderson traveled to Europe by boat, and he far prefers trains and automobiles to anything airborne.) Also somewhat peculiar is the fact that buried in one of Anderson's monogrammed suitcases is 10,000 euros in cash—about $14,000—an amount that may or may not be legal to carry, and that was given to the director by Bill Murray, who asked that the money be "delivered to Luigi."

"It's not as weird as it sounds. Luigi was Bill's landlord when we shot The Life Aquatic," explains Anderson, talking about his last movie, parts of which were filmed in Rome.

"But," I ask, "wasn't that back in 2004?"

"Yeah, Bill can be a little weird with time. But there's no hard feelings or anything. I think Luigi and Bill have a pretty good rapport, though Luigi will probably be happy to get his money."

Anderson often finds himself in situations like this: real-life circumstances that have the same absurd, art-directed quality as his films. You may be tempted to shake your head and simply say that Anderson has been incredibly lucky, which is true, but that doesn't give enough credit to his talents—not just as a director, but more generally as someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims. When he was editing Darjeeling, for instance, he convinced Fox Searchlight to rent him a suite at the Inn at Irving Place, an unmarked hotel on Gramercy Park designed to re-create an era of faded glamour that probably never actually existed. Given that Anderson owns a spacious loft in the East Village that doubles as a work space, and that the studio could have rented any number of generic editing rooms for significantly less money, the logic behind this could be considered questionable. "I remember walking in there and thinking, Man, only Wes would figure out a way to pull this off," recalls the photographer Gregory Crewdson, who befriended Anderson at a dinner party four years ago. "There was the little guy behind the desk, the narrow wooden staircase leading up to the room—it was just perfect. In his films he creates a very particular and unmistakable world, and I guess you could say the same is true in his life."

You need only watch a few frames of one of his movies to spot it as an Anderson production. Though he is originally from Texas, there is something distinctively European in his obsession with aesthetics: a belief that the way something looks is what dictates how it will make you feel. His impeccably composed wide-angle shots have the feeling of a childhood fantasy: wistful, more than a bit ridiculous, with a darkness creeping in at the edges. Pepper in some resurrected classic-rock songs; deadpan dialogue; themes of failure, nostalgia, and fractured families; and the result, at its best, is a world unto itself.

Though his films have collectively grossed only $100 million—a large-sounding sum until you realize it's exactly what they cost to make—he is supported and adored by the studio system. "For studio executives, supporting Wes is like collecting art," says one friend. "It makes them feel they have great taste." The appeal is the films, of course, but also the persona of the eccentric auteur. He is an abnormally tall man, or at least a man so pale and so skinny that he appears to be abnormally tall. And he dresses primarily in suits custom-tailored to be a half-size too small, giving him the look of one of the off-kilter characters he puts on screen, further evidence that Anderson's life is his work, and vice versa.

None of which is lost on Anderson himself. Last year, he made an excellent commercial for American Express in which he simultaneously parodied and breathed new life into the Anderson Myth. In the ad he is seen clothed in a vintage safari jacket, a viewfinder dangling from his neck, filming a (fictional) movie starring Schwartzman. Anderson walks through the set making sure every detail, no matter how absurd, is just so. "Can you do a .357 with a bayonet?" he asks a prop man, and two seconds later—presto!—a sketch of the nonsensical weapon is produced. Shot outside a French château, the ad borrows the theme from Truffaut's Day for Night—just the kind of sly reference loved by Anderson. Shooting a commercial is, for many directors, simply a means to earn quick money. But for Anderson, who more recently shot an equally distinctive series of ads for AT&T, the experience had the unique benefit of allowing him to further the storybook life he was delicately lampooning. At the time he made it he was living in the Paris apartment recently vacated by Kirsten Dunst, who had been renting it while filming Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. It was a decadent and exorbitantly expensive place that Anderson converted to an editing suite, with AmEx paying the rent.

His talent, in other words, has become his trust fund. But one gets the impression that even Anderson, these days, can find living in Wes's world a bit claustrophobic. I first met him on a bright, windy afternoon in Venice, two days after Darjeeling had been screened for the public for the first time. With Schwartzman and Coppola, we were waiting for a water taxi to shuttle us off to lunch at an outdoor café. At one point Anderson complimented Schwartzman's new sunglasses, and then suddenly turned to me, concerned with how I would interpret the seemingly banal exchange. "Oh God, I bet that's the first line of your piece, isn't it?" Anderson said. "Wes Anderson, notorious for his attention to detail, carefully observes the black retro sunglasses that the young Schwartzman has pulled from his pocket ..." Later, when a breeze picked up during our meal, he turned up the collar on his seersucker suit and again quoted from the article he was writing in his head: "Anderson then pensively turns up the collar of his blazer, pulling it tight around his skinny frame to cover the monogrammed dress shirt underneath ..." Pause. Laughter. "I'm sorry, man," he then said. "I'm in a weird mood these days."

Such a mood is understandable, especially given the circumstances surrounding the Venice Film Festival. One of the most prominent members of the Anderson contingent has been notably absent these past few days. It was just over a week earlier that Owen Wilson—a friend of Anderson's since his days at the University of Texas, his first writing partner and most regular collaborator—tried to commit suicide. Anderson approaches the subject carefully. "He's never had a time like this in his life before," says the director. "His life has changed so radically in the last few years, and in ways that most people never have to deal with. He's one of the funniest, smartest guys I've ever known, one of my best friends in the world. I know I've been depressed myself before—most of us probably know something about what it's like ..." He doesn't complete the thought. "I went to see him last week in L.A., and, you know, he's doing very well. He's going to be fine." Another pause. "I call him every day to keep him updated on what's happening with the movie. I wish he was with us. He's a major part of our project, and he has the right to be there with us."

It was the 1998 release of Rushmore that radically altered Anderson's life. He was hailed as a visionary, fetishized by his fans, encumbered by expectations. It was only his second movie—his first, Bottle Rocket, would become a cult favorite later in his career—but it offered everything an indie audience desired: an endearingly arrogant and peculiar teenage outsider (Schwartzman); a love triangle that was both twisted and innocent; and, of course, Bill Murray, in a surprising role as a wealthy, unhinged developer who, because he is Bill Murray, became an immediate icon of middle-aged angst. It also introduced to the world the Anderson aesthetic. Simply put, Rushmore did not look or feel like any other movie.

This is an accomplishment that comes with a price, guaranteeing for the director that everything that followed would look and feel like something: a Wes Anderson movie. Three years later he released The Royal Tenenbaums, a more ambitious ensemble piece about a New York family of gifted children who, as adults, had fallen on hard times. Thanks in part to a cast that included stars like Gene Hackman and Gwyneth Paltrow, Tenenbaums introduced a larger audience to Anderson's style, which this time out seemed, depending on your tastes, to be either more defined or more distracting. As a meditation on family and adulthood, the film succeeds, movingly, and it certainly made clear how much more exciting American cinema is with someone like Anderson around. But there were moments—remember the Dalmatian mice?—when Tenenbaums risked being a bit too curious with its curiosities. ("Yes, yes, you're charming, you're brilliant," chided A. O. Scott in his review. "Now say good night and go to bed.") Then came The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau–inspired fantasia that left even some of Anderson's most loyal fans impatient. There was a sense that the director had become pickled in a world of his own creation.

Novelty has a shelf life. Aquatic was seen as a beautiful failure, a study in style stripped of substance. In talking to Anderson you can tell that Aquatic was a difficult movie for him—beginning with its making. Like just about everything in his life, Anderson prefers a movie set to be a communal and intimate environment, which was difficult to maintain while dealing with the cold world of sound stages, special-effects crews, and the heightened expectations that come with an ever-expanding budget. (Aquatic cost close to $60 million, more than twice what Tenenbaums did.) "There were so many damn trailers," he says of the filming process. "Every actor had like three trailers. And it's not just the expense, but when you have all your actors watching ESPN on satellite, they're not thinking about the work, so you have to pull them into it. You tell the actors you're ready, you wait, you check their makeup, you monkey around, you wait some more—all of this over and over, and it doesn't make the movie any better." Discussing it seems to exhaust him, as if he were reliving the experience. "We just put everything into it, and it kind of, you know, got a bit of a rough ride," he concludes. "I think it's generally thought of as the least loved of all my movies."

It's hard to gauge how personally Anderson has taken the criticism. At one point I bring up a recent essay by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic Monthly arguing that, as a culture, we are "drowning in quirk," an aesthetic he defines as the "embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream." Citing Anderson's movies as a prime example, Hirschorn claims that the problem with quirk is that it "can quickly go from an effective narrative tool to an end in itself." Anderson, who in person is typically quite calm, becomes suddenly animated by the topic. "You know, I've heard that argument a million times, and it's completely uninteresting to me," he says. "It's just deadeningly unoriginal. If you have ideas that you think can contribute to a movie, that you think might help you honestly enjoy it more ..." He trails off, thinking. "Now I'm sounding bitter, aren't I? Okay, my response to that is that sometimes it hurts my feelings." Another pause. "When they say a movie I make is smarter-than-thou, that the movie is 'too smart for its own good,' as if we're making movies to try to show everybody how great and cool we are ... well, that's just not the case. We're trying our hardest to entertain people, to make something people will like, something people will connect with. I don't think there's a great effort to try to make some statement about ourselves, you know?"

Some artists thrive on defending their work, on the idea of being in combat with the culture; Anderson is not among them. By the time he was finished promoting Aquatic overseas, in the summer of 2005, he says he found himself feeling depressed. This was not a monumental or debilitating sadness, more like the low-simmering melancholy that defines his characters. He had some ideas for a new project, but they remained stalled in the Anderson gestational phase: sketches of disconnected scenes and dialogue scribbled in the small notepad he keeps in the breast pocket of his blazer.

Anderson decided that in order to be productive he had to leave New York, where he has lived and worked for nearly a decade—that it would be "interesting" to live outside of America for a bit. The director called up Schwartzman, who was then living in Paris, shooting Marie Antoinette. "Could I maybe crash in your guest room for a bit?" Anderson asked. "Whenever you want," Schwartzman assured him, and shortly thereafter the two were roommates.

It turned out to be the beginning of a European adventure that, somewhere along the way, ended up producing The Darjeeling Limited. The movie features Schwartzman, Wilson, and Adrien Brody as three estranged brothers who travel through India by train in order to find themselves and bond with each other and "say yes to everything," as Wilson's character puts it. This "spiritual journey" is played for laughs, though like all of Anderson's work, the comedy is born out of sadness—a fractured family attempting to repair itself. (See David Edelstein's review on page 80.)

Anderson first got the itch to shoot in India after Martin Scorsese—an avowed fan who in Esquire once anointed Anderson "the next Scorsese"—introduced him to The River, a lush and evocative 1951 film made by Jean Renoir. The idea for the brothers traveling came from Husbands, a 1970 John Cassavetes movie about three suburban husbands escaping to London. "But my main idea was not the train, not India, not the brothers," says Anderson. "My main idea was, I want to write with Roman and Jason." One night when Anderson was holed up in Schwartzman's Paris apartment, he read a few pages of his notebook to Schwartzman—a scene that ended up being the film's opening. It wasn't long before Schwartzman and Coppola had signed on, and the three of them set aside a month to travel through India by train. It was there that most of the script was written.

"I guess we went to India as research," says Anderson, "but the more precise-slash-romanticized description would be that we were trying to do the movie, trying to act it out. We were trying to be the movie before it existed."

On the trip to Rome, Anderson and company move about the train as if it belongs to them. They abandon the suitcase full of Bill Murray's money and head to the dining car for pasta, prosciutto and melon, and numerous half-bottles of wine. After lunch they sneak into a business-class cabin (from which, later, they will be ejected when an Italian politician arrives with armed guards). Coppola and Furches decide to kill some time by completing the Times crossword puzzle; they are soon stumped, and turn to Anderson, an amateur crossword junkie, for assistance. "Mind if I hold the paper?" Anderson asks, setting the crossword in his lap, pulling an erasable pen from his pocket, and casually taking control of the situation. He gives the sense that everyone is participating, working together, and yet—as he fills in one answer after another—it becomes clear that the end result would be the same if Anderson were sitting there alone.

"I think we're just being entertained," jokes Coppola.

"Oh, no—I couldn't do this without you guys," says Anderson, a statement that comes across as both true and false.

It is perhaps not unlike his collaborative process. His friends seem to act as conductors for his imagination: triggering it, encouraging it, very rarely questioning it. There were times on the set of Darjeeling, for instance, when Anderson would doubt his instincts: "Okay, am I doing too much of a 'thing I do' here?" he would ask the crew. Coppola was quick to quell the director's insecurities. "Roman would always express his appreciation for being inventive and making what we thought was a strong choice." As Coppola puts it, "When you do something that really is your instinct to do, then what more can you ask of yourself?"

Still, Anderson was tense at the premiere in Venice. It is the same at all premieres—Anderson worrying about how his movies, crafted in something of a parallel universe, will play in the world at large. "Mostly it's just a process of steeling oneself for what's going to happen. I'm sitting there thinking, Is the movie gonna be received with a lull of silence? Or with a boo?" says Anderson. "That's a common thing in Europe, you know? They boo here."

For the record, they did not boo. The early reviews were mainly positive, much more so than with Aquatic, though there was the requisite grumbling that the movie was "good but more of the same," as Anderson puts it, shaking his head, after reading what Variety had to say. But the director does not seem particularly hurt or defensive this time around. "It's probably not a good idea to put too much of your self-esteem on something like this, because, really, you can make a bad movie and it can be well received, and you can make a good movie and it can be badly received," he says. "I think people who've done it a lot have learned, like the Coen brothers, for instance. My impression of them is that they really aren't that vulnerable to what comes back at them. And they could get anything from any of their movies. Like The Big Lebowski, the first time I saw it I thought it didn't quite work, but the second time I saw it I thought, Oh, I didn't get it. I just didn't understand it. And I really loved it then." He adds, "You know, everyone's limited. You can only do so much. I think in the end all I can do is say, Let me live the moment. I can still do what I want to do. I'm lucky enough to be able to do these movies so far."

Two weeks later, over the phone from his Paris apartment, Anderson briefs me about how he fared during the rest of his travels. After we parted ways in Rome, he tells me, he delivered the money to Luigi, clearing Bill Murray's outstanding debt. For the next few days he dined at his favorite restaurants until he decided it was time to head back to Paris. A sleeper train was momentarily considered for the journey, until a better idea struck. "We ended up slowly wandering our way back to France in a Roman taxi," Anderson says, as if nothing could have made more perfect sense.

New Wes Anderson Film Features Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues
Source: The Onion

LOS ANGELES—Fans who attended a sneak preview Monday of critically acclaimed director Wes Anderson's newest project, The Darjeeling Limited, were surprised to learn that the film features a deadpan comedic tone, highly stylized production design, and a plot centering around unresolved family issues.

"What will he think of next?" audience member Michael Cauley said. "And who could have foreseen the elaborately crafted '60s-era aesthetic, melancholy subtext, and quirky nomenclature—to say nothing of the unexpected curveball of casting Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray?"

In a recent review, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott also expressed surprise at the film's cutting-edge soundtrack, which features a Rolling Stones song and three different tracks by the Kinks.

Quote from: Pwaybloe on September 25, 2007, 09:12:20 AM
New Wes Anderson Film Features Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues
Source: The Onion

LOS ANGELES—Fans who attended a sneak preview Monday of critically acclaimed director Wes Anderson's newest project, The Darjeeling Limited, were surprised to learn that the film features a deadpan comedic tone, highly stylized production design, and a plot centering around unresolved family issues.

"What will he think of next?" audience member Michael Cauley said. "And who could have foreseen the elaborately crafted '60s-era aesthetic, melancholy subtext, and quirky nomenclature—to say nothing of the unexpected curveball of casting Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray?"

In a recent review, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott also expressed surprise at the film's cutting-edge soundtrack, which features a Rolling Stones song and three different tracks by the Kinks.

:lol:

website is up:

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/thedarjeelinglimited/

and as usual, fox searchlight free screenings...

Monday, Oct 01   7:00 PM   AMC River East , Chicago   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 02   7:30 PM   AMC Georgetown, Washington   RSVP
Wednesday, Oct 03   8:00 PM   AMC LOEWS Boston Common, Boston   RSVP
Thursday, Oct 04   7:30 PM   The Landmark, Los Angeles   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 09   7:30 PM   Landmark Mayan, Denver   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 09   7:30 PM   Santana Row, San Jose    RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 09   7:30 PM   Angelika Dallas, Dallas   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 09   7:30 PM   AMC Barton Creek, Austin   RSVP
Wednesday, Oct 10   7:00 PM   Harkins Fashion Square, Scottsdale   RSVP
Wednesday, Oct 10   7:00 PM   Landmark's Hillcrest, San Diego   RSVP
Wednesday, Oct 10   7:30 PM   Ritz East, Philadelphia   RSVP
Thursday, Oct 11   7:00 PM   AMC FORUM, Montreal   RSVP
Thursday, Oct 11   7:00 PM   Cinema City, Hartford   RSVP
Thursday, Oct 11   7:30 PM   Landmark Lagoon Theatre, Minneapolis    RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 16   7:30 PM   Landmark Oriental, Milwaukee   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 16   7:30 PM   Edwards Grand Palace, Houston   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 16   7:30 PM   Regal Natomas, Sacramento   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 16   7:30 PM   Landmark Maple Art, Birmingham   RSVP
Wednesday, Oct 17   7:30 PM   Cedar Lee Theatre, Cleveland Heights   RSVP
Thursday, Oct 18   7:30 PM   Drexel Gateway Theatre, Columbus   RSVP
Monday, Oct 22   7:30 PM   Rialto, Raleigh   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 23   7:30 PM   AMC Newport on the Levee, Newport   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 23   7:30 PM   Broadway Centre, Salt Lake City   RSVP
Tuesday, Oct 23   7:30 PM   Santikos Silverado, San Antonio   RSVP

goin for la.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mensvogue.com%2Fimages%2Fmagazine%2F2007%2F09%2Fmaar01_owen_wes.jpg&hash=a66fd6d2b6da3ebae4462b31278427716aa00e92)

American Visionaries
Wonder Boys
Two college buddies amble out of Texas, shake up American movies, and become the country's best-loved cut-up and its reigning indie genius. Now, in the midst of personal crisis, Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson emerge with their most ambitious collaboration yet. By John Seabrook; Men's Vogue

I got to know Owen Wilson a couple of years ago, when he was renting the second floor of a palazzo on the Piazza Farnese, in Rome. He stayed for six months while shooting the 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by his friend Wes Anderson. I was living in Rome with my family then, and, as often happens with expatriates, one meets people one wouldn't ordinarily know at home. Through an emissary, Wilson invited me to one of his parties. We talked about books, sports, music, and magazines—everything, it seemed, except movies.

After that, I'd meet O. (as one comes to know Owen) in a pub called the Abbey Theatre—an Irish-themed joint near the Piazza Navona that shows NFL football games. Being from Dallas, Wilson is a Cowboys fan. "Hey, I will see you at the Ab-bay," he'd drawl, and he would see me, too—before I spotted him, usually. He had learned from being famous to get his looks in early, before other people noticed him. In the face of rapidly growing celebrity—this was around the time Starsky & Hutch came out, but before Wedding Crashers—he seemed to be aggressively committed to remaining himself. The reason that he was so determined to be himself, I imagined, was that he always seems to be playing himself on-screen. If he stopped being Owen Wilson in real life, he wouldn't know how to be Owen Wilson in movies.

Like the characters he plays, Wilson projects an air of toasted insouciance, but it takes about two minutes to see he's actually anything but a slacker. He's well informed, sharp-eyed, and careful. He orders his hamburgers well done, and I never saw him drink anything except Coke or water, and then usually tap water. "I'll have taaaiiip watah," he'd say, in that voice, after the waitress offered him, with a flourish, acqua con oppure senza gazzz. He didn't learn Italian; he just spoke to the natives in pidgin Spanish—hola, amigo!—and the Italians seemed amused, because that's exactly what an Owen Wilson character would do. We didn't discuss politics too much—you never know with guys from Texas—but I got the feeling we were on the same side about most things. After spending an evening with O., I'd find myself drawing out my vowels—exploring, like a tongue probing a sore tooth, the previously untested ironic possibilities in diphthongs.

"Are you trying to sound Southern?" my wife would ask.

But it wasn't a Southern accent exactly, or even a regional one. Later, when I asked Wilson why he talked that way, he told me he had needed a lot of speech therapy as a child, because no one could understand him. That intonation and inflection were what he had come up with.

While we were in Rome, Wilson was negotiating to play Walter Mitty in a film based on Thurber's short story, which seemed like the perfect part for him, because to me Wilson was Walter Mitty. His good fortune was so farcically unlikely, and its benefits so vast—almost anything he wanted, he could have, usually for free—that the only way to understand it was as a daydream. Except O. wasn't going to have to wake up. Maybe that's why he didn't get the part in the end.

Around this time, I also met Wilson's two brothers, Luke and Andrew, and got to know members of the Aquatic crew. The film was by far Anderson's biggest production, with a budget of $50 million, financed by Disney, and I met people involved with the production everywhere. But I never met Anderson himself. He didn't seem like the type to hang out at the Abbey. When I saw him on the set, he was working, intensely focused on a million details, not unlike the persona he presents in his witty 2006 American Express commercial, which can be seen on YouTube.

The production ended in the spring of 2004. Wilson was heading to the D.C. area, to begin shooting Wedding Crashers. It was a huge hit, earning more than $200 million and moving Wilson up a couple of notches on the celebarometer. He now commanded $10 million a picture and you could follow his exploits as "the Butterscotch Stallion"—consort to a series of celebrated women, from Sheryl Crow to, more recently, Kate Hudson—as you waited in the checkout line at the grocery store. The Life Aquatic, on the other hand, while it found its usual cadre of devoted Anderson fans, was not the hit Disney imagined it would be; Anderson's quirky vision hadn't played to a mass audience. Some blog-aesthetes noted that Wilson had collaborated with Anderson in writing the director's first three films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums), but Wilson did not cowrite Aquatic. (Noah Baumbach did.) Ergo, Wilson somehow had the common touch that Anderson, for all his brilliance, lacked.

In writing his latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, which is scheduled to be released in October, Anderson worked with Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, who happen to be cousins. Wilson plays the central character, Francis Whitman, the oldest of three brothers. Almost all of the action concerns the Whitmans' accidental spiritual pilgrimage through India after the death of their father. The film has many of the stylistic elements that link all of Anderson's movies—a sweet, sixties soundtrack; that adventures-of-Tintin feeling; unexpected slow-motion sequences that imbue commonplace situations with pomp; painterly color (this time there's lots of saffron, ruby red, and lime-pickle green); and dollhouse-like tableaux. Visually, it's Anderson's most gorgeous film. Thematically, it feels like something of a departure. Anderson, who, like Wilson, is 38, is pushing beyond the constraints of the gifted adolescent's view of life, the auteurial stance in Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

Francis Whitman is somewhat reminiscent of Dignan, Wilson's first cinematic role, in his and Anderson's delightful first film, Bottle Rocket (1996). Like Dignan, Francis has a crazy scheme to make everything right, and he's always optimistic, even when he has no reason to be. Adrien Brody, a new addition to Anderson's familiar repertoire of actors, plays the middle brother, Peter, and Schwartzman, who starred in Rushmore—arguably Anderson and Wilson's most satisfying creation—is the youngest, Jack. All of them are in some way damaged: Wilson's character has been in a motorcycle accident (his head is half-covered in bandages throughout the film); Brody's is freaking out at the prospect of having his first child; and Schwartzman's is trying to escape from a disastrous love affair.

Wilson and Anderson were back together in New York in June. Anderson was editing the film at the Inn at Irving Place, which is located in a double-wide townhouse near Gramercy Park, and Wilson was staying nearby at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Inn has a Victorian feeling, with a harpsichord in the lobby. The filmmakers had taken over a suite on the ground floor, covered up the windows, and set up Avid editing machines in the sitting room. The hard drive, which contained the actual movie, was in the shower, with a fan and portable Pinguino air conditioning unit to keep it cool.

Anderson is tall and lank-haired, and looked somewhat dandified in a white suit and baby-blue handmade shirt with his monogram slightly offset on the pocket. He has courtly manners. He used to wear glasses, and he still looks like someone who has just taken them off. There's an expression of perpetual bemusement in the corner of Anderson's mouth, one that you can often see on Luke Wilson's face in The Royal Tenenbaums.

We sat in the Inn's tearoom. Classical music played softly. Anderson explained how he came to write The Darjeeling Limited. He had gone to Paris on a press tour for The Life Aquatic, visited Sofia Coppola when she was shooting Marie Antoinette, ended up staying in an apartment with Schwartzman (who was in the Coppola film), and stuck around for 13 months. He began spending time with Sofia's brother Roman, who is also a filmmaker. Starting with an idea of Anderson's, the three of them wrote the script in Paris—and via conference calls—over the course of a year. Wes played the role of editor in the process. "He's the director," Schwartzman said, "and he had a very specific idea of what he wanted to direct, and he's got such impeccable taste you just trust him. It was like making an eight-million-piece puzzle. We'd come up with a piece, and Wes would say, 'I think that goes here.' "

Anderson shot most of the film last winter in Jodhpur, where the cast and crew lived together in a big hotel and everyone would walk around in their pajamas. The budget for this movie was $20 million, much smaller than The Life Aquatic. It feels like a return to the jewel-box perfection of his early work. "We had to reshoot a bit in New York last week," Anderson said, sipping a glass of sparkling water. "And now it's done. Just finally done."

Anderson went on to say he was heading off to London, where he would soon begin shooting an animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the Roald Dahl story, from a script he wrote with Baumbach. He paused and held up a long, tapered finger. "The music. Listen. Though it sounds like a Boston Pops production, it is actually an Ennio Morricone tune from Once Upon a Time in the West. No. Once Upon a Time in America." For a moment, I felt as I were participating in the director's DVD commentary on our interview.

I asked Anderson whether it surprised him that Wilson could make such an easy transition from the highly wrought films they've made together for going on 15 years to the lowdown comedies—like Zoolander—that have made his old friend a star. "It's pretty different," Anderson said. "The kind of stuff that Owen does in these comedies, a lot of that is improv. You give them the idea, and it's best take. In our projects you have a bunch of threads that all have to be woven together. Everything has to be set up. You can't just ad lib it."

I wondered if they would ever write together again.

"It will happen," Anderson said. "I don't know what the factors will be, but I believe it will happen." He didn't look like he wholly believed it would. As though to reassure himself, he added, "We actually talked about doing something not long ago."

Anderson first met Wilson at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. Both of them had published stories in the college literary magazine and were aware of each other, but they eyed each other for some time before they spoke. It wasn't until they were together in a playwriting class, sophomore year, that they became friends.

Owen was from Highland Park, a wealthy section of Dallas. He had gone to St. Mark's, an Episcopalian prep school, but had been expelled sophomore year for cheating on a geometry test, and transferred to a military school in Roswell, New Mexico. Wes was from Houston, and his father, like Owen's, was in advertising; previously Mr. Wilson (as Wes still refers to Owen's dad) had been the president of the PBS and NPR stations in Dallas. (Owen's mother is the photographer Laura Wilson, formerly an assistant to Richard Avedon.) But their main bond was that both came from families of three brothers, and both are middle brothers. I have never hung around with Wes and his brothers (one of whom, Eric, is a writer, illustrator, and production designer), but from the short time I've spent with the three Wilsons, I can report that it feels like a parallel universe.

There were nine students in the writing class, and the big assignment was to write a play. "Wes was the one who actually finished his," Wilson told me. It was called A Night in Tunisia. The teacher, Webster Smalley, singled Wes's play out, and it was given a production in the college auditorium. Wes wanted Owen to play the main character, but Owen "never wanted to be an actor," Anderson said. "I had to talk him into it. Luke would do it, but Owen was always trying to find other guys to do his parts."

After the first performance, during a dialogue with the audience, the play was warmly complimented. But one person was critical, and that person happened to be James Michener, the author, who then was teaching at the University of Texas. "He singled Owen out," Anderson recalled, smiling his toothy smile. "He said, 'That guy is very inappropriate and doesn't seem to know how to act.' "

Wes already knew he wanted to be a director, and Owen was planning to be a writer, so they wrote a screenplay and, after they graduated, made it into a short film, Bottle Rocket. Wes wanted it to be like Scorsese's Mean Streets. "It was going to be very heavy, hard-core, violent, and dark," Wilson said. "Wes had this sequence in his head—the guys in a car, with these guns sticking out of the window, while the soundtrack played 'Heroin,' by the Velvet Underground."

But as the two of them worked on the project, it turned into something else. Three friends who know each other from growing up (Owen, his brother Luke, and Robert Musgrave) are reunited and, at the urging of Owen's Dignan, sign on to a loopy plan to rob a house and lead a life of crime. At this point, the scenario could turn dark, but everything with Dignan's plan goes comically wrong in a way that makes everyone happy. Instead of re-creating Mean Streets (which Tarantino did with Reservoir Dogs), they made a cracked fairy tale, one that served as a template for all of Anderson's future projects.

When they had finished the short film in 1992, they got it into Sundance and, together with a script for a full-length movie, the project attracted the interest of James L. Brooks, who ended up financing the feature film for five million. At this point, Wilson still thought of himself more as a writer than an actor. He had gone along with Anderson in playing Dignan in the short film, he said, but "when we got the word that James Brooks would come to Dallas to meet with us and wanted to give us the money to make Bottle Rocket, I always expected he would want to recast me and Luke." Brooks left both Wilsons in the film. "Owen is a very distinctive actor," Brooks told me. "He is incapable of having a dishonest moment on the screen. And he's intrinsically funny."

After the full-length Bottle Rocket came out in 1996, Wes and Owen moved to Los Angeles, where they shared a house; at one point all three Wilsons were living there. "Not since a Busby Berkeley musical has there been so much talent in one house," Brooks said. That was where they wrote their next script, Rushmore, about a bright kid, Max Fischer, who gets expelled from a good school (which actually is St. John's—Anderson's alma mater—in the film). Rushmore is Anderson and Wilson's most perfect collaboration: It's the story of Wilson's getting tossed out of St. Mark's, but told with a character like Anderson at the center of it. Something about that balance works; Max is a type, but you still care for him as an individual.

By the time they were writing The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson had moved to New York. "I always wanted to live in New York, and I had a girlfriend here," he said. Wilson stayed in Los Angeles. Hollywood was discovering his potential as a comedic leading man, as in Ben Stiller's hilarious remake of Meet the Parents, but also as an action hero in Shanghai Noon and Behind Enemy Lines. Anderson ended up writing most of Tenenbaums by himself, he told me, which he didn't particularly enjoy. When it came time to write The Life Aquatic, he didn't ask Wilson to help him.

I was waiting for Wilson in a chair in the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel when I heard that voice, slightly hoarse and low: "Hey, buddy." He was wearing jeans, a blue T-shirt, and black sneakers. He did not seem to have lost his determination to remain Owen Wilson. The night after we met, as I later read in the New York Post, he rode a mountain bike up to Scores West Side, a strip club in Chelsea, checked it at the club, spent a couple of hours getting lap dances (I wondered if he likes strip clubs because they're the only place where people aren't staring at him), and left his bike there while he went to some other nightspots.

We found what seemed like a quiet place to talk. It was a small room with a big-screen TV on one wall, muted, tuned to CNN. Wilson sat with his back to the screen, on which, by a weird coincidence, almost as soon as we began talking about being a celebrity, the whole Paris Hilton re-arrest started going down in real time. In front of that scene was Owen Wilson's head, saying he thought his fame was still manageable, that there was still another level of celebrity that he hadn't reached, when you have to take precautions.

"You mean that level," I said, and we watched pictures of Paris's tearful face in the patrol car. Wilson said he felt bad for her.

I asked about his writing collaboration with Anderson. "People say that I am the one with the heart or something, and Wes is the intellectual. But I think that's all pretty much bullshit. Everything we did, we did together. Of course, Wes was the only one who could type, so he always got to put a kind of final edit on it. But, like, a writer said that the glib stuff was more me and the soulful stuff was Wes, and that wasn't accurate. Wes is capable of coming up with silly stuff just as I was. The main thing was finding the same thing funny and getting it on the page." Anderson may be the auteur, but Wilson has an ear for dialogue, especially for hackneyed clichés—like "You're cooking with gas!"—that he uses to show his characters' endearingly misguided fixations. And that privileged air of Highland Park prep that so many characters in Anderson's movies embody—Wilson can do that in his sleep.

Wilson's BlackBerry chirped. It was Wes.

"Hey, Wes... O.K., can you text it to me, or is it easier to tell me?... Yeah, yeah, O.K.... Second Street, just east of Bowery... I'll go."

After hanging up, Wilson asked if I wanted to go downtown to see some drawings by Hugo Guinness, a British artist whose work can be seen on the walls of the Tenenbaums' house on Archer Avenue in the movie.

While we were waiting by the elevator, I asked Wilson if he was a Republican.

"Yes," he said, and for one moment I believed him, until, with perfect timing, he said, "Nooo. But I had you, didn't I?" Then he had an idea. "You know what would be funny? If a guy like you or me went around in New York and told people you were a Republican. I mean, made it clear in some way that it wasn't a put-on."

" 'GOP like me.' "

"Exactly. It would be funny, wouldn't it? People would freak out. It would almost be like being a racist."

Outside the hotel, Wilson was not even out from under the awning when a woman stopped him. "Oh, I love you," she said. "I just love you." She gave him a hug and said, "You're great. Thank you for your work."

"Thank you for your fucking work?" I exclaimed as we headed downtown. "You call that work?"

At Joey Ramone Place, we turned east on Second and went into John Derian, a home-furnishings store. There were Hugo Guinness paintings and drawings all around the place. "Wes says the small ones are the best," Wilson said, and indeed they were. Unfortunately, all had red circles beside them, meaning "sold".

"Excuse me," Wilson asked a salesperson. "Could you tell me who bought these?"

"Yes, those were all bought by the same person," the woman said.

"And who was that?"

"Um, Wes Anderson."

Months later, when I read the unfathomable news that Wilson had been hospitalized after a drug-related suicide attempt, I was sorry I'd said that about his work. He had made it seem easy to be O. But now I wondered if I knew him at all. Maybe I was just another person projecting buddydom onto him. I had never noticed any signs of hard-drug abuse—and certainly never pictured him strung out among the film industry's notorious users. I hated to admit it: We weren't the friends I thought we were.

Coming of age in Texas and then being plunged straight into a life where everyone on the street is your friend must be deeply disorienting. I had been thinking about how neatly O.'s vocation had sprung from his youth with Wes, but now I saw that the meaning of friendship is easily blurred at this exaggerated level—and that if that anchor gets loose, maybe everything else goes too.

I also felt for Anderson, who must have had to endure a lot. It's easy to speculate that the cinematic crash-and-burns that O.'s characters are put through in Anderson's films can be seen as a reflection of O.'s offscreen life. Though there are plenty of revelations coming out about his problems, I keep looking for my own clues.

A few instances have been badgering me. Just before our first interview, O. called to say that "food poisoning" had caused him to postpone this magazine's photo shoot, so he had to cancel on me as well. And now, after reading that he had gone to church in Santa Monica the night before he lost control, I wish I'd paid more attention to a stray comment he made in the East Village. Passing a looming church, that evening last June, he asked if it was Catholic. Joking, I said, "You want to go to confession?" He said, not joking, "Well, maybe a little prayer."

A Conversation With Director Wes Anderson
Source: The Huffington Post
         
What was it like to shoot your movie in India?

India gets under your skin. It is filled with colors like no other place. People look at you as if you are the craziest person they have ever seen. I like the idea of being a foreigner, and having so much positive feedback. India is a very vibrant place. You are never alone in India. India influenced the form as well as the content of our movie. Our policy was not to control what we find there, but to look and see what we could discover. In the finished movie, we would freeze-frame a shot and we'd be surprised to see who was in it: a man walking by with a barrel in the corner, for example. We did not control it. India became the subject matter. None of us is an expert of India

Can you speak about your use of setting?

I like trains, and I liked the idea of having a set moving across the country. We made the sets spontaneously while in India. One of our rules was to make it as personal as we could. It was all discovery, and getting locals to paint the sets. For example, one day, we got the idea to have locals paint elephants on the train. My set producer Mark Friedberg created on the spot. I did not want to go to India and have this be a continual struggle. We had to face surprises.

Can you give an example of a surprise?

In one village we shot in, we had to take the dead child into a home to be cremated, but no villager would allow us to do this in their houses. That scene was important for the movie, so we had to find a solution. The villagers built us a home overnight, and they decorated it and painted it as if one of their own houses. This solution was unexpected. Why did I need the scene with the dead child? I needed it to happen to turn the movie l80 degrees.

What about the music?

The music comes from Satyajit Ray's movies. Indeed, Ray's movies are what made me want to go to India in the first place--as did Jean Renoir's movie "The River". Ray wrote the music for his own films. We also used music from Merchant Ivory.

What inspired you to make a film about three brothers?

I always wanted to do a film about three brothers because I am one of three brothers. We grew up fighting and yet they are the closest people in the world to me. Of course, all the characters in the movie are fictional. The next movie I am making is even more fictional: I am making a movie about a family of foxes!

How did you write the script?

I went to Rajasthan with two friends, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, and we wrote the script over two months; we wrote it on the train and put everything into the script. I printed out pages everyday. But then I short-circuited the printer! I liked doing this movie in circumstances I could not control. .

Why do you begin your movie with a short about Paris?

I made the short separately, and only later did I see how the two went together. We started incorporating things from the short into the movie. Not everything was well-conceived. The way the movie itself starts with Bill Murray was meant to be like that from the beginning. I found Bill in the West Village and said, hey would you like to play not a cameo role, but a symbol. He said: "Playing a symbol, I like that.' The ideal thing is to see the short one day, and the movie the next.

What does the journey through India mean for the brothers at the end?

The brothers start off not open to each other. They are controlled. Things happen unexpectedly to them, and this throws everything over. They learn to approach each other in a different way. They learn to approach death in a different way too.

Your movie spoofs conventional Western experiments with spirituality in India, but nevertheless has a spiritual component, perhaps in its own creativity?

Yes, we performed every kind of ritual in India, from snakes to yoga. But our biggest ritual was the making of the film itself. Making a movie together is the most moving experience. I met and worked with people I want to keep for my next films, such as our key grip, Sanjay Sami.
__

The morning before I spoke to Wes in Venice, I went swimming in the Lido because I had a migraine----because slept in a new bed last night, a wonderful American woman having graciously opened her palazzo in Venice to me, just in the spirit of sharing (she herself paying 3000 euros for the week), after I found myself on a canal curb at midnight waiting for a man named Dante who had screamed, "Bring me the money! Bring me the money!", who never showed up because he "was eating dinner", and then two Venetian boys lent me a cell phone and a cigarette, and I called this American woman....

She spoke over breakfast about her philosophy of "visualizing and making the universe happen," and then we took the vaporetto together in the morning to Lido, where I met Todd Haynes, after twenty years (old college mates), and felt happy to see him with the same young look and view: "Bob Dylan is a chance to live the myths of America past and future," he said.

Then went swimming in Lido.

The masseuse in the Excelsior hotel said she would see me immediately for a massage, as I had an interview with Wes Anderson and my head was pounding, but midway through I felt bad about paying 50 euros so extravagantly and stopped the massage, and she said, "But I can't leave you with a migraine! My daughter is a poet, and she writes such sensitive poems..." So she acupuncture-pressed my hands and then blowdried my sea-wet pants so they would not be too embarrassing for the interview.

The hairdresser in the hotel salon caught me as I was leaving with sea-salted wet hair and said "You cannot leave like that!" He sat me down and coiffed my hair, for free, and told me that art today was terrible, that the best art is the art of the heart, so simple, that all humans were the same, with a simplicity in their heart, and this was what the old films had, and he himself was one who believed in art that made us remember the magic of the moment!
Then sat down with Adrien Brody and he said that to be an actor is to create magic. How so? I asked. How do you make that happen? And he said: "to be open. You are open and then all clicks."

He smiled and winked.

Wes Anderson agreed that the spirituality of his film voyage to India lay in precisely the making of the film: to be with a group of people and make a film: that, he said, eyes glowing in happy near tears, is spirituality!

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'Darjeeling' director Wes Anderson powers this train
By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY

Whenever another whimsically hip Wes Anderson film alights in theaters, the director is accustomed to having his aesthetic choices dissected as cultural signposts.

Fashion-forward types zero in on the offbeat wardrobe choices, such as the much-coveted red Adidas warm-up suit donned by Ben Stiller in 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Soundtrack enthusiasts delight in his selections, exemplified by the arcane British Invasion tunes that lent a sonic rush to 1998's Rushmore.

Few would consider the eccentric tastemaker as gossip fodder. But that was before the police-reported suicide attempt by Owen Wilson, longtime pal and a lead in his new release, The Darjeeling Limited, which opens the New York Film Festival on Friday before an exclusive run in the city begins Saturday.

The magical misery tour through India taken by three brothers mourning the loss of their father is no longer just another stylishly amusing entry in Anderson's ongoing study of familial dysfunction. Instead, the director's fifth feature has been upstaged by the disturbing events that unfolded Aug. 26 at Wilson's home in Santa Monica, Calif.

As a result, the melancholic odyssey aboard a locomotive won't be best remembered for its omnipresent 11 pieces of custom Louis Vuitton luggage, so soft and creamy you can practically smell the animal-motif leather. Nor will it be famous for the hauntingly mood-appropriate trio of songs borrowed from Lola vs. Powerman & the Money-Go-Round, a largely forgotten 1970 Kinks album.

As for Anderson's amuse bouche of a 13-minute companion piece, Hotel Chevalier, on Apple's iTunes website starting Wednesday, it is destined to be a mere footnote.

Most likely, all eyes will be on Wilson, 38, as he plays ringleader and eldest brother Francis to Adrien Brody's Peter and Jason Schwartzman's Jack with his head wrapped in bandages, the aftermath of a motorcycle accident that he later admits was intentional.

The sight of the so-called Butterscotch Stallion's sad-clown countenance, studded with scars and scabs as he gives enthusiastic pep talks to promote their uneasy bonding, just adds to the uncomfortable poignancy of the situation.

Wilson will speak for himself

Meanwhile, Anderson, also 38, is in an awkward place as both an artist and a friend. He cares about the welfare of his fellow Texan, former college roommate and frequent collaborator, and he doesn't want to encroach on his privacy.

"I just don't want to be his spokesman," Anderson says on the phone while traveling across Italy a week and a half ago. "I feel it's not my place to go into details. It's all for Owen to do. When he shares his thoughts with the world, he will do a good job."

As if to appease with some positive news, he adds: "I will say that I was with him out in L.A. I spoke to him while at the Venice Film Festival, and I talk to him often. He sounds very good."

About the speculations in the tabloid press (the latest: photos that supposedly reveal Wilson's slashed left wrist), most of them neither confirmed nor denied, Anderson says: "They make up stuff, and a lot of it is wrong. Anyone interested will find there is nothing too mysterious. Just simple stuff we all understand. It's up to him to talk about it." He answers as politely as possible, but it is apparent he would much rather discuss his new movie, of which he has said, "It means a great deal to me, and it also means a great deal to Owen."

It might involve dodging inquiries, but Anderson needs to promote his downsized Darjeeling, a reinvigorating return to a less cumbersome, more boutique approach to filmmaking that arrives at a crucial point in his career.

Streamlined adventure

The critics who adored Rushmore and admired The Royal Tenenbaums were less enthused about overly ambitious The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. The 2004 belly-flop starring Bill Murray as a crusty oceanographer cost more than $50 million and took in only $24 million. Changes had to be made.

Now, Anderson has a niche-savvy studio behind him, Fox Searchlight, instead of a blockbuster behemoth such as Disney. He has recruited a fresh crop of writing partners, Rushmore discovery Schwartzman and his cousin, Roman Coppola, son of Francis. To savor India firsthand, the threesome took a trip similar to the film's brotherhood, ending up in the Himalayas with a printer in tow — just like the one carried by Wilson's Francis in Darjeeling.

"Everything was alien to us and exotic," Anderson says. "We felt very welcome. Going someplace foreign was a positive experience. We literally finished the script on the highest mountain we went to."

He also was able to switch tracks and take a more minimalist route behind the camera.

"I wanted to move much more quickly," he says of the production that cost $20 million and took 38 days to shoot, compared with 100 days for The Life Aquatic. "I was reducing the budget as we went along. We didn't have costume people. Actors came to the set in their costumes with wireless mikes built in. They took care of their own hair and makeup. It was a complicated movie, a lot of locations and dealing with 12-car trains. But the process made it a pleasure."

As for Wilson's state of mind while on location last December, "We had a great time," Anderson says. "Here's Owen, this big star, living in a room next to Jason. No trailer, no special treatment. I said, 'This is how we are going to do this movie,' and he said, 'Sounds great to me.' He was very good then."

A band of brothers

Brody, 34, speaking before news broke about Wilson's troubles, says a rewarding time was had by all. "They were wonderful," he says. "It didn't feel like work in a lot of ways."

An only child, the Oscar winner for 2002's The Pianist liked hanging out with his movie siblings. "Having brothers was something I always wanted. We lived together in one house, and it felt good. It was kind of like being at a summer camp for wayward youth."

Schwartzman, 27, openly idolized Wilson. "He was very intimidated by Owen over the years," Anderson says. "They became much closer during the movie. They knew each other from Rushmore (which Wilson co-wrote) and were both close to me. But I never got them together until India."

And Wilson, with his surfer insouciance intact, did not disappoint, Schwartzman says.

"He's funny, nice, kind, great. There was a little-brother aspect to it. I would talk to Owen and if I made him laugh a couple times, that would make me feel good. Then I would see Adrien having the best time with Owen and making him laugh. And I felt jealous, like a possessive lover."

But that was then. This is now. And one brother is MIA.

Most Anderson fans have wondered about the suicidal tendencies that run through his oeuvre, some involving Wilson's characters.

Does he now regret the suicide theme in Darjeeling? "My only answer is that it comes more from me than Owen," the director explains. "He is just playing a role. There's not much else there. People can't avoid making connections, but they are making them after the fact."

Many couldn't help but play amateur shrink, either, as they recalled the hard-to-forget scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, co-written by Wilson, where his brother Luke's character slits his wrists. Says Anderson: "I wrote that character myself. Owen was not in on that one."

Darjeeling's three siblings were partly inspired by his two brothers as well as Wilson's: "Owen, Luke and Andrew are a part of this."

He almost sighs with relief when the subject switches to an Internet rumor — not about Wilson but a theory that Francis, Peter and Jack are named after Coppola, Bogdanovich and Nicholson, all amigos in their low-budget Roger Corman days. After all, Francis likes to direct the action, Peter wears huge glasses, and Jack is a bit of a womanizer.

Are they being referenced? "Not really. Like, for example, Jason's father is Jack. There is not much in it except for the fact we named them after people who were close to home for all of us."

Given the circumstances surrounding Darjeeling, it is probably for the best that it is basically an adult child coming-of-age story that carries more gravity than, say, one of Wilson's Frat Pack buddy romps.

When a life-altering tragedy occurs after the brothers are thrown off the train following such incidents as an escaped snake and a raucous brawl, Anderson reverentially follows it with 10 minutes of dialogue-free imagery. "Everything changes from that point on. It doesn't really lighten up."

And unlike Anderson's usual father-fixated individuals, the daddy figure here (a cameo by Murray) is hardly in the picture as the struggling lads — Francis is still healing, Peter has a baby on the way, Jack just suffered a bad breakup — are left to their own devices.

"I kept saying I have too many fathers in these movies," the director says. "In the end, the three of us just wrote what we felt was right. The luggage represents the father. It's practically in every frame. We barely hear his name and don't know what happened to him. But they cling to these suitcases."

In the end, much of that emotional baggage is left behind.

Given Anderson's cult status, Wilson's situation probably won't affect Darjeeling's box office. "It's a small film at heart," says Paul Dergarabedian of Media by Numbers. "There might be a slightly higher awareness. But it was never meant to be a blockbuster."

One question remains: Will Anderson and his buddy work together again? And especially, will they write together again since many feel they bring out the best in each other's words?

"Owen is a huge part of the filmmaking team," Anderson assures. "He always will be. We have lots of other things in mind to do together. We have an inventory."

In other words, the train doesn't stop here.

EXCL: Jason Schwartzman on The Darjeeling Limited
Source: ComingSoon

A lot can change in two years. When ComingSoon.net last spoke to actor Jason Schwartzman at the Toronto Film Festival for Steve Martin's Shopgirl, he had been playing around with writing a few songs but nothing serious. Two years later and those songs have been turned into album, he's appeared as Louis XVI in his cousin Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and he's been reunited with Wes Anderson, the director that gave him his start in the popular cult comedy Rushmore. For The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson brought Schwartzman on as a co-writer along with their mutual friend Roman Coppola, and the young actor also plays Jack, the youngest of three estranged brothers (played by Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody) who reunite for a spiritual journey by train across India. Schwartzman is also the star of Anderson's short film Hotel Chevalier, which acts as a prequel of sorts to "Darjeeling" and which can be downloaded for free on iTunes.

As always, Schwartzman is a pleasure to interview--friendly, funny and often self-effacing--so obviously some things don't change in two years.

ComingSoon.net: How did Wes approach you originally to co-write this movie? You obviously hadn't written a movie script before.
Jason Schwartzman: The approach was weird. The acting approach was clear. He arrived in Paris, because his "Life Aquatic" press tour ended there. It seemed like he wanted to stay. He only was scheduled to be there for a couple of days, but it was the end of this thing, so I said to him, "Look, if you want to stay and you don't want to pay for a hotel, just come stay at my apartment."

CS: You had a place there while you were working on "Marie Antoinette."
Schwartzman: I had a little place there. I mean, I don't have an apartment in Paris, heh, but they were putting me up in this little place and there was a guest room. I said, "You could stay with me if you want" and he said, "Great" and he moved in. There was a little bar down the street from my house called "Le Palette" and like every night after work, we'd sometimes go down there, have a little dinner or have a coffee or something, and he said to me, "I want to do this movie about three brothers on a train in India and I want you to be the youngest brother." That seemed okay and I was totally flattered, because I missed working with him and I was excited about that.

CS: This is before you made "Hotel Chevalier."
Schwartzman: This is before "Hotel Chevalier" yeah, well before "Hotel Chevalier." The writing thing was a little more unclear to me because part of our relationship over these last ten years has always been talking about ideas and recounting stories and trying to make each other laugh. That's just part of our dynamic, so there was nothing out of the ordinary of us walking through Paris with a notebook talking about things and writing them down, but at a certain point, he said, "Why don't we bring Roman on this." And I said, "In on what?" and he said, "The movie that we're writing." It was a little bit blurry that whole thing.

CS: I thought that was similar to how Noah Baumbach ended up on "The Life Aquatic" too.
Schwartzman: Yeah, I didn't realize it and then I realized it. That one I tried to play cool. "Oh, yeah, yeah, we're writing a movie together" but I was freaking out, to be invited on that level with Wes. And not only did he pitch the idea of the movie and us writing together, but also, the way he wanted to make the movie was already in place. Like I want to go to India. I want no hair and make-up, no wardrobe department, no trailers. I want to do a very small crew, very quickly, on a train, so the whole thing was set. So that's how it all happened.

CS: Noah also mentioned that you eat very well when you make a movie with Wes, because he said they would meet at an Italian restaurant for their writing sessions and it was very casual and laid back.
Schwartzman: Noah said that?

CS: Was this like that, writing on the fly when you were together, or was it really structured writing sessions?
Schwartzman: No, it felt pretty strict. I mean, like we weren't always in the same city, so no matter where anyone was, we'd always have a conference call for these four hours every day, and then when we were in the same city, which was pretty much a lot of the time--three weeks in Paris, two weeks back in L.A.--the writing sessions were casually rigorous, if that makes sense, in that they're not intense. Most of the writing was talking. You really are just asking questions, you're telling stories about your life, you're looking for something, but that for like thirteen hours.

CS: Did he just record everything and then just go through it later and assemble the best parts?
Schwartzman: No, no, no, we would write it there, too, but it is a lot of discussion. We were always together. It always felt when we were writing that the characters were real and this whole movie was a real thing. It didn't seem like we were telling them what to do as writers. It seemed like they already had done it, and we were just trying to figure out why.

CS: When you went on the original train trip through India with Wes and Roman, did you automatically take on the Jack role?
Schwartzman: No, I mean in the dynamic, I am the youngest of the three writers and of the three brothers, so that exists already. I didn't become Jack, but we would act out the scenes and in them, I'd be Jack.

CS: You weren't the one who hit on the porters.
Schwartzman: No, I wasn't hitting on any stewardesses. None of us were for the record. Too busy.

CS: How did the script change after you three made the trip considering that you'd already been doing a lot of writing beforehand?
Schwartzman: Well, I think India really gave it something else. We had a lot of stuff written, but it really kind of came together in India. It really showed us itself.

CS: Had you been there before?
Schwartzman: No, the writing trip was our first trip there. Wes had been there for one week earlier in the year, but it was fun.

CS: And Wes was scouting locations and figuring out how to shoot on that writing trip?
Schwartzman: It ended up becoming like a location scout. We'd have backpacks and our scripts in the back and then we'd see a temple and go, "Oh, let's stop at this temple and do a scene at this temple." We'd sit at the temple and Wes would go, "Hey, this is actually a good location. We can put the cameras in here and light it. Let's shoot it here." And then we'd just shoot it there. It ended up being really great.

CS: How cramped was it shooting on that train?
Schwartzman: It's more cramped than you can ever imagine.. but I loved it. It kept the actors together. You need to keep the actors together in this kind of movie.

CS: I know you didn't have trailers but did you have your own cars?
Schwartzman: No, not our own cars. We had cubicles. Some time to have a nap.

CS: How do you feel you've changed since making "Rushmore"? Obviously, that was your first movie and you've made many movies with other directors before working with Wes again.
Schwartzman: I suppose I've changed a lot but maybe I haven't changed. I have more experience on a film set, and I do have more years of just hanging around in life. At the same time, I'm still quite nervous and quite obsessive on a film set, and so I don't feel leisurely and confident like "I'm an old pro." I just feel like I've just got so much to learn. I still have the attitude and energy of "Oh, don't f*ck up" but I'm a little bit more comfortable. In "Rushmore" I wasn't even thinking about acting. I was just thinking about not getting creamed on the whole deal.

CS: The last few movies you've made have been with friends, but how did this experience compare to "Marie Antoinette" being that it's a little more male-oriented than a French period piece?
Schwartzman: Yeah, it was a pretty big change of pace, but it was also so many years after the fact, like we really shot it two or three years after "Marie Antoinette" so it felt like I had gotten that out of my system.

CS: When you did the "Shopgirl" interviews in Toronto, had you already shot "Marie Antoinette"? For some reason, I thought you hadn't.
Schwartzman: I already shot "Marie Antoinette," I'd already done it. I was thinking like that but I know that I did it because I had to lose all the weight from the movie before that premiere.

CS: I didn't realize you had gained weight for the role.
Schwartzman: Yeah, I gained 50 pounds.

CS: Really? I guess the period costumes help hide that.
Schwartzman: Yeah, they do.

CS: You've stacked up quite a line-up of leading ladies starting with Claire Danes, then Kirsten Dunst, and now Wes has set you up with Natalie Portman for this one. Do you have some kind of checklist you're knocking off?
Schwartzman: No, no, they're all great actresses and they're all beautiful women, and it's all extremely mind-blowing to me.

CS: I know you knew Claire before and you must have known Kirsten. Did you know Natalie before you two shot the short film with Wes?
Schwartzman: No, I'd met her once before at a party, as you do in Hollywood, but I hadn't spent time with her. You know, really, we spent the first amount of time together for "Hotel Chevalier." She got there, we rehearsed a bunch, had dinner, got up the next day and got right into it.

CS: How much time did you spend shooting that?
Schwartzman: Two days. A day and a half really.

CS: What else do you have going on? I know you're in "Walk Hard" playing Ringo Starr? Do you play any drums in that?
Schwartzman: No, it's just a small cameo. I also did a movie called "The Mark Pease Experience."

CS: Yeah, I was going to ask about that because I'm a huge fan of Todd Louiso as an actor.
Schwartzman: Yeah, he's a great director and this movie is very funny. I loved it. He wrote it, and it's about an ex high school musical star, who now ten years later is a little more of a burnout, but still living the dream. He still loves high school theatre and he's also trying to get an acapella singing group off the ground. It centers around him and trying to get in touch with his old singing teacher, Ben Stiller.

CS: In "Rushmore," you were a playwright, you've mentioned that you wanted to be a playwright yourself. Have you tried to approach any theatres about writing something?
Schwartzman: When I was 15, I wrote and directed a play, a long time ago, but I haven't tried to do it since.

CS: It seems like an obvious direction, since you keep coming back to that in the movies you do.
Schwartzman: Maybe, maybe, yeah, but I also feel like people are born and bred for that kind of thing, and I hope I didn't miss the boat on it.

CS: I interviewed Jonah Hill a few months ago for his big movie and he mentioned that you were friends and that he wanted to do something with you.
Schwartzman: We're hoping to write something together, but nothing's concrete yet.

CS: I know you also have this new record out. What's that about?
Schwartzman: It's under "Coconut Records," that's the name of the band.

CS: Are you playing drums on it?
Schwartzman: I did most of the instruments and sang them, but some stuff, my friends played on. It was a big collaboration.

CS: I remember in Toronto at the "Shopgirl" junket, you mentioned that you were writing songs, but I didn't know you had plans to do something with them.
Schwartzman: Yeah, well I didn't either, it happened so quickly. I just went to my friend's house and did them all there in one week, and not under the idea that it's going to be a released record, more that it was an experiment in multi-track recording for myself. I'm used to having an idea for a song, but you have a band and you bounce ideas off them and hear how things sound together, but I used the studio like it was my band.

CS: Did you do it all on the computer?
Schwartzman: Yeah, mostly computers.

Anatomy of a Scene: 'The Darjeeling Limited'
Wes Anderson, director of "The Darjeeling Limited," discusses how a scene from the movie was created.

*WATCH AT OWN RISK*


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/09/27/arts/20070927_DARJEELING.html#

eh. :yabbse-undecided:  bring on Blood.

i think i'm gonna hold off on really saying anything about the movie cos i feel the same way about it as i did when i first saw life aquatic (and my opinion on that movie has since changed).  but my first impression is that i didn't like the first third, really liked the second third, and was bored by the end. 

but i did sit directly in front of rob huebel. 

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Quote from: JG on September 29, 2007, 11:30:36 PM
but i did sit directly in front of rob huebel. 

you must have been at the union square loews, because i saw rob huebel as well.

Was he dressed as Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7WFVZPvLUY

Jason Schwartzman: Color him amazed
No one's more surprised at his career than Jason himself. And now he's reunited with the man who helped start it all, 'Rushmore's' Wes Anderson.
Source: Los Angeles Times

JASON SCHWARTZMAN limped around his friend's sun-dappled Nichols Canyon retreat looking highly apologetic. Frowning at his heels was his chubby French bulldog, Arrow. Schwartzman had broken his toe the day before, and as he made his way to a secluded outdoor table, he tried explaining. "It was like that scene in 'Karate Kid,' " he said, presumably casting himself in the Ralph Macchio role. Everyone was kicking soccer balls around like a bunch of Pelés, he said. So, playing barefoot seemed like a good idea.

The actor's solicitous earnestness was palpable. This hesitant, wide-eyed loopy charm, often employed as the comic relief in sensitive, maudlin films, lands him roles among Hollywood's best. But no one, it seems, is as surprised by his celebrity as he is. In some respects, he's at the white-hot center of young arty Hollywood; yet he sees himself more as a struggling musician and improbable interloper.

"The Darjeeling Limited," opening Friday, is his first movie with Wes Anderson since the writer-director helped make the teenage Schwartzman a star in 1998's "Rushmore." And it's Schwartzman's first screenwriting credit. It's a weird road movie with the typical Anderson flourishes -- the Kinks songs, the melancholic tone, all of it awash in color -- that follows three estranged brothers played by Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson on a spiritual quest by train through India. Schwartzman spent about 18 months writing the script with Anderson and Schwartzman's cousin Roman Coppola.

But before his storytelling began, Schwartzman opened with a disclaimer. "My feelings won't be hurt if you cut me off," he said. "I can be slightly long-winded."

And then Schwartzman unspooled a stream-of-conscious recollection of "Darjeeling" from the first moment Anderson approached him with the idea in Paris, while Roman Coppola and Schwartzman were filming "Marie Antoinette," to the exotic experience of shooting in India, much of it in the crowded compartments of a moving train with weekends spent in his pajamas, watching movies in bed with Anderson. At some point, Arrow began snoring loudly under the table. Schwartzman paused to acknowledge his throbbing toe.

"It's like a ticking clock," he said."I've never done an interview in physical pain before, but it's great." And he was off again, remembering his surprise at Anderson's invitation to co-write the film. "Darjeeling" originated with Anderson's idea -- three brothers on a train in India. They worked out the rest together in Parisian hotel rooms and coffeehouses where Anderson sometimes lives, on long distance conference calls and then, finally in India, until they finished the script.

"I really would describe it as less like painting something or drawing something, less like creating something on a blank space," Schwartzman said. "I think it was more like trying to uncover something like an archeological dig or something. It felt to me like these three brothers were real and the trip they were on was real and we were trying to define it or document it. I remember going to bed every night thinking, 'What are they doing now? Where are those guys?' So, I don't think it was as much, 'OK, what can we create for them now?' as waiting for them; it felt more like they were there and we were trying to uncover it, less than create it. Then we went to India for four or five weeks and really just wrote nonstop. I had to get a whole new long-distance plan."

He paused. "Was that too long-winded?"

It was quiet out on the deck, the silence broken only by the sound of wind in the leaves. The small hillside compound felt exclusive. A windblown Kirsten Dunst lingered out front, as the actor headed into his beautifully appointed quarters for a photo shoot. But apparently, this was a bit out of Schwartzman's milieu.

"I think if I lived here," he said, raising his eyes to the trees, "this would drive me crazy." He pointed down the hill, toward the endless, noisy flats of Hollywood and said, "I live down there."

Schwartzman, 27, grew up in L.A., the older of the two sons of Talia Shire and now deceased producer Jack Schwartzman. He also has two older half-brothers, one of whom, John Schwartzman, is a cinematographer. Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle and Roman, Sofia Coppola and Nicolas Cage are his cousins. His grandfather was award-winning composer Carmine Coppola.

But to hear him talk, Schwartzman grew up in the audience, not on movie sets. He recalls living in his mother's busy orbit, where music was always played at high volume -- Stephen Sondheim or Aaron Copland.

"My mom would be singing and kind of dancing around rooms," he said. "She always was watching movies. So I think that as a young kid maybe just to be close to my mom I would watch movies with her. But I wasn't too invested in it, because usually they were black and white, usually from the 1930s."

As an adolescent he acquired his own brand of showmanship, dressing in formal attire for family gatherings, performing lines from movies to entertain his family. He shared the same comic self-possession that made his Max Fischer in "Rushmore" so memorable.

The Schwartzman style

HE hasn't lost that puckish quality, which colored every role that came after, from the overwrought poet-activist in "I ♥ Huckabees" to the scruffy, self-involved font designer in "Shopgirl" to his socially stunted Louis XVI in "Marie Antoinette." His performances are often as much expression -- the furrowed brow and pursed mouth, the exaggerated gestures -- as timing and delivery, sort of a postmodern Buster Keaton.

"He has a way of moving, the way he uses his hands, his manner is very unique, very interesting and can be very funny," said Anderson. "He also has a really interesting way of making metaphors that are very unexpected and very pointed."

Every now and then, Schwartzman performs around town as a solo artist called Coconut Records. A video of a recent gig posted on his MySpace page shows him wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt, shooting incongruent gestures into the crowd. His lyrics are inaudible over the cheers.

"There's a very endearing quality about him," said Brody. "He's very honest and open and I think that's very lovable."

The summer he was 16, Schwartzman played Otis Ormonde in his cousin Sofia's take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," a small stage production Francis coordinated for the kids at the homestead in Northern California. Around that time, his mother rented three classic 1960s-'70s films for him: "Dog Day Afternoon," "Harold and Maude" and "The Graduate."

"That was the first time that the feeling I got from music, I got from a movie," he said. "I just knew that whatever I do with my life, I hope that I can make something that makes me feel -- makes someone else feel -- the way I feel when I'm really enjoying these things."

At a party later that year, Sofia's friend Davia Nelson told her she was helping cast the lead role in "Rushmore." Sofia waved over Schwartzman, who was wearing tails and carrying a cane. He listened to Nelson's pitch and tried to talk his way out of it.

"Growing up in L.A.," said Schwartzman, "there are kid actors and you see like little headshots -- you know what I mean -- you go into places and see like a little kid dressed like an astronaut or something, showing all the things he's capable of looking like. And I remember thinking, I'm just not that person."

'It didn't seem scary.'

BUT then he read Wilson and Anderson's "Rushmore" script -- the first he'd ever read -- and decided to give it his best shot. He wore khakis, a blazer with a homemade school emblem on the lapel and slicked back his hair and was devastated to find that every other candidate for the role had worn the same thing.

Then he met Anderson. "He was so young!" said Schwartzman. "He had Converse sandals on and I was wearing New Balance shoes. And we started talking about each other's footwear. I remember thinking, 'Wow, this guy seems like he would like music.' It didn't seem scary."

Even after that phenomenal debut, Schwartzman toured as the drummer of Phantom Planet, a band whose song "California" became the theme to the hit Fox show "The O.C." But touring proved too much and Schwartzman decided to focus on acting and songwriting.

"He has a lot of heart," said Roman Coppola. "He doesn't make choices in any kind of cynical way. He's very curious and committed. When he gets involved in something, he gives it his all."

Schwartzman had spent the morning recording. Last spring, he released an album of pop songs from his own small label, Young Baby Records, his first since he left Phantom Planet about three years ago. He's considering writing another screenplay. Next spring, he costars with Ben Stiller as the title character in "The Marc Pease Experiment, a comedy about a once-great high school musical-theater star turned limo driver. "It's got some sad, nice moments," he said.

A week after Schwartzman's toe injury, Anderson called from Paris with a more succinct take on writing "Darjeeling."

"Our goal," he said, "was to make it too personal."

Anderson, who earned much acclaim for "Rushmore" and a screenwriting Oscar nomination for "The Royal Tenenbaums" -- both of which he co-wrote with Wilson -- seemed to stumble with the big budget of "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou." With "Darjeeling," the consensus among early viewers is that it's more fun than "Aquatic," but lacks the depth of "Tenenbaums" and "Rushmore." Then again, Anderson's films -- and Schwartzman for that matter -- aren't designed for mass appeal. To some, they're just too precious, even self-indulgent. For others, though, they capture something layered and emotional about 1970s childhoods.

Schwartzman's character in "Darjeeling," Jack, is a writer and hopeless romantic who is inexplicably barefoot at all times. He tries to heal his broken heart with lusty encounters with the train's lovely young hostess while obsessively checking his ex-girlfriend's voice mail because he still has the access code. He writes short stories that he says are fiction, but are actually taken verbatim from his life.

Brody's character, Peter is expecting a baby with a woman he expected to have divorced and wears his recently dead father's old prescription glasses everywhere. Wilson's character, Francis, seizes his brothers' passports to ensure they don't abandon the spiritual journey, a quest inspired after his near-death motorcycle "accident."

"Each guy is really just the three of us kind of spread out," said Schwartzman. "Shards of the three of us."

The "Darjeeling" shoot was an intimate one. Mornings, Wilson cooked Brody and Schwartzman oatmeal that he'd brought from L.A. Then they each donned their suits, fixed their own hair and makeup and by 7, they were jumping on a train which became their traveling set. For about 14 hours each weekday, everyone packed into those tiny compartments. "You have no place to hide," said Schwartzman. "And I think that really helped. We really were forced to be there for each other."

There's no mention of Wilson's state of mind during the shoot, or the fact that a year after the film wrapped, he apparently attempted suicide. When asked about Wilson's August hospitalization, Schwartzman demurred.

But Schwartzman quickly retrieves the thread of conversation, turning it back to the film, his admiration for his co-stars, his struggles with self-confidence. He said he gets so star-struck on film sets, it can be crippling. Despite Dustin Hoffman's casual, kind way, for example, Schwartzman said he was never totally comfortable with him on the set of "I ♥Huckabees." And on "Darjeeling," the idea of filming opposite Wilson and Oscar-winner Brody was so unnerving, Schwartzman said, he arrived to the set in India seven weeks early.

"Maybe this is always how it will be," he said. "I feel like I'm learning. I feel like I'm just starting out."

kind of got a little miss sunshine feeling from this - many funny, moving moments but was left wanting more. this may not be a step in a "new direction" for wes but it certainly wasn't a step backwards. i kind of like thinking of it as the baby brother to tenenbaums. 

one thing's for sure - it's hard not to continually be reminded of wilson's recent suicide attempt (the bandages certainly don't help). the film is all the more poignant because of it.

i was disappointed, slightly.
it's definitely a different directorial style for Wes.
the film's intro was great in style and got me excited but i expected myself to laugh more and thoroughly enjoy it, which I did, but in a 'kinda' way.
crazy how The Life Aquatic and the familiarity it embodied within Wes's individual style seems brighter than this film.
maybe i need to watch it again.
it was definitely a new style of filmmaking for him, albeit still maintaining Yeoman's camera pans, zooms, etc.
meeting Roman Coppola behind me on line made my day anyway.

East meets Wes
Variety screens 'Darjeeling Limited'

Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" is big in heart and oddly enough, spirituality. Shot almost entirely in India, the story follows three brothers trying to cope with the death of their father.

At the Variety Screening Series, the 38-year-old Texas native said it was a beautiful, arduous process.

"The movie really began with me wanting to make a picture in India. And that was, in part, inspired by movies. The films of Satyajit Ray, which I really loved all of my life and subsequently, the real reason why I wanted to go to India," he exclaimed. "The other big inspiration was the idea of working with Jason [Schwartzman] and Roman [Coppola] on a script and mixing all of our ideas together."

The three of them wrote furiously and decided it would be best to travel to India to scout locations and "act out" some of the scenes.

"So we were traveling by train in India one day and we end up in this village. When we arrived, they welcomed us with a standard ritual for visitors, where you sit down with the elders of the village and do this opium drinking ceremony with them," Anderson said with a smile. "So one of them is sitting there steeping it in tea and then he pours the opium in his palm and you have to slurp it out. You can do it once, twice, or three times, but I think we all did it three times. When we left we all felt like 'this is a great village. Let's shoot here!'"

When asked what he thought was the most memorable moment of the shoot, Brody recalled a beautiful Christmas dinner with the cast that took place in a remote field in India.

"It was beautiful. It was a very spiritual night. When we left though, I was with my girlfriend and we were in the back of a pick-up truck and I was staring dreamily into her eyes when out of nowhere, a low-hanging powerline went under my neck and I struggled to free myself. It was a very dramatic, romantic ending to the whole shoot."

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Tomorrow I'm camping out in front of the Hammer and it's going to be a great day and then the film is going to be free.  Since there's appearences tonight at Aero I'm hoping for the same tomorrow but the website doesn't list it and probably not.

i don't understand why there is not a theater schedule yet.

is it because TLA was a commercial flop - they're treating it delicately?

Yes, they are worried that there is no enough screens in the country for Game Plan, Mr. Woodcock and Rush Hour 3. They release every piece of shit movie in 3000+ screens and then they make a big deal out of these movies. Makes no sense, and I dont get tired of saying it.

Wes Anderson Conducts The Darjeeling Limited
Source: ComingSoon

Filmmaker Wes Anderson is back with his fifth movie, The Darjeeling Limited, which takes three estranged brothers, played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman (who also co-wrote this), on a spiritual across India, getting into all sorts of misadventures. A few days before the film was to have its North American premiere as Opening Night of the New York Film Festival, Anderson made a rare appearance to talk to journalists about it.

ComingSoon.net: What sparked your interest in this idea?
Wes Anderson: The first thing was I wanted to make a movie in India. That was sparked through a series of events: some movies that I'd seen over the years, a book that I'd read, and a friend that I had who I grew up with who was from India. So all those things contributed and then just at a certain point I realized that's what I want to connect. And I thought I wanted to make a film about three brothers because I grew up one of three brothers. One of the key things was that I thought I would like to write with Jason and Roman and that was in a way the biggest idea for me because the story came from all three of us together.

CS: I thought it was interesting that the natural colors used in India seem to be very much like something you might see in a Wes Anderson film. Is that something that appealed to you? That sense of color and style?
Anderson: I love that about India. There's practically nothing in the movie that we invented. I didn't go there until three years ago and I went there because I wanted to make a movie there, and when I went, I wasn't shocked by what it was. It was this place that I've seen in movies, but vastly expanded. Obviously, I'm not an expert on India by any means. It's just a huge place with so many different subcultures. To me it was a place where there is no direction to look that isn't interesting in some way or another. It's a very moving place to visit.

CS: Do you believe in reincarnation and that you might have been an Indian filmmaker in a past life?
Anderson: One of my favorite filmmakers is Satyajit Ray and he's one of my inspirations for doing this movie. His whole approach to making movies interests me because he works like a novelist really. He made a movie practically every year. He has his own little troop and their very personal stories. I think Pedro Almodovar today, his way of working, he's a regional filmmaker, has his group of people, he has his resources and can keep making one movie after another. He does his own thing. I admire that.

CS: There are some similar people you work with from movie to movie like cinematographer Bob Yeomen who's shot most of your movies. Would you ever work with another DP or do you just like his style?
Anderson: He's a very good friend of mine and I just think he's great. I would be happy to work with someone else if Bob doesn't want to do the movie I'm doing, or if he's unavailable. I like working with my friends. We work well together.

CS: You've collaborated on your movie's scripts with Owen and Jason and Roman, all of whom you've been friends with for a while. Can you talk about how you decide to start writing with your friends?
Anderson: It's different every time. Owen and I were helping each other writing short stories when we first got to know each other, but we also went to movies all the time. That one it was just sort of automatic. It was almost like we didn't have any choice about it. Then, Noah (Baumbach) and I started working on a story for a movie without realizing we were doing that. It wasn't "The Life Aquatic" it was something else that we haven't even finished writing. Whenever we would go to dinner or something we would just start make up scenes for the thing and then we would just start writing them down because we've got a lot of stuff now. And with Jason and Roman it happened when we were all in France at the same time. I knew I wanted to work with Jason again, we hadn't done anything together since "Rushmore" and we'd been friends since then. And then Roman had come and helped while we were doing "The Life Aquatic" he did a lot of work on that movie and really helped me enormously and he's somebody I really enjoy being around. So suddenly we were all in this place together right when I wanted to start this project and I thought this is good luck so let's take advantage of it.

CS: What is it about brotherhood you think makes such fertile soil for story telling?
Anderson: For me it's because the first twenty years of my life most of the time I was with my brothers. I feel like we get along very well, but we fought a lot. We fought most of the time we were together. And yet they're the people I'm closest to in the world. And other than my own brothers I've spent a lot of time with Owen, Luke, Andrew Wilson. Those brothers are like my brothers to me because I lived with them for years and years in different places we've all been together. And also Jason and Roman I feel like my relationship to them is also like brothers. Just because it's a big part of my life I guess.

CS: This film is set in India, in previous films, like "The Tenenbaums," it's kind of a mythical New York, what made you want to do it this way?
Anderson: Well we don't ever say India. I don't know if we do actually, we may. It's hard to argue that this is a mythical India. I thought during the movie about this issue, because I kind of like not specifying a place. But in the case of this, Darjeeling is a real part of India. It's nowhere near where any of this stuff is actually taking place. I guess because India is so much the subject matter of the movie I just wouldn't want to give it a fake name.

CS: What are some things that you learned making "The Life Aquatic" and also some things that you learned making "The Darjeeling" that can apply to your next project?
Anderson: "The Life Aquatic" was a very hard movie to make. We shot for a hundred days and people were always warning me you don't want to do a movie on the water. And I was like, "Well, just wait." But it just turns out to be very difficult. Making a movie on a train is nothing like making a movie on a boat. The weather can change so suddenly and small things can become gigantic problems. I've never been anywhere close to working on a movie where two thirds of the day through I was thinking, "I'm not going to get anything done today. We're going to leave today without anything and we're going to have spent three hundred thousand dollars." And that's the kind of thing that was happening on that movie; it was very difficult. It was also a lot of fun in a lot of ways. It was the movie we wanted to make, but it was expensive and difficult and slow, and I don't like working that way. I felt like nobody made any choices along the way to make it any more commercial. It's an odd movie, it's a weird movie. It's the movie we wanted to make, but maybe it shouldn't have cost sixty million dollars. The way it was released in Europe or in Japan for instance; they released it like my other movies. "Well, this is a special little odd movie we've got here." They don't really know how much it costs. They don't really think about it. But in America, the way it was presented, it had to be presented as a big movie that came out on 2,000 screens or something, because they had all this money in it. Their only hope to get the money back was to go for it which it doesn't do all that. So this movie we made for much, much less money. We made it much more quickly. And the whole process really felt right, whereas, in "The Life Aquatic," the process was a mixture of things. And I will say this, looking back on "The Life Aquatic," how we did it, I don't know how we could do that movie cheaper. Well, the way to do it cheaper is you cut out some of the boats, islands, helicopters, explosions, you know? And then you can get it to a more modest scale.

CS: I remember you had a five-story boat in "The Life Aquatic." In this, you have a scene of the train, where the camera pans from one car to the next. Did you actually build that in a similar way?
Anderson: The difference is that was five stories tall. But that was the most expensive shot in the movie. Because we had to build this set. It is like following a train of thought. The scene you're talking about in "Darjeeling" definitely relates to that other scene. And I sort of worry, well do I want to do something where somebody will recognize that's something I do, or I'm repeating something I've done in some way. But I kind of think that, well I don't want to not do that. There are a lot of peoples other movies people that can see and if I want to follow this train of thought if you want to call it that I'm just going to do that. So we built it and we had to bring everyone back. Bill Murray and Natalie Portman, and everybody who left had to come back for that. And then we went out for the afternoon to the desert on our train and shot it. It wasn't actually that hard to do. A lot of what needed to be done just had to be built in such a way by our production designer who was good at that stuff.

CS: You mentioned earlier watching a lot of movies while you were younger and getting inspired by that. What first made you fall in love with wanting to make movies?
Anderson: Once I would list Hitchcock movies that were out on Beta, when they first had Beta, which were "Rear Window" and "Rope" and maybe "North by Northwest." Just a few color ones. And those really interested me because I was aware that the videos said Alfred Hitchcock. You see him every now and then, but suddenly it's not about the star, it's about this Alfred Hitchcock. So I was interested in that, this director. And then I think probably Spielberg, "Indiana Jones" and "Star Wars", all that stuff was interesting to me. And then later when I actually started doing stuff I started watching some French movies and those were movies where all the things I was looking at were built around these directors, and I got drawn to those.

CS: Looking onto your next film, is "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" going to be a bigger budget movie?
Anderson: It's bigger than "Darjeeling" just because it's a movie where you have to build everything and you're building it in miniature. It's stop motion.

CS: Is Henry Selick going to do that?
Anderson: Not Henry. Henry has his own movie that he's directing, but there's a guy he introduced me to named Mark Gustafson who is one of his colleagues at this place Vinton where he works. So he's going to be the guy who's in charge of the animation. It's very low budget for an animated movie, it's like thirty five million, because you need to get a bank loan. (This is probably more information than I'm supposed to be giving you.)

CS: Have you started principal photography?
Anderson: No we haven't started. We're still designing the characters. We just got the money two months ago, something like that. We were at one studio that went out of business, and we've been through a lot of different phases of getting this sorted out, but finally we're rolling on it.

CS: We've talked to a lot of filmmakers who try to do everything on camera because when they have to go to computer animators, it's out of their control. Are you worried about not having as much control because you'll be depending on them?
Anderson: The way we shot in India, I feel like what I enjoyed the most about it were the things that you couldn't control because I'm pretty good at controlling it all. India is a place you can't control. There's no way, it's going to invade everything. Things are going to happen. My theory with the movie was, okay, all right. We left last night and the hut was brown and now today we're here and we can all see that it's painted blue. Now that happened over the night. That was somebody's decision and now we're going to film that. Literally that's an exact thing that happened. It's just a place where you say, "Well, what happened guys?" People just made decisions. It was very exciting for that to happen. It was full of surprises working there. The animated stuff, we control everything. That's the answer to that. The actors will bring a lot to it and the animators are like actors also, so they bring a lot to it as well.

The Darjeeling Limited is now playing in New York, and it will be released in more cities on Friday, October 5.

Wes Anderson And Jason Schwartzman On Journeying From 'Rushmore' To 'Darjeeling Limited'
'This time around the intent was to make something very personal,' Schwartzman says of the recently released 'Darjeeling.'
Source: MTV

*READ AT OWN RISK*

Say what you will about Wes Anderson, the director of "Bottle Rocket" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," the man and his work stand out. There's nothing much like a Wes Anderson experience (and they are experiences, from the impeccable production design to the spot-on soundtrack choices), except another of his films.

Much to the delight of his avid fans, he's back with his fifth film, "The Darjeeling Limited" — which recently opened in, um, limited release. As much a spiritual journey through India as it is a comedy about three estranged brothers, the film stars Adrien Brody and Anderson stalwart Owen Wilson.

And re-teaming with Anderson for the first time since the much-beloved "Rushmore" is Max Fischer himself, Jason Schwartzman. MTV spoke with Anderson and Schwartzman (who also co-wrote the film) about their history together, why it's not so bad to repeat yourself and whether Max will ever appear onscreen again.

MTV: First things first: Who is to blame for it being nine years since you've done a film together?

Wes Anderson: Is it nine years? We did have a part in "The Royal Tenenbaums" that was written for Jason, but it got cut out. He played a boy who lived across the street from them.

MTV: That was cut out in the screenwriting stage?

Anderson: Yeah. But there's a bird in the movie that's named after his character. He was going to play Mordechai. He was the son of a diplomat and had escaped from his school.

MTV: What did you guys make of each other when you first met at the audition for "Rushmore"?

Jason Schwartzman: I was very nervous going in because I had never really auditioned for a movie before. I was immediately put at ease, though. He was young. I felt immediately like, "Oh, this could be my friend."

Anderson: I remember the very second of meeting him. We had spent a year trying to find someone to play this part. When he read, it was a slam-dunk. We got the guy. Then he read opposite some other people that were auditioning to play the sons of Bill Murray, and he played Bill Murray's part and he was really great. I mean Bill was great, but Jason was pretty good too in that part.

MTV: Does it feel like a completely different kind of collaboration this time?

Schwartzman: This time around it feels like the intent was to make something very personal. And it feels like you can only go to that level by deep-sea diving with someone you know and trust and can believe in. There's a real foundation there. You have much more rope to bungee with.

Anderson: [Laughs.] I knew there would be a second [metaphor]. I already got deep-sea diving but then I got the bungee. I knew I'd get at least two. Jason has a way with metaphors.

MTV: You started writing this together in Paris, and then you continued writing in India. How much of the film was dictated by the trip?

Schwartzman: When we went to India, Wes kept saying, "Say yes to everything," just like in the script. So we were half living the script and half writing it. We would engage in things way more than we normally would.

Anderson: Most of what's in front of the camera is what we discovered there.

MTV: This film returns to some of the themes that appear in most of your work, namely absent fathers.

Anderson: I've been thinking about this recently. There are a lot of things that, from one movie to the next, are related. I kind of like following a train of thought and developing an idea. I like the idea of, after I make some more movies, they can all sit on a shelf together and they sort of fit together.

MTV: Do you worry about repeating yourself? Do you ever compose a shot or write a line of dialogue and think, "I've done this before"?

Anderson: I do worry about repeating myself, because I know that I am doing something the way I would do it. But then I think, should I do it the way I wouldn't do it? It's a dilemma. And I really think the best answer for me is, I should try to make it the best it can be and do it the way I like it the most. I'd rather do that than force myself to be something normal. Maybe my way is worse, but at least it's personal to me. It's based on all my own experiences and my own approach that's formed by God knows what.

MTV: "Darjeeling" marks four Wes Anderson films in a row with Bill Murray. What power do you have over him?

Anderson: We keep going back to him for more stuff. We always want him.

MTV: Is it implied that his character in this is the father?

Anderson: People have said that.

MTV: Was that your intention?

Anderson: We didn't have any intention.

MTV: Was it discussed with Bill?

Anderson: No. Jason, [co-writer] Roman [Coppola, who is also Schwartzman's cousin] and I discussed whether people might think that. But that was about as far as we ever went with it. My one conversation with Bill was, "We have this thing you could do if you want to come to India. It's kind of a cameo. It's actually more of a symbol." I think he was interested in being a symbol.

MTV: The short prequel, "Hotel Chevalier" [which has been screened with "Darjeeling" at festivals and is available for free on iTunes], was shot over a year before the film, even though it also stars Jason's character. How exactly did it come about?

Schwartzman: I remember Wes calling me on the phone and reading it to me. He said he had written this short story that he wanted to do with me and Natalie Portman. And he wanted to do it immediately. I don't know how soon after was the idea that this guy in this short film is Jack Whitman. It was totally helpful for me to go back a year later and work on "The Darjeeling Limited." You can imagine things as an actor but it's really great to remember it as an actor. I actually wish that from here on out I could shoot tons of things a year before I do the actual movie.

MTV: Wes, did you consider shorts for Owen's and Adrien's characters too?

Anderson: We thought about it, but the short we made with Jason and Natalie wasn't written to fill a formal spot. We just had it. Then I thought, "I just like that we have the one that we made." The other ones would have been because we felt like we owed shorts to those guys.

MTV: Have you ever thought about writing another story with the Max Fischer character for another film or book?

Anderson: [He pauses.] Hmm. In a way a lot of these characters are connected.

MTV: Do you imagine them all inhabiting the same universe?

Anderson: I do sometimes feel that characters from "Rushmore" could go into "The Life Aquatic" in a very natural way, and there aren't many other movies they could go into and feel like they weren't out of left field.

Schwartzman: It would be great to see them meet.

Come on, Mac!  Spoiler warning, man!

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 04, 2007, 11:41:57 AM
MTV: Do you imagine them all inhabiting the same universe?

Anderson: I do sometimes feel that characters from "Rushmore" could go into "The Life Aquatic" in a very natural way, and there aren't many other movies they could go into and feel like they weren't out of left field.

Schwartzman: It would be great to see them meet.

Please, Wes... no "Max and Herman Blume Strike Back."

bite yourt toungue, Sparrow!  dont you ever 'come on, mac!' again!

WES ANDERSON
At only 38 (he looks even younger), the director of hits such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums has returned to his favourite theme. But, Simon Houpt discovers, he can't say why
Source: The Globe And Mail

NEW YORK -- Want to know what Wes Anderson is like in person? Watch his films. For here he is, perched on a high floor of the chic W Hotel overlooking Union Square and seeming as nattily attired, emotionally reserved, unreflective and wholly sui generis as his five-feature body of work.

He is clad in an off-white linen suit that, per his habit, is tailored about one size too small: his pants are floods hanging a centimetre or two above light brown hush puppies, his jacket reveals shirtsleeves unbuttoned at the cuffs. With his baby smooth face and slightly overlong reddish hair, at 38 he gives the playful impression of a boy who suddenly grew into a man and has been too distracted to buy himself a new wardrobe.

Which is an intriguing fiction, because it's hard to imagine Anderson getting distracted from anything he considers important; he knows the value of appearances. Certainly his films, beginning with Bottle Rocket in 1996 and stretching through Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) seem the intricate creations of an obsessive boy-man. His new work, The Darjeeling Limited, is, like the others, a lovingly hand-turned dollhouse of quirky characters. But there's something new pushing at the edges: an awareness, however small, of a wider world out there.

The film, which opens in Toronto on Friday before rolling out across Canada over October, centres on three estranged brothers who have not seen each other since the funeral of their father one year earlier. Led by the eldest, Francis (Owen Wilson), after a motorcycle accident left him longing to reconcile his fractured family, Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) set out by train across Rajasthan on what Francis bills as a spiritual journey. To ease their way, Francis has brought along his personal assistant, who daily distributes laminated cards to the trio with their minutely planned itinerary.

Like the fictional brothers, Anderson travelled across India with his co-writers on the movie, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola. "We went over there to kind of act out what we knew of the story up to that point, to see what it was like," he explains.

"So we went on a train around India and we put ourselves in a lot of situations where normally we'd be too reluctant or too reserved to go into, but we did them because, you know, we were doing our 'research' - so we kind of were acting out the story."

While writing, Schwartzman played his own character, Coppola took on Brody's character and Anderson played Wilson's - that is, just as he does in real life, he played the ringleader, the orchestrator. And while he's loath to admit he was on his own spiritual quest - "I think it would sound silly to be talking about that in the context of promoting a movie," - Anderson agrees that he was off-balance and in need of rejuvenation after the experience of making and promoting The Life Aquatic. His first big-studio feature, with a budget of more than twice what he had had before, that project had thrown him into a manner of filmmaking that didn't suit his handmade style: trailers for the actors and endless personal assistants and a sense that there was no need to rush the process because Disney was footing the bill.

"I didn't want to spend that kind of money with Life Aquatic," he insists. "We had ships and giant sets and we had islands, and we made it for I think half of what you would normally spend for such a movie, but still it ended up being $58-million or something like that. Well, that's a lot of money." Particularly when the North American box office ends up topping out at about $24-million.

After Life Aquatic, Anderson left his home in New York and took an apartment in Paris. "Often people just have to get away from where they're from, I guess," he says. The city fed him - he once wanted to be an architect and he is in thrall to classic Parisian design - and put him that much closer to his real goal: travel through Asia and India. Inspired by Jean Renoir's The River, which had been recommended to him by Martin Scorsese, Anderson went to India and immediately fell in love with the land and its people.

"Have you been to India before?" he asks. "There's so many more people than most places you go, and they're out. People are everywhere. So any way you look, there's something funny, something that's going to make you laugh or something that might shock you, or something beautiful. The place is filled with activity, and everything is at a much more intense level, you know? You don't see a guy on a scooter, you see a family of six on a scooter, you know, and the wife is riding side-saddle in a sari, and a guy riding the other way on a bicycle has like 25 milk cans, so that it's wider than a car, and you really can't believe it."

To illustrate his point, he borrows a pen and a piece of paper and draws a picture of a flatbed truck with an almost dome-like load of cotton that makes the conveyance look like a package of Jiffy-Pop, comically topped off with a tiny Indian man balanced precariously on the load.

Anderson wanted to capture some of that chaos. So he stripped away the normal Hollywood perks, instructed his actors to do their own hair and makeup, and used real locations. Production ended up costing about $17-million.

"My approach with India was, we didn't go to India to build India," he says. "I feel like there's very little in the movie that we invented." Except, of course, for the central story, which brings Anderson back to his familiar themes of failure, nostalgia and fractured families.

In The Darjeeling Limited, he toys with those who believe all fiction is autobiographical: Jack, a writer, is frequently protesting that his stories - which the audience knows to be taken directly from his life - are pure fiction.

"I don't think I'd want to write about three brothers if it weren't for the fact that I have two brothers and there were three of us growing up and that comes from my own experience," Anderson says.

So does he understand why he keeps gnawing at the theme of fractured families?

He pauses as if he's never been asked the question. "I guess, maybe - well, you know what? It's very hard for me to answer," he says. "I certainly, you know, couldn't help but be aware that that's something that's always in these movies, but umm, I don't know why I feel that drawn to that material."

He pauses again. "Umm. I'll think about it." He laughs quietly, to himself: Nothing more is forthcoming.

i love wes. i love the movie. but i really can't read another article or promo about either for sometime.

Wes Anderson went from nerdy film school savior to pretensious pompous auteur overnight.

I'll wait for the video.

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 03:14:55 PM
Wes Anderson went from nerdy film school savior to pretensious pompous auteur overnight.

I'll wait for the video.

Are you really sure you don't wanna see a gorgeous cinemascope Wes Anderson movie on the big screen?

By the way, how much does an average viewer pay in the US to see a movie in theaters? In Portugal is about 5-fucking-€, which is just too much, but I heard some of you guys pay even more, right?

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on October 04, 2007, 04:38:22 PM

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 03:14:55 PM
Wes Anderson went from nerdy film school savior to pretensious pompous auteur overnight.

I'll wait for the video.

Are you really sure you don't wanna see a gorgeous cinemascope Wes Anderson movie on the big screen?

By the way, how much does an average viewer pay in the US to see a movie in theaters? In Portugal is about 5-fucking-€, which is just too much, but I heard some of you guys pay even more, right?

I probably will see it, but I'm just saying, it doesn't seem like Wes is really making any progress.

Wes and PTA have been in an unspoken war the past 10 years whether people want to admit it or not. Sure, you can like them both, but you can't like them both the same amount. You have to like one more than the other.

I think PTA has passed Wes by. He's making movies that are stretching his filmmaking talents while Wes is still making buddy movies with his friends.

My allegiance lies with PTA. Because I'm an adult, and I need an adult filmmaker (HAHA)

Last movie I saw in the theater was Cocoon II and I paid $2.50 and it came with a free shoe shining in the lobby.

any word on how much this is expanding this week (number of theaters)?

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 05:10:27 PM

Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on October 04, 2007, 04:38:22 PM

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 03:14:55 PM
Wes Anderson went from nerdy film school savior to pretensious pompous auteur overnight.

I'll wait for the video.

Are you really sure you don't wanna see a gorgeous cinemascope Wes Anderson movie on the big screen?

By the way, how much does an average viewer pay in the US to see a movie in theaters? In Portugal is about 5-fucking-€, which is just too much, but I heard some of you guys pay even more, right?

I probably will see it, but I'm just saying, it doesn't seem like Wes is really making any progress.

Wes and PTA have been in an unspoken war the past 10 years whether people want to admit it or not. Sure, you can like them both, but you can't like them both the same amount. You have to like one more than the other.

I think PTA has passed Wes by. He's making movies that are stretching his filmmaking talents while Wes is still making buddy movies with his friends.

My allegiance lies with PTA. Because I'm an adult, and I need an adult filmmaker (HAHA)

Last movie I saw in the theater was Cocoon II and I paid $2.50 and it came with a free shoe shining in the lobby.

As for the price you paid, I really thought it was a lot more than that. Do people still shine shoes? I think I never did...

As for the evolution of the filmmakers, I agree with some of what you have said. Yes, Paul Thomas Anderson seems like the best overrall between the two, but that's not really an issue for me. Wes is still entertaining me, and I really thought that TLA wasn't really a step forward, but that was the only time when I felt that about him. Rushmore was an improvement on Bottle Rocket, and The Royal Tenenbaums was an improvement over Rushmore and still is, for me anyway, the best movie of the decade. The Life Aquatic seemed less amazing, but not at all bad.

As for Paul, yes, he's exploring his filmmaking to the limit, and that is making me really excited. He's the best that came from the nieties post-Tarantino period. No doubt about it.

Movies here in New Mexico (Southeast United States) run an average of $10 a ticket.

Quote from: bigideas on October 04, 2007, 05:33:11 PM
any word on how much this is expanding this week (number of theaters)?

Playing only two days in a pair of Manhattan theaters, the AMC-Loews Lincoln Square and the Regal Cinemas Union Square, director Wes Anderson's latest comedy, "The Darjeeling Limited," starring Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers traveling through India, earned $134,938. "Darjeeling Limited's" $67,469 per-screen averageranked just below Michael Moore's healthcare documentary "Sicko" as the top exclusive debut of 2007, although the Wes Anderson comedy only played two days in theaters after opening the New York Film Festival Sept. 28. "We sold out all shows by noon at Lincoln Square and at Union Square we experienced sell-outs all day long," said Sheila Deloach, Senior Vice President Distribution at Fox Searchlight Pictures. "People were lining up at both theaters and it was very exciting to watch them come out in droves and embrace Wes Anderson's new film." "Darjeeling Limited" expands Friday to six additional cities [Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Toronto] and continues to expand throughout October, reaching its widest release Oct. 25.

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 06:37:50 PM
Movies here in New Mexico (Southeast United States) run an average of $10 a ticket.

Geography was clearly not your strongest subject in school, eh?

And I'd love to respond to the theme you hinted at--PTA is an adult filmmaker, and by the negative, Wes is not--but there wasn't much to go on and I am at a loss as to what reasons there may be. Let us know...from an adult's perspective.

talk about a slow burn...not even Dallas or Austin. i know they are doing the free screenings around more cities though. i guess they're hoping for word of mouth to spread.

Quote from: Sunrise on October 04, 2007, 06:52:35 PM

Quote from: Stefen on October 04, 2007, 06:37:50 PM
Movies here in New Mexico (Southeast United States) run an average of $10 a ticket.

Geography was clearly not your strongest subject in school, eh?

haha, oops. I meant Southwest. I live here. It was a mistake.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hollywood-elsewhere.com%2Fimages%2Fcolumn%2F101507%2Fowenshot.jpg&hash=afeee546dd179830826e9d7cd60886b55227e2c3)

Owen Wilson returns to public eye

Owen Wilson returned to the public eye Thursday night, making an appearance at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Darjeeling Limited."

Sporting a shaggy blond beard and a dark jacket, it was among Wilson's first public appearances since a suicide attempt in late August.

Wilson was joined by fellow cast mates Adrien Brody, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman and filmmaker Wes Anderson.

Before the movie started, Anderson introduced Wilson, his longtime friend and collaborator, saying, "I've never made a movie without him and I hope I never have to."

The two have worked together on several films, including "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," and "The Royal Tenenbaums," for which they were nominated for a best screenplay Oscar.

Wilson stars in "The Darjeeling Limited," in which three brothers journey by train through India.

The premiere was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences headquarters.

Quote from: Sunrise on October 04, 2007, 06:52:35 PM
PTA is an adult filmmaker, and by the negative, Wes is not

That's great. Wes is older but Paul is more of an adult. i guess

Hotel Chevalier went first.  I wasn't expecting this but how much better it was on the big screen is amazing.  There was some sound design I'd missed from my home viewing, and the colors, that never felt right on either my computer or television, were gorgeous.  If you've been for some reason holding off on watching Hotel Chevalier, don't, because there are a lot of in-jokes in Darjeeling about it and you'll miss out.

There's a lot I want to talk about, but it's early, so I'm going to signal for spoilers.  The spoilers are at the bottom of the post.

Darjeeling is another film, like I felt Eastern Promises was, in which the creator has very purposefully grown out into a new area that both betrays and typifies earlier work.  This contradiction incites two equally inconsistent reactions:  Wes Anderson has either repeated himself, or he has failed (or he has always failed, but I personally dismiss that possibility).  It is unfortunate that the popular opinion of Anderson's nascent career is that he suffers from a legacy frozen three films in, especially when there is no indication that he himself feels this way*.  Much criticism is a result of the conversation among film goers that says Anderson's films are obviously similarily idiosyncratic and similarily themed.  Because of this, his critics have become similarily expectant for an evolution of material equal to Bottle Rocket - Rushmore - Royal Tenenbaums.

Which I think has occured, because it is my opinion that Royal Tenenbaums - Life Aquatic - Darjeeling Limited has been a continuous progression, and in Darjeeling Anderson reaches deeper into his palette then he ever has before.  Because I see Darjeeling as having all the best elements of the previous films I
see it as the best.  Specifically, the brilliant characterization of his previous films has become more internalized, and the iconic personalization of their environments has become more integrated^.

Anderson talks a lot about the influence of seeing The River, and what The River is most notable for is its colors.  Darjeeling is an equally pleasant looking picture.  Blues, greens, and yellows against a backdrop of reds, browns, and oranges.  The colors are as memorable as anything else in the film, which is an example of how Anderson has continued to develop the craft of filmmaking.  The detail to attention has multiplied into all areas of the film.  Considerable attention is paid all the fragments constructing Darjeeling, and I'll restate some of the obvious here:  the shot composition is engaging, the music selection is energizing, the shot variety is stimulating, the dialogue is interesting, the themes are expanding, and the production design is imaginative.

The script is so important in a discussion of a Wes Anderson film.  So important because the scope of his filmmaking talents have already been proven, what is under direct scrutiny with his new films is his ability to develop new material.  The Darjeeling script is emotionally cohesive, seemlessly executed, and pretty fucking funny%.  I think it strikes out in diffrection directions and that Anderson is a filmmaker in which "Rushmore," "Life Aquatic," "Royal Tenenbaums" or the others should all be equally acceptable answers to the "Which one is your favorite" question.  Like other directors he juggles the same themes, and each film is an intepretation of ideas and questions that he finds compelling.  I embrace this aspect.  I am in the camp that doesn't find Anderson emotionally compelling, so I'm not one to have a favorite based on emphatic response.  Perhaps some have reached a deeper core (I don't think so), but I truly feel that Darjeeling is a fully functioning script that incorporates the real with the effective and the funny with the painful in a way that eliminates the criticisms of affectation or eccentricity of his previous films.  They're chiseled characters, and what I said about 2006 was that I loved the films because they had imperfect characters in imperfect situations that challenged the apparatus of scriptwriting.  This is how I feel about the Darjeeling script.  I'm lucky it's also made by such a talented filmmaker.

Spoiler section

*There were at least three conspicuously metaphorical moments in the film.  Wilson himself identifies the second in the narrative, the third is Wilson removing his bandages, and the first is Murray missing the train at the beginning of the film.

^Is the reason people are calling the film ethnocentric because it sometimes feels like Anderson has set-designed India?  If so what a compliment.  The debate on the issue of cultural ego is of little importance to me.  Anderson's characters have always been rich white people who are almost idiotically amazed by the simplest departures from normal routine.  That his characters are now venturing into new territory seems to justify this.  The characters of Darjeeling are naive to the Indian culture and sometimes respond brutishly, but it's built into the characters.  What should be judged is their response to the individual Indian.  The river scene, which begins with "What a bunch of assholes" and ends with a funeral that connects the brothers to their New York lives is the sort of cultural transcendence that makes sense, that seems real to me, rather than reservation and haughty, forced respectfulness.  Also, they seem little more out of place and condescending there than they did in New York.

%  The pepper spray set-up and pay-off is the long and most organic example of Anderson's humor.  It does not rely on cleverness of irony because it's all physical and situational comedy. Real easy stuff to follow that really livens up the film and makes it more fun.  The Porsche scene is a condensed example of Anderson's ability to generate emotion - it's a stretch of pure rage and futitily and ego.  I apologize for calling Coppola - Schwartzman - Anderson simply Anderson, it's just easier, but there's no doubt in my mind that Anderson relies on and uses the skills of his fellow writers.  Why else would he never write alone.

Just saw this in Chicago. I have alot of thoughts, both negative and positive, that I need to get a handle on, but I will say that the comparison of PTA's career to that of Wes Anderson seems to miss the point on many levels. It doesn't make much sense to me.

If aquatic was the messy culmination of Anderson's first chunk of work, darjeeling felt to me like the messy onset of something different that I think he'll be heading towards. It's very Wes, but certainly not more of the same. Some pretty incredible things going on in this film, and by the same token, some things that are driving me up the wall.

Quote from: squints on October 05, 2007, 04:49:14 PM

Quote from: Sunrise on October 04, 2007, 06:52:35 PM
PTA is an adult filmmaker, and by the negative, Wes is not

That's great. Wes is older but Paul is more of an adult. i guess

I'm tempted to argue t'other way 'round.  And so I will.

When you see PTA, he's really like kind of a big kid, kinda goofy, kinda charming as he flops down, takes a step back, and covers his quiet laugh with his hand when he's nervous, and so on.  He seems more in touch with the FUN of all of it.  His inspiration is DRACULA!  And I think it's a childlike quality (in a great way) to want to explore new territory, and grow and grow and grow.

I don't really feel comfortable comparing the two Andersons, but I said I'd try to argue the other way around, so I'll say that when I see Wes, he seems more keen on presenting himself as an adult than Paul does, with the suits and the generally calm demeanor.  Also, I find that an ironic sense of humor and sometimes detachment seems like more of an adult quality than the unabashed emotion that Paul excels at.  Just try to imagine a character in a Wes movie saying, "I have a love in my life, and it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine."  Also, Punch-Drunk Love felt like watching a kid with a big box of crayons coloring furiously and outside the lines... I can't say that any of Wes's movies felt like that.

But these things don't REALLY mean very much.  I think that they both have a childlike quality that they can tap into, which I think is really wonderful, and they both can tap sophisticatedly into mature subjects.  I think that's why both Andersons are admired by people of all ages, really.  I was but a young'n when I first saw their movies, and there was a lot for me to latch onto even then.  There are also, of course, much older fans as well.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that calling Wes more childlike and Paul more adult seemed incorrect to me.  I think the comparison is unfair to both of them, but if I had to compare, I'd totally choose Paul as the more childlike of the two.  Though, I'm interested to see if/how fatherhood for Paul will shift the scale.

Quote from: matt35mm on October 05, 2007, 05:55:05 PM

Quote from: squints on October 05, 2007, 04:49:14 PM

Quote from: Sunrise on October 04, 2007, 06:52:35 PM
PTA is an adult filmmaker, and by the negative, Wes is not

That's great. Wes is older but Paul is more of an adult. i guess

I'm tempted to argue t'other way 'round.  And so I will.

When you see PTA, he's really like kind of a big kid, kinda goofy, kinda charming as he flops down, takes a step back, and covers his quiet laugh with his hand when he's nervous, and so on.  He seems more in touch with the FUN of all of it.  His inspiration is DRACULA!  And I think it's a childlike quality (in a great way) to want to explore new territory, and grow and grow and grow.

I don't really feel comfortable comparing the two Andersons, but I said I'd try to argue the other way around, so I'll say that when I see Wes, he seems more keen on presenting himself as an adult than Paul does, with the suits and the generally calm demeanor.  Also, I find that an ironic sense of humor and sometimes detachment seems like more of an adult quality than the unabashed emotion that Paul excels at.  Just try to imagine a character in a Wes movie saying, "I have a love in my life, and it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine."  Also, Punch-Drunk Love felt like watching a kid with a big box of crayons coloring furiously and outside the lines... I can't say that any of Wes's movies felt like that.

But these things don't REALLY mean very much.  I think that they both have a childlike quality that they can tap into, which I think is really wonderful, and they both can tap sophisticatedly into mature subjects.  I think that's why both Andersons are admired by people of all ages, really.  I was but a young'n when I first saw their movies, and there was a lot for me to latch onto even then.  There are also, of course, much older fans as well.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that calling Wes more childlike and Paul more adult seemed incorrect to me.  I think the comparison is unfair to both of them, but if I had to compare, I'd totally choose Paul as the more childlike of the two.  Though, I'm interested to see if/how fatherhood for Paul will shift the scale.

Talk about a quote taken out of context...sorry you got that impression. I would tend to agree with a lot of what you wrote, Matt. I was simply trying to bait Stefen into defending his statement. It didn't work.

Quote from: Sunrise on October 05, 2007, 06:51:23 PM

Quote from: matt35mm on October 05, 2007, 05:55:05 PM

Quote from: squints on October 05, 2007, 04:49:14 PM

Quote from: Sunrise on October 04, 2007, 06:52:35 PM
PTA is an adult filmmaker, and by the negative, Wes is not

That's great. Wes is older but Paul is more of an adult. i guess

I'm tempted to argue t'other way 'round.  And so I will.

When you see PTA, he's really like kind of a big kid, kinda goofy, kinda charming as he flops down, takes a step back, and covers his quiet laugh with his hand when he's nervous, and so on.  He seems more in touch with the FUN of all of it.  His inspiration is DRACULA!  And I think it's a childlike quality (in a great way) to want to explore new territory, and grow and grow and grow.

I don't really feel comfortable comparing the two Andersons, but I said I'd try to argue the other way around, so I'll say that when I see Wes, he seems more keen on presenting himself as an adult than Paul does, with the suits and the generally calm demeanor.  Also, I find that an ironic sense of humor and sometimes detachment seems like more of an adult quality than the unabashed emotion that Paul excels at.  Just try to imagine a character in a Wes movie saying, "I have a love in my life, and it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine."  Also, Punch-Drunk Love felt like watching a kid with a big box of crayons coloring furiously and outside the lines... I can't say that any of Wes's movies felt like that.

But these things don't REALLY mean very much.  I think that they both have a childlike quality that they can tap into, which I think is really wonderful, and they both can tap sophisticatedly into mature subjects.  I think that's why both Andersons are admired by people of all ages, really.  I was but a young'n when I first saw their movies, and there was a lot for me to latch onto even then.  There are also, of course, much older fans as well.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that calling Wes more childlike and Paul more adult seemed incorrect to me.  I think the comparison is unfair to both of them, but if I had to compare, I'd totally choose Paul as the more childlike of the two.  Though, I'm interested to see if/how fatherhood for Paul will shift the scale.

Talk about a quote taken out of context...sorry you got that impression. I would tend to agree with a lot of what you wrote, Matt. I was simply trying to bait Stefen into defending his statement. It didn't work.

Oh no no no, it was my fault.  I was just lazy in what I chose to quote (I just quoted the whole last post on the matter), but I knew that it wasn't you who put forth that argument.

This movie was great!  It exceeded my expectations.  I haven't not loved a Wes Anderson film yet, so my recommendation might not come off as strong as somebody else's.  Like the Royal Tenenbaums, this film has a clearer delineation of sad or funny moments.  I still believe that Life Aquatic confused some viewers because they weren't sure what scenes were funny and what scenes were sad.  This film should be more accessible to the Zissou haters.    For example, Max has only very nonchalantly mentioned the death of his mother, Chas's wife was brought up a few times as morbid jokes, Zissou's loss was upstaged by whoever that characters was, played by William Dafoe.  But in this film, the father's death is more drawn out.  There are also a lot more obvious set ups, payoffs, and external changes, both dramatic and comedic, than Wes's other films.

As for the ethnocentrism, I don't think so.  The characters have developed a genuine connection with India, they're not tourists, and the Indian characters are not mere backdrops.  The white characters seem awkward, but they don't appear to be particularly perplexed or puzzled by their differences, nor does the film ever pause to widen the differences.  Other words, this is not at all like that other movie that I hate so much.

Quote from: w/o horse on October 05, 2007, 05:17:34 PM
The detail to attention

Quote from: w/o horse on October 05, 2007, 05:17:34 PM
diffrection directions

classic horse. you rival GT in bizarre linguistic anomalies.

these positive reviews are refreshing. i must admit i kinda liked zissou.

Quote from: pete on October 05, 2007, 10:48:07 PMAs for the ethnocentrism, I don't think so.  The characters have developed a genuine connection with India, they're not tourists, and the Indian characters are not mere backdrops.  The white characters seem awkward, but they don't appear to be particularly perplexed or puzzled by their differences, nor does the film ever pause to widen the differences.  Other words, this is not at all like that other movie that I hate so much.

Unbearable Whiteness
That queasy feeling you get when watching a Wes Anderson movie.
By Jonah Weiner; The Slate

*READ AT OWN RISK*

The first time Owen Wilson met Wes Anderson, at a college playwriting class in Austin, the future director made an immediate impression. "He walked in wearing L.L. Bean duck-hunting boots and shorts," Wilson recalled, "Which I thought was kind of obnoxious."

In every film he's made, even the best ones, there's been something kind of obnoxious about Wes Anderson. By now, critics have enumerated several of his more irritating traits and shticks: There's his pervasive preciousness, exemplified by the way he pins actors into the centers of fastidiously composed tableaux like so many dead butterflies. There's his slump-shouldered parade of heroes who seem capable of just two emotions: dolorous and more dolorous (not that there haven't been vibrant exceptions to this). And there's the way he frequently couples songs—particularly rock songs recorded by shaggy Europeans between 1964 and 1972—with slow-motion effects, as though he's sweeping a giant highlighter across the emotional content of a scene. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Richie can't watch Margot get off a bus without Nico popping up to poke us in the ribs: "He loves her! And it's killing him! See?"

The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson's latest movie, showcases an obnoxious element of Anderson that is rarely discussed: the clumsy, discomfiting way he stages interactions between white protagonists—typically upper-class elites—and nonwhite foils—typically working class and poor. The plot concerns three brothers, Francis, Peter, and Jack Whitman (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who set out on a "spiritual journey" across India by rail. Brody and Schwartzman stalk the film somberly, their eyes glazed with melancholy, their laconic exchanges one part deadpan, one part night of the living dead. They are zombies in fitted blazers, suffering quietly but profoundly from the same vague, paralyzing, leisure-class malaise that has plagued Anderson's heroes ever since Luke Wilson checked himself into a mental hospital for "exhaustion" in Bottle Rocket. Owen Wilson (despite his recent personal ordeal) is the trio's winningly dopey optimist, convinced that the Indian sojourn is exactly what the brothers need to get closer together—they haven't spoken since the death of their father, one year earlier. The film is gorgeous to look at: The color palette is riotous, and Anderson's rapacious eye for bric-a-brac binges on the Hindu prayer altars and crowded street markets of Rajasthan. But needless to say, beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.

From the Beatles' 1968 hang with the Maharishi to the recent "Imagine India" flower show at Macy's, South Asia has long been a hotspot in the American and European orientalist imagination. But for a director as willfully idiosyncratic as Anderson, it's surprising how many white-doofuses-seeking-redemption-in-the-brown-skinned-world clichés Darjeeling Limited inhabits. Early on, Adrien Brody ascends through the various classes of the film's titular train, leaving behind the goats and peasants of the luggage car and the drab denizens of coach before arriving at the private sleeper Francis has reserved for the trip: This spiritual journey comes equipped with a locking door and private bathroom, thank you. A comely stewardess named Rita soon enters, draws a bindi on each brother's forehead, and offers up "sweet lime and savory snacks." Jack decides to interpret this liberally and shortly makes love to her in the bathroom. Rita isn't a character so much as a familiar type: the mysterious, exotic, dark-skinned beauty. Jack hardly exchanges a word with her, but, reeling from a bad breakup, he begins pestering her to leave her Sikh boyfriend, convinced for no good reason that she can turn his life around.

Sometimes Wes Anderson winks at the brothers' fetishistic attitudes toward India, but he eventually reveals his own. When Francis grandly declares, "I love these people"—minutes after a shoeshine boy has run off with one of his "$3,000 loafers"—or when Peter says, "I love how this country smells; it's ... spicy," Anderson must be chuckling at them. But he runs into trouble when he tries to stage their genuine awakening. The plot contrives to get the brothers kicked out of the Darjeeling, where Francis' personal assistant has been drawing up laminated daily timetables, and out into the countryside, where they might enjoy the sort of unmediated revelation you just can't plan with TripAdvisor.

This revelation comes soon enough. After a series of pratfalls, the brothers throw up their hands, deciding to go their separate ways. (What follows is no movie-ruining giveaway, but I should insert a spoiler alert, just in case.) As they walk alongside a canal, they see three adolescent Indian brothers attempting to cross it on a raft attached to a system of ropes and pulleys. A pulley snaps, and the boys are flung into the raging currents. Francis, Peter, and Jack dive in—one set of flailing brothers trying to save another—but one of the adolescents is killed. They're invited to the child's rural village for his funeral (which Anderson cannot resist presenting in slow motion and setting to a Kinks song), where the Whitman clan realize that they need to stick together and see out the rest of their journey. Turns out that a dead Indian boy was all the brothers were missing.

This isn't just heavy-handed, it's offensive. In a grisly little bit of developing-world outsourcing, the child does the bothersome work of dying so that the American heroes won't have to die spiritually. There is no wink from Anderson here. He plays the whole funeral sequence for pathos. Later on, in a celebratory moment, we get a classically offbeat Anderson image. The three brothers squeeze together onto a moped and ride, liberated, in some gorgeous late-day sunlight. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal a cartload of Indian porters behind them, carrying the brothers' considerable baggage (nudge-nudge). Any implied critique seems unintentional, though. Anderson's just doubling the sight gag.

Although the issue of race has never been as prominent as in Darjeeling Limited, it's cropped up continuously in Anderson's films. In Bottle Rocket, the Paraguayan housekeeper Ines is a direct precursor to Rita—a service-industry hottie with whom a depressed Anderson hero (in this case, Luke Wilson's Anthony) becomes obsessed. Helping this obsession along is the fact that Ines can barely speak English, making her a convenient projecting screen for Anthony's fantasies about purity and true love. Their romance is sweet, but its subtext is laughable. Anthony's last girlfriend sent him into a psychological tailspin, we learn, when she made a bourgeois proposal: "Over at Elizabeth's beach house, she asked me if I'd rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question," Anthony explains, "but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life." So it's barefoot, towel-folding Ines to the emotional rescue.

Anderson generally likes to decorate his margins with nonwhite, virtually mute characters: Pelé in Life Aquatic, a Brazilian who sits in a crow's-nest and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese; Mr. Sherman in Royal Tenenbaums, a black accountant who wears bow ties, falls into holes, and meekly endures Gene Hackman's racist jabs—he calls him "Coltrane" and "old black buck," which Anderson plays for laughs; Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore, the Indian groundskeeper who occasionally mumbles comical malapropisms (Anderson hired this actor, Kumar Pallana, to do the same in Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket). There's also Margaret Yang, Apple Jack, Ogata, and Vikram. Taken together, they form a fleet of quasi-caricatures and walking punch lines, meant to import a whimsical, ambient multiculturalism into the films. Anderson frequently points out his white characters' racial insensitivities ("Which part of Mexico are you from?" Wilson asks Ines in Bottle Rocket. She shakes her head. "Paraguay." "Oh, Paraguay ... that's over ... under ... Guatemala. ..."), but he presents them, ultimately, as endearing quirks.

Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet.

Quote from: Pubrick on October 05, 2007, 10:53:55 PM

Quote from: w/o horse on October 05, 2007, 05:17:34 PM
The detail to attention

classic horse. you rival GT in bizarre linguistic anomalies.

I read over that one three or four times before I realized what I'd done.

Quote from: w/o horse on October 05, 2007, 11:10:11 PM

Quote from: Pubrick on October 05, 2007, 10:53:55 PM

Quote from: w/o horse on October 05, 2007, 05:17:34 PM
The detail to attention

classic horse. you rival GT in bizarre linguistic anomalies.

I read over that one three or four times before I realized what I'd done.

symptom of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia

can be cured with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

Spoilers kind of, I guess

I loved this!!!!! Well, I guess that is a god damn no brainer since everyone here thinks I like everything, which I don't. I hate rush hour movies, predictable romantic comedies and the 'friends' TV show, but I digress.

I went to the official LA premiere on thursday night with Natalie Portman, Wes Anderson, Jason S, Adrien B, Owen W, and Roman Coppola in tow. It surpassed my expectations and the characters made me smile throughout the whole movie. There were so many memorable moments it's hard to pick just one. But my fav. probably has to be when Jack puts on the song as soon as the indian girl went into the all three brothers'  compartment to get himself ready to woo her again. It's a heartbreaking movie that really is going in a different direction for wes.

The afterparty was ok, I saw peter bogdonavich that creepy guy who trapped jake g. in his basement in the movie zodiac and James Van der beek among others. I got a poster and the soundtrack free.

Quote from: SiliasRuby on October 06, 2007, 02:57:28 AMthat creepy guy who trapped jake g. in his basement in the movie zodiac

You mean, Roger Rabbit?

ya.

Let me disagree with this for a second: he's pointing out pretty much what every movie and tv show has been doing for the last thirty years, which is that white characters don't really interact with non-white characters who are less fleshed-out except mostly through service and retail situations.  come to think of it, I guess that is quite ethnocentric, but I'm not sure if it is any more "unbearably white", than anything else Jonah Weiner has to endure in his long and storied career.  He also just straight made up parts of the story and ignored the other parts for the sake of his article.  I'm getting queasy defending this movie with a guy who ain't never gonna come to his board, and his name is Jonah Weiner and he writes for Slate magazine, two things that are a hella whiter than me.

Ravi come say something for or against this movie, you lover of Indian films!

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 05, 2007, 10:58:43 PM

Unbearable Whiteness
That queasy feeling you get when watching a Wes Anderson movie.
By Jonah Weiner; The Slate

I saw an interview with Wes and he pronounced Paris as Pair-EE. The douchebag way to pronounce it.

Let the backlash begin.

overrated.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.avclub.com%2Fcontent%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FWes-Anderson.jpg&hash=9418601d735492a1d0550157dc4aeda500eb51f0)
Wes Anderson
Source: The Onion AV Club
October 10th, 2007

Never say the MTV Movie Awards are entirely useless: For many, the left-field award given to Wes Anderson's 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket was a first introduction to one of American film's most distinctive stylists, comic or otherwise. Written with longtime friend and collaborator Owen Wilson, Bottle Rocket established Anderson's knack for lacing whimsical comedy with a touch of melancholy, and launched Wilson's stardom. Anderson's reputation didn't take off until his 1998 follow-up Rushmore; from there, he made two ambitious ensemble pieces about family, the bittersweet New York tale The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, his eccentric first crack at a major studio production.

Anderson has returned to family themes with The Darjeeling Limited, a typically luxuriant travelogue about three estranged brothers (Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman, who also co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola) crossing India by train. Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the pleasures of Indian "chaos," his acclaimed commercial work, and why his movies seem to improve on second viewing.

The A.V. Club: Darjeeling Limited's basic premise could be set against any number of backdrops. Why India?

Wes Anderson: In the end, India is really the subject matter of the movie as much as anything else is. I wanted to go to India because of movies I had seen that were set there, which I had watched over the years, and one particular book called The Photographs Of Chachaji by Ved Mehta. He used to write for The New Yorker pretty frequently, and it's a very good book. I sort of developed a fascination with India after reading it.

But along with my own interest in India, and my own affection for the country, the story that Jason, Roman, and I dreamed up together is about these three brothers who want to take a very programmed, spiritual journey of enlightenment, with laminated itineraries. And for somebody who would like to do that, and thinks that that might work, India might be at the top of their list of places to go and try it.

AVC: It would also be a place where a precise itinerary would be impossible to follow.

WA: Well, I don't know if it would work anywhere, but India would be the last place in the world it would. India is a place where one of the great pleasures for a foreigner is that you're constantly surprised. Everywhere you look is something that is either funny, or very moving, but there is always so much that is so unexpected. That's part of the reason why people who like it tend to love it.

AVC: India tends to evoke chaos, but your movies are very orderly. Was there a conflict there?

WA: I love the feeling of chaos that you feel when you are in India, but a lot of making a movie is about order. You make a schedule, and you try to stick to it, and the better you plan, the better off you are in the end, in most cases. But our approach with this movie was very much that whatever went wrong, we were going to make that part of our story. If the hut was brown, and we left for the evening, and when we came back, the hut was painted blue with flowers all over it because somebody thought that it would be a good idea, that's the way we were going to use it in the story. That happened. And that is the sort of thing that happens all the time. The bumps in the road can be so peculiar, and that was what we wanted the movie to be about.

AVC: Did the film surprise you in how differently it turned out than what was planned?

WA: People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged—and in a lot of ways, they are—but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected. That was certainly the case with this movie. In the end, it doesn't resemble anything like what I had in my mind. And yet, piece by piece, they were all things we chose together along the way.

AVC: How well-schooled were you in Indian culture before embarking on this project? Had you spent much time there?

WA: I think I continue to be not well-schooled at all in Indian culture or history, because there is so much there. I've only been going there for a few years, and I started to go there because I wanted to work there. Satyajit Ray's films are part of what drew me to India, and I've seen and know a lot of his work. I know niches. But the movie's from the point of view of a Western tourist, and that's what I've always felt like there.

AVC: While this film has a luxuriant, exotic look that really isn't like Ray's work, you use a lot of wonderful music from his work. What kind of influence did he have on the film?

WA: For me, Ray was one of the ideal role models for the kind of director I would like to be. He's somebody who wrote his own scripts. He often adapted books, but he also created his own material. He was regional and had his own area in West Bengali, around Calcutta, where he worked. He had his own sources of money. He had a little family operation to make his movies, and he made a lot of movies. And they're often very personal.

Somewhere along the way, he started composing the scores for his movies, which I recently heard was for expediency, because he felt like he could turn them around a lot faster than what he was getting from the people he was working with. He didn't have enough money to wait for them to take longer. Anyway, I loved these movies. Somewhere along the line of writing this movie, I pulled one of Ray's scores I wanted to use at the beginning, and then realized there was a second one I wanted to use later on. We didn't really know how much we were going to use until we were in the cutting room. But the movie is wall to wall with music from Ray's films and from Merchant-Ivory's films up until [the three brothers] are kicked off the train.

AVC: You always collaborate on your scripts. Are there limits to what you feel you can accomplish on your own, or why do you feel the urge to collaborate?

WA: I think it's a few things. In the case of this film, one of my ideas was that I wanted to make a movie about India. Another of my ideas was that I wanted to make a movie about three brothers. And I thought I would like to do a movie on a train. But the biggest idea of any of those was that I thought I would like to write with Jason and Roman. The movie is really the combination of all three of our points of view, and I don't think it's anything like I would have done on my own. I enjoy working with collaborators, and I enjoy working with my friends. Part of the movie is about that process where one person is telling a story and it's connected to their own life. In this, Jason's character is able to move on to the next chapter in his life when he is able to finish the last chapter in his book.

AVC: The three of you traveled to India by train before writing the script. Was there role-playing involved? What sorts of things did you incorporate from that adventure?

WA: Mostly what we got out of that adventure were details. Those guys had never been to India at that point; they were just getting to know it. That was the main thing. We had the first part of the story figured out, but a lot of the movie is about traveling, and a lot of our experience as travelers went in it. I'm being vague because I can't think of anything specific.

AVC: Were there any stop-offs? In the film, the characters are stranded for a bit after they're booted from the train. Was there anything like that, where you were completely off what you intended to do?

WA: We planned a train journey, because we wanted to see what that was like. But we went there for two main reasons: So I could introduce those guys to India, and because we needed to write somewhere. So I thought this would be a good way to keep us together. Most of our time on that trip was spent writing, sitting in one room or another working on our story.

On that trip, we did things we normally might not have done, because we were trying to act out the story to some degree. So in situations where we might have been more reserved, because the story is filled with ritual and religion, we were always going into temples. I was particularly obsessed with participating in any religious ceremonies I could get involved with. We joined a lot of groups that I would normally be to shy to get involved with, but India is a place where often people make you feel very welcome. That colored that trip.

AVC: So many people talk about your movies being more resonant on repeat viewings. Is that by design? Are there emotional cues that are maybe subtler than people tend to pick up on the first viewing?

WA: I have a hunch that might be right. Any time someone doesn't like one on the first run, I hope they will give it another shot. At least we'll get another chance. But I do feel, in my approach, I am not really a minimalist. I don't like to leave out ideas that I think could add something to the story. Sometimes, you can't quite pick up on all of it in one sitting. It's not by design. But maybe it's a side effect of my approach.

In the case of this movie, we withhold a lot of information. There are lots of things that we have figured out about our characters that we don't tell the audience. We consistently made this decision not to explain things, because I felt it seemed right for the movie that it would be spare in terms of the information, until a certain point in the story. There are a couple of points where we reveal everything all at once without explaining it. That's sort of our idea.

AVC: There's always an economy and concision to your work. People talk about your films as having the qualities of a short story, in that respect.

WA: Well, there certainly are short stories where you suddenly get what was going on the whole time. And that's what happens with almost every play. You're really supposed to read the program before it starts, and then it takes some time to figure out what is going on. There's this Harold Pinter quote which I can paraphrase, which we kept referring to because we felt like it applied to what we wanted to do. He was asked to explain the meaning of one of his plays. And he said, "This is what they said, this is what they did, this is what happened." That's his whole thing. He doesn't really want to go beyond that. I wouldn't say that our movie takes this to the degree that Harold Pinter has, but we definitely felt some connection to that quote. Or that misquote, anyway.

AVC: Many recent movies owe a debt to your work. Are you flattered by that, or does it bother you.

WA: I think I would be flattered by that. If someone pointed it out, I would like to think that it's true.

AVC: It doesn't take anything away from what you're doing?

WA: No, the only thing that takes away from it is when they steal some music from one of my movies and put it in a TV commercial. I am not crazy about influencing TV commercials. But if I legitimately influence someone making a movie, I think that is really flattering.

AVC: Speaking of commercials, you've been doing some interesting ones lately. Under what circumstances do you take commercial work? Is it tough to advance a personal vision while still satisfying your client's need to sell something?

WA: Well, mostly with commercial work, it isn't about personal vision. It's not a personal effort, it's work for hire. That's more my attitude with those. You just want to be a professional worker. I did the American Express commercial, and that was different. They went to me and said, "It's a commercial, but you can write something." And I had something I wanted to do, and I could put my friends in it. Sometimes it's fun to do a commercial. But I consider it to have no connection to my personal work.

AVC: Maybe the commercials just seem personal, but the style is so unmistakably yours.

WA: It would be hard to argue that I wasn't still trying to do my thing. But if I was going to write something, they wouldn't have to keep saying things into their mobile phones.

AVC: Your last film, The Life Aquatic, was at a budget level you hadn't experienced before. You've downshifted a bit with Darjeeling Limited. Is there a level where you start to get uncomfortable? Do the expectations and distractions get too much when the budget reaches a certain level?

WA: With The Life Aquatic, for instance, that's a complicated movie with big sets and ships, and it's kind of a giant thing. We were making it shoestring for the kind of story we had to tell, but it was a giant, giant shoestring. We ended up spending $58 million on that movie. But there was no real effort made to modify it so that more people would go see it than any other movie that I've done. It's the same kind of personal story. I just did what I wanted to do. And maybe that isn't the right way to approach something where you're spending $58 million.

The other thing is, it took us 100 days to shoot that movie. It was very difficult. I like to work more quickly. With this movie, we made a particular effort to move quickly and find a system to move quickly and to make it for a much, much lower budget. We made it for a third of The Life Aquatic, and it was a happier film experience overall.

QuoteAVC: India tends to evoke chaos

WTF?

QuoteAVC: India tends to evoke chaos

Quote from: GWBThat's why it should be invaded.

The AV club has been all over Wes's jock the last month. They had some features about what movies wouldn't be here without Wes Anderson, and then another about how Wes Anderson wouldn't be here without some movies. It's what started my Wes backlash.

The guy used to just be a film nerd, with coke bottle glasses, and a film fan mentality. Now he's just a pretentious wannabe auteur (in appearance) who cites french coffee and scones as insipiration for his films instead of other movies.

What a jerkoff. Wes Anderson? More like Wes FADerson. (I reached harder on that one than Sparrow did with his new username. GADS.)

"The guy used to just be a film nerd, with coke bottle glasses, and a film fan mentality. Now he's just a pretentious wannabe auteur (in appearance) who cites french coffee and scones as insipiration for his films instead of other movies. "

Hey man, nothing wrong with changing your style

my guess is he'll keep this same style until the next movie, and then go onto something completely different.
Maybe he won't look so much like Beck?

Perhaps he'll shave his head and wear a bowler hat and a checkered suit, playing trumpet between takes on the set.
Maybe he'll grow a Moustache and a Mowhawk, creating a contradiction in styles.

or maybe he'll grow a beard and wear cop glasses and a headband?
hm.

Instead of changing his "personal" style, maybe he should change his film making style and do something different for a change.

This year is going so great. I had to pick my entertainment whipping boy or else this year wouldn't be very realistic. Wes FADerson is it.

I just saw this movie last night, and wanted to share my thoughts. Appologies if some of this has been said before but I have been trying to avoid reading other people's comments until I posted my own.


I absolutely loved this movie. Right now I think that it is probably my favourite of Wes Anderson's films, and probably within my top few films of this year (so far, of course). First, let me just say that I felt this was a very different film to the "typical" Wes Anderson film, although it still contained many of Wes' tradmark quirks. Therefore, I could watch the film just as a standalone piece, without comparing it to any of his other films. Likewise, I also recommend not watching the short film 'Hotel Chevalier' with this. I hadn't seen it before I saw the movie, they didn't show it in the cinema, I came home and downloaded it afterwards. 'The Darjeeling Limited' is a film which stands best alone, and so it should.

The beginning of the film, imo, was perfect. It wasn't a total surprise to see Bill Murray (unfortunately I found out earlier in the same day he was in the film), but the way he was introduced was great. He seemed tired, worn-down etc, but totally different to how he normally seems in Wes Anderson's films, and I could tell right then that this was going to be something different than I'd seen from this director before. That's not to say of course, that there are some similiarities to Wes' other films, but the tine in particulal was more mature, more restrained. Stylistically there are quite a few of his trademark camera moves and set-ups, but through much of the film they are compromised by a need to be more "on the fly", and it suits this film well. The walking-in slow-mo looks great, but it is overdone as the film wares on.

So anyways, the opening ends with Bill Murray as a businessman running to catch the eponymous train. He's not going to make it. Then, running past him comes Adrian Brody who does manage to catch the train. Once he does, he looks back down the platform at Bill Murray, still running in vain, with no hope of catching up. That's the whole film right there. To me it was all about the sense of detatchment - the brothers are detatched from the world emotionally, they're detatched from the significant people in their lives, they're detached from each other. Likewise, their story is detatched from Bill Murray's, even though their characters are in the some place at the same time. But different stories are always going on around us. It reminded me of the moment in PTA's 'Sydney' when there is that argument in the background at the diner. Maybe that's why India plays such an important role in this movie. Such a vast country with so many people, it is easy to connect with the idea of how disconnected an individual can become.

That's my interpretation of the film anyway, especially seeing as how towards the end of the film we revisit some of the other characters we passed by earlier in the film. And yes, Bill Murray finally catches his train. Of course, throughout the movie we gradully get to see the brothers begin to connect with each other, and their lives as a whole. Adrian Brody's character, for example, makes peace with the idea he's going to be a father, and in his own way even gets excited that he's soon to have a son. I liked the way Anderson mentioned in an interview about the laminated itineraries for the brothers' spiritual journey - like it's even possibly to schedule something like someone's spiritual development or whatever.

Staying with the idea of disconnectedness in the movie, I also liked how there would often be mention of some person or event from the past, and yet no energy was spent trying to clarify or explain it for the benefit of the audience. There is no need. We're disconnected with that, that isn't our story, our story is what's happening on screen right now. That's why I think this movie is better viewed without 'Hotel Chevalier'. We don't need to know what happened there.

Of course people are going to say they don't like this film. Of course there's some bits that aren't so great. Of course there's some bits of typical Wes-mayhem which don't sit as well in 'Darjeeling' as they do in other films. That would probably be my only critisicm, and it is slight. I really loved this film, and cannot wait to own it. When Owen Wilson first appeared, I felt he was being typical "Owen Wilson-in-a-Wes Anderson film", but he seemed to settled down fairly quickly, and when the moment came where he took off his bandages it was great. Maybe that was his own was of showing change, and mirroring Wes' gradual evolution as a film-maker.

One last note, I thought Angelica Huston was great. I know she only had a really small part, but I'd like to see her get some sort of recognition for this role.

So yes, I really liked this film. Sure, it's not going to be to everyone's tastes, especially not on this site. But I really loved it. It was nice to see a tender film which entertained and yet made you think.

Quote from: Sleepless on October 14, 2007, 11:47:00 AM
It was nice to see a tender film which entertained and yet made you think.

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9886.0

Well, I'm very happy that I had the lowest possible expectations for this film, cause I loved it. From the opening scene to the end I was smiling (even in the sad parts) and enjoying it. I dont know how to compare it to his other films yet, but at least I'm happy it wasnt 'the same thing'. I'm very happy I liked this :)

Anderson cited for visionary filmmaking

Wes Anderson will be awarded the Stockholm film festival's Visionary Award for his humane and humorous portrayals of lonely people.

Anderson — director of offbeat comedies "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" — has created "unique and stylized universes inhabited by characters searching for something to search for," the prize citation said.

"Through his visionary filmmaking, Anderson has given a modern face to the classic auteur," organizers also said Wednesday.

The award will be presented during the Nov. 15-25 Stockholm Film Festival.

Anderson, 38, grew up in Texas. He had his feature debut with the comedy "Bottle Rocket" in 1996.

"The Royal Tenenbaums," starring Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Stiller, earned Anderson an Oscar nomination for best screenplay together with Owen Wilson in 2002.

Anderson's latest film is "The Darjeeling Limited."

The only passing whim that can be permantently assigned to Wes Anderson is his detractor party labeling him a fad.  The irony is essential.

Wes is scheduled to be on Charlie Rose tommorrow night (Friday the 26th)

I liked this film a lot.  It doesn't take a straight path anywhere, but neither do the characters.  I liked the absurdity of a laminated itinerary for spiritual enlightenment.  Owen Wilson's character has good intentions but he misses the point of his own journey.  Traveling through India is a metaphor for the brothers traveling through unfamiliar emotional territory.

The use of Satyajit Ray music was distracting for me because I'd be watching a scene and then I'd think, "Hey, that's the music from Charulata!" so I was momentarily taken out of the film.  But there were moments in which the music worked very well.  I don't think it will be a problem on subsequent viewings.

Jason Schwartzman was at the screening I attended.  When people actually asked good questions he had thoughtful an interesting answers.  He was very funny and outgoing.  He autographed my DVD of Rushmore and took a photo with me, but the memory card in my camera got corrupted somehow, so the photo is lost to the ages.

Ok so, dissent. I did not like this movie. It was boring, rehashed, lazy. It's as if Anderson watched his own films and realized what his style was this whole time. I was not engaged or surprised at all, it was just too goddamned much of the same thing from Anderson's universe.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Oh wow! Angelica Houston playing another mother figure. More slow motion. Another pointless overhead shot. My friend summed it up best, "Oh, I get it, their father's baggage was a metaphor." The film's depth was very superficial.

best movie I've seen all year.
minus "City of God" which is like 4 or 5 years old. :yabbse-thumbup:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=20862626 (http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=20862626)

this is supposed to be wes anderson and owen wilson talking about lots of stuff. but i wouldn't know, 'cause my sound broke while updating my pc.

poor owen. seems sad... and it looks like he must have fell on his face during his attempt because his nose is all flat and weird lookin'...

spoil for interview


a w.a. space film  :ponder: sounds fun!

Yeah he seems really out of it, but the video is funny at parts.

In Wes' first three films the issues of class and money come up quite a bit. In Bottle Rocket you get the impression that Dignen is not of the same middle class upbringing as Anthony and Bob Maplethorpe - "...you know there's nothing to steal from my Mom and Craig.". In Rushmore Max is the self-confessed Son of a Barber whom Bill Murray advises to "take dead-aim on the rich kids". Finally, in the Royal Tenenbaums, Eli Cash enviously watches the Tenenbaums across the road from the window of his Grandmothers small apartment - "I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum". To a lesser extent the issue crops up via Ned Plimpton who Steve exploits for the inheritance from his dead mother in The Life Aquatic. However, in The Darjeeling Limited the issues of class and money seem to have disappeared from the agenda.

Going into the film off the back Hotel Chevalier I was hoping for some explanation as to the funding of Jacks extended stay at the Parisian Hotel. As well as the source of the wealth that could spawn a month-long, first class trip across India with with monogramed suitcases in tow. The absence of an explanation in these matters seems frivolous to me,  beyond just adding to the conceit of the first half (and misconception by Owen Wilson's character); that they'd find their brotherhood and spirituality on an itinerated, whistle-stop tour of spiritual landmarks. Particularly when the writers made the same trip under the conceit of researching and writing a film (probably with monogramed suitcases in-tow, also). They are extremely fortunate.

Fortunately for me, I think the film finds its soul by the end and it was a treat of a film. Perhaps I'm looking for an insight where it doesn't need to be found on the issue of money, but I find it interesting that Wes has been so on-the-nose about it in past films (particularly Rushmore) and I'd be interested to know where that comes from.

Quote from: idk on October 25, 2007, 08:34:42 PM
Wes is scheduled to be on Charlie Rose tommorrow night (Friday the 26th)

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/10/26/2/a-conversation-with-director-wes-anderson

SPOILERS ?! MAYBE... POSSIBLY...

Uh, really enjoyed this. Like other Wes movies (which is what I like about them), this will age better and better, and the little things will become funnier and funnier over time and repeat viewings. Unlike the last two Wes movies, it will not slowly rise to the top of my list. I confess, I think Life Aquatic is his masterpiece. Don't get the negative reaction to it. The crazy tone shifts from hilarious to suddenly very immediate and tragic that almost turned me off that movie (but seemed to elevate it to greatness upon reflection) were worked on again here. I guess to some extent Wes has always done it (in bits and pieces, like the handjob conversation in Rushmore, and obviously the suicide in Tenenbaums). The child's death in this one came completely out of nowhere, and set that bizarre standard, and it feels like Wes has now become a master at this. It wasn't my "favorite" moment by far, but it balanced all the other little throwaway ridiculousnesses of the movie that I was enjoying so much. Still, that -- I think -- didn't elevate this movie above a snack, as opposed to the meals of Rushmore, Tenenbaums, and Aquatic, but it was a tasty and enjoyable snack. The scene in the auto mechanic's was one of the best so far this year. I remember on some commentary (I think it was the cc Rushmore) they mention his love of Bunuel and somehow that mechanic scene really channelled that wonderful Bunuel surrealism.

Re: Hotel Chevalier... they showed it as the opening. Having seen it online, I almost would have preferred just seeing the feature. I like them as companion pieces, but not back to back. Can't put my finger on why. As to some negative comments on the superficiality... I kinda thought that was the point. While that may not make it anymore "depthful" for being so, I think it was just made with that slight touch, and anything that may have came across as heavy-handed did so in service of the characters (who went about their lives in an extremely heavy-handed manner). I just like Wes doing his thing. There is no need to yack on about wishing he made changes. That's dumb. That's like saying you wish Fellini wasn't so Felliniesque. His world is certainly not played out by any means.

It will find a healthy spot on the dvd shelf in the future, for a nice once a year spin.

MOST LIKELY END OF (A FEW) SPOILERS

it's already dimishing from the wide weekend and has 8 mil total.
is this considered a flop?
yes i know it will make some dough on DVD - but strictly in theatrical terms.

and i still ain't seen it.... :(

This is enjoyable fluff to me. Anderson's style is so predictable by now, but he is still capable of whimsical delight. "Darjeeling Limited" works best at playing out the chemistry between the three leads. It's their performances that give the film it's warmth and humor. Of course, a good soundtrack doesn't hurt either. However, it's a film I think I liked more than respected.

oh yeah, i saw this in san jose the night before i watched twbb.  forgot all about it.  i grew tired of the uncountable slow-mo bits but did enjoy it. 

oh yeah, i went to the winchester mansion as well.  did i enjoy that?  i recall only a chair and a mill...

damn you, twbb.

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'One does feel misunderstood'
For Wes Anderson, real life and films get very mixed up. He talks to Xan Brooks about his Indian odyssey, confusing critics, and the problem with Owen Wilson
Source: The Guardian

Wes Anderson likes to live his movies before he shoots them. It is a neat way of working, he says; it helps the creative process. So if, for instance, he is making a film about life at a private school, it is only natural to cast his alma mater in the title role. Or if he makes a film about a dysfunctional New York family he'll have Anjelica Huston wear his mother's glasses to play the matriarch. His most recent work, The Darjeeling Limited, features a trio of squabbling American brothers on a train ride across India. In preparation, Anderson embarked on the exact same trip alongside his writing partners Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman. The three of them, he explains, were acting out the plot as they went along. They were, in effect, being the movie before the movie existed.

When it comes to Wes Anderson, it is sometimes hard to tell where the facts end and the fictions begin. Here he is, a slender white prince in his London hotel suite, with his feet on the table and his nose in the air. At the age of 38, he has conjured up a bunch of wry, literate tragicomedies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) that mark him as one of the brightest film-makers of his generation. And yet one can't shake the sense that in some respects Wes Anderson's greatest production is Wes Anderson himself, and that his grand body of work might best be read as a kind of romantic reconfiguration of his own life and the people in it. In the case of The Darjeeling Limited, this has rebounded on him in ways he could never have foreseen.

Anderson was born and raised in Houston, though he remains the most unlikely-looking Texan I've ever met. "Yeah, I've never really seen myself as a Texan," he says. "I mean, I lived there for the first 20 years of my life and all. But even then I always wanted to live in New York, and probably secretly identified myself as a New Yorker." As a child he would pretend he was rich, sketching Hampton mansions and European chateaus and then pretending that he lived in them. He is a very Gatsby-esque creature; a callow westerner remade as the classic east-coast sophisticate.

We talk about The Darjeeling Limited, which stars his long-time accomplice Owen Wilson as the older brother who masterminds a "spiritual journey" through the subcontinent. It's a lush and lovely affair, an oddball picaresque that manages to be at once determinedly inconsequential and weirdly profound. Darjeeling was shot on location, and features a poisonous snake and a man-eating tiger. But the terrain it travels is very much an India of the imagination, and an extension of the man who imagined it. Sometimes that's part of the problem.

"It's difficult," he acknowledges. "I don't want to repeat myself, but of course I do repeat myself. I have my own personality and some people are going to like that and others are not. I think some people find it very annoying when they feel that a film-maker's signature is too visible. But without ever quite making that choice, that tends to be the way I make 'em. You can spot 'em a mile off."

Early word on The Darjeeling Limited has been a lot kinder than it was for his previous effort, 2004's arch, unsatisfying The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. And yet Anderson remains such an acquired taste that the dissenting voices will always have their say. Reviewing the film in the New York Times, AO Scott described it as "precious in both senses of the word", which sounds about right. Slate critic Jonah Weiner was altogether less impressed. In Weiner's opinion, "there has always been something obnoxious about Wes Anderson". For good measure he suggested that the director's treatment of the peripheral Indian characters in Darjeeling borders on the racist.

"It's a harsh thing to be accused of, racism," Anderson says. "It's hard not to be offended by that. I mean, this is a movie from the point of view of three American tourists, so their window is always going to be pretty narrow. But this notion that we are somehow using India as fodder, that's just so wrong." He sighs like an old tragedian. "One does feel misunderstood."

This leads us, inevitably, to the other area of misunderstanding, the proverbial elephant in the living room. The Darjeeling Limited marks Anderson's fifth collaboration with Owen Wilson, a man he describes as his best friend. Here Wilson plays a character recovering from a failed suicide attempt. At the end of August, just as the film was about to be unveiled at the Venice film festival, Wilson was admitted to hospital following an apparent attempt to take his own life.

Touring the film on the festival circuit, Anderson has grown used to fending off this subject. Some people, he says, can't resist the temptation to sift the film for clues to the actor's mental state, equating the fictional Wilson with the factual one. "You know, I generally just don't engage in it. The fact is that Owen's - what do we call it? - experience over the past few months cannot be connected to this film in any way. It's just bad timing. I mean the whole thing is beyond bad timing. But that character is not based on Owen. Sure, I based him on real-life people, but Owen was never one of them."

But he is doomed to tackle these questions. It all comes back to that crucial sense of slippage between Anderson's personality and the personality of his films; the impression that the dramas in one world have echoes in the other. First off, Anderson and Wilson have known each other since they were students. Second, their films invariably feature characters that are much cursed as they are blessed; bright young stars who crash and burn. Small wonder people will add two and two together and come away with five.

Anderson nods. "What you are saying is quite true. And yet no one puts it with that degree of clarity. They just say, 'Oh, this character tried to kill himself and look, there's Owen Wilson in real life.'" He shrugs. "Certainly my movies are connected to my real life and the people around me. That's what confuses people."

Out of the blue he tells me about his first experience of working with Wilson. This was on Bottle Rocket, a jaunty, freewheeling feature that the pair expanded from a 14-minute short. Bottle Rocket won a powerful champion in Martin Scorsese, established Anderson as an art-house darling and paved Wilson's ascent to the Hollywood summit. Except it almost didn't turn out that way. On completion, the film garnered the worst results of any Columbia Pictures test preview, ever, and was widely judged to be a disaster.

"Owen thought we were all washed up," Anderson recalls. "He thought it was over. I remember him saying that we had to quickly look for work in advertising, which I really did not want to do. He also kept saying that we needed to distance ourselves from the movie." He chuckles at the memory. "And I'm like, 'How are we going to do that? We've both written it, I've directed it and you're in pretty much every scene. That seems a pretty tall order.' But no, he was insistent. We had to distance ourselves."

This question of distance is central to Anderson's work. Any director worth their salt will inevitably filter their films through their own consciousness, and make the audience see the world as they see it. In the case of Wes Anderson, the fit is snugger than is strictly comfortable. This is what makes the notion that he can somehow disown his own projects so ludicrous (so comical on one occasion; so entangling in another). But it is also what makes him so interesting. Anderson produces movies that are clever and cocksure, fragile and flawed, ephemeral and intense. In person he's a bit like that himself: a series of successful gestures, at once a self-regarding aesthete and an artist to be cherished. Precious in both senses of the word.

I loved it and don't really see it being pretentious at all. Everything good and bad has been said already, so, I don't know.

Racist? I wouldn't say so. If anything, it made me want to visit India. Like watching Lost In Translation, I felt compelled to go to Japan after that. I think that suggests something good about the material opposed to negative.

holy doodoo, i will finally get to see this.

very odd, but there is a very small 4 screen theatre close by that has film festivals once or twice a year and even has foreign films, etc, that would never play here otherwise. i guess they decided to start carrying films like this as out of festival season.

it's about like Radiohead coming to Texas and playing Houston, Dallas and then deciding to play a concert in the high school gym of an 11,000 population town and skipping two close towns that are at least 7 and 10 times as big.

i guess after i go through all these pages and read all this stuff i've been avoiding i'll post something.

**addition after viewing**

Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors.
The Life Aquatic seemed to alienate a good deal of fans of his previous films, but I liked it just as much.

The Darjeeling Limited may be the first one that I really don't have a desire to watch again. I probably will get the DVD and maybe on subsequent viewings I'll like it more.

That said, Dustin Hoffman should get an Oscar for sounding just like Angelica Houston.
:wink:

to me, it's most comparable to Bottle Rocket (which i love), in that it there is less attention paid to surreal details, a more realistic approach. the last two films especially were surreal - claymation made up ocean species, characters that were the exact same warddrobe throughout the movie, etc.

i think a lot has to do with Wes leaving the settings mostly as they are instead of creating a world of his own. here he kept it more realistic to what he, jason and roman experienced when writing the film. i guess the closest to this would be the specially designed luggage seen throughout.

there also don't seem to be many quotable lines in this to me. unfortunately what seems to be one of the biggest laughs and most quotable, was one used in the trailer - the mace scene.

this was also the first time Wes didn't introduce me to any new great bands. not that that's his duty in any way as a filmmaker, it's just be nice and something to look forward to.

another comparison to BR is when Owen lists 'a,' 'b,' he does it in Dignan persona and it is even similiar to things Dignan says.

Owen's assistant in the film is a kind of role that Wes has in all his films and i just didn't find him funny.

like i said before, this was only after first viewing. i wasn't totally sure what i thought about TLA after first viewing (i think i was underwhelmed by the look of the shark itself) but i did want to see it again and again. and there were reasons to - to spot the Zissou figurines, to see other little details, but i'm not sure there really is this feeling with Darjeeling - which goes back to Wes' desire to go back towards more realistic storytelling.

The flashback sequence at the garage is the best thing Wes has ever done (so far).

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on November 11, 2007, 11:04:46 PM
The flashback sequence at the garage is the best thing Wes has ever done (so far).

I will agree with this, because I think the story misses out on not introducing us to the patriarch in the flesh.

Quote from: bigideas on November 11, 2007, 02:12:01 PM
another comparison to BR is when Owen lists 'a,' 'b,' he does it in Dignan persona and it is even similiar to things Dignan says.

This was brought up at a Wes Q&A I attended and he agreed with the Dignan similarities. He didn't elaborate how designed the similarities were but the question was to do with sequels/'where are they now' etc.

I really wanted to ask about Bottle Rocket - whether the more conservative (in comparison to say The Life Aquatic) production design was the result of a) a smaller budget, b)he hadn't found his style yet or c)intentional, in line with emphasis of Dignan's banana suit against his environment. Unfortunately I thought about this four hours later. From the trailer, I wrote here that I sensed a more Bottle Rocket-like sensibility but to be honest, after seeing it I think this is born more from being in an existing environment (as you say) and being conscious of his weakness for matching hats and speedos (I remember reading an interview where confessed to checking up on himself on the set a lot).

At the same Q&A they played clips from all his films and the joy of experiencing them with other fans reminded me not get too caught up in the "where is Wes Anderson headed" and just enjoy his unique style, matching speedos an' all.

the character is also very Dignan because he is a leader who has very detailed plans.

in BR you had the handwritten notebook
in DL you had the laminated schedules

as far as production design - i think it mainly had to do with money and experience.
BR was his first film. after finishing it, plus getting more money, he had the opportunity and greater confidence to do something like Rushmore.

i think he purposely scaled back Darjeeling because it is mentioned in all the reviews and the fact that the 3 writers were trying to write things based on what they experienced themselves when checking out India.

after reading all these interviews and articles posted here, it is very obvious he reads his reviews throughly. he's constantly wondering if he's rehashing something he's already done.

Quote from: pozer on November 08, 2007, 06:20:10 PM
i grew tired of the uncountable slow-mo bits but did enjoy it. 

is this a spoiler?

also, bill murray = pointless =  :yabbse-rolleyes:  has this been discussed?

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on November 11, 2007, 11:04:46 PM
The flashback sequence at the garage is the best thing Wes has ever done (so far).

Absolutely, it was the most poignant part of the film for me. The rest was....eh. I need a 2nd viewing though.

and yeah Pozer, having Bill Murray was completely pointless and distracting.

Quote from: B.C. Long on November 13, 2007, 05:40:00 PM
having Bill Murray was completely pointless and distracting.

Do I still need to warn about what some might consider spoilers?

I think you miss the point. Or am I being too positive and optimistic? Okay, sure it's possible that Wes just threw in Bill for the sake of a star cameo, but I really don't think that's the case. For me, it reasserts the whole idea of detatchment which I harped on about in my review a couple of pages back. By kicking off with the businessman racing for the train we are led to believe that his is the story we will be following. It certainly looks like it's going to be an interesting one. Then suddenly, someone else races past him and catches the train. The focus switches, and we focus on this other story instead. But the businessman still has his own story, and that's reasserted when he shows up later on in the movie. Sure, it could have been any random actor do it, but by having Bill Murray play the part it emphasises these points, but ensures the audience recognise him and make the connection during the train sequence. That's what I think.

wow.  i really like your thoughts on that.  i was REALLY tired when i saw this and fought to keep my eyes open toward the middle/end.  when i view it again, i will look at it that way.  but just sitting here thinking about your view on that opening sequence and how he appears in the montage of all the characters in the end has turned my rolling eyes into :shock:

SPOILERS

Wes has said multiple times in the interviews that he asked Bill to play a symbol, so he could represent the father. They go on a trip to deal with the father, and by the end they have parted with the father, this time represented by the luggage.

What did everyone think of that train/box car bit at the end when the brothers and mother are praying or whatever? I'm not sure exactly what that is meant to represent. If it's purely the thoughts of the people I'm not sure what Bill or the tiger mean, unless the mom is thinking tiger and adrien, bill.

he's said playing a symbol, but i don't believe he ever said it was symbol for their father. 

Quote from: modage on November 14, 2007, 10:07:11 PM
he's said playing a symbol, but i don't believe he ever said it was symbol for their father. 

true.
what this proposes is..........maybe he didn't quite say it, but meant it?
not my original observance either, i read it somewhere else.

check this from Ebert's review (he must not recognize Kumar):

"Anderson uses India not in a touristy way, but as a backdrop that is very, very there. Consider a lengthy scene where the three brothers share a table in the diner with an Indian man who is a stranger. Observe the performance of the stranger. As an Indian traveling in first class, he undoubtedly speaks English, but they do not exchange a word. He reads his paper. The brothers talk urgently and openly about intimacies and differences. He does not "react" in any obvious way. His unperturbed presence is a reaction in itself. There is a concealed level of performance: They probably know he can understand them, and he probably knows they know this. There he sits, a passive witness to their lives. It is impossible to imagine this role played any better. He raises the level of the scene to another dimension."

:saywhat:

ebert is nuts.  it was clearly just a kumar cameo for the hardcores.

Didn't feel a connection with this one. The metaphors felt very on-the-nose. Never felt that either of the brothers were anything more than just two-dimentional. I liked it better when the story got serious (after they get kicked off the train), but overall the film seemed to just pass over me with only memorable moments rather than a memorable film as a whole.

Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are gradually becoming the same filmmaker.  Three or four years down the line from now, they'll both release movies at the same time, and they will turn out to be the exact same movie.  I will feign surprise.

Quote from: polkablues on November 18, 2007, 06:37:05 AM
Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are gradually becoming the same filmmaker.

already happened.

Quote from: Pubrick on October 22, 2004, 12:15:37 AM
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Quote from: modage on November 14, 2007, 10:16:41 PM
ebert is nuts.  it was clearly just a kumar cameo for the hardcores.

haha I like your justification way better than Ebert's.

Wes Interview:

http://media.movies.ign.com/media/848/848865/vid_2211673.html

On February 26, 2008, Fox Home Entertainment will release The Darjeeling Limited on DVD. The Wes Anderson film revolves around three brothers who travel to India in search of enlightenment, or at least to reunite as brothers should. The film stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman. It will contain several currently unnamed featurettes, including the spotlighted "Hotel Chevalier" starring Natalie Portman, and will be available for the MSRP of $29.98. No Blu-ray version is slated.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdvdmedia.ign.com%2Fdvd%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F841%2F841604%2Fdarjeeling-limited-finds-nirvana-20071214004142023-000.jpg&hash=2cc1345fdc3b37df07b56ffe7c3a687269e745ce)

Wow that is lame...

At least Hotel Chevalier is on it. Life Aquatic makes it to Criterion but not the Darjeeling? This puzzles me.

Quote from: overmeunderyou on December 14, 2007, 08:43:37 PM
At least Hotel Chevalier is on it. Life Aquatic makes it to Criterion but not the Darjeeling? This puzzles me.

Criterion always made it known they were not working on the DVD for this film. I don't know the reason why, but I have to assume a smaller company like Fox Searchlight is protecting its own. It isn't a simple matter of large companies allowing Criterion to release smaller films. I think Darjeeling Limited is more valuable to Fox Searchlight. And considering the price, I'm not sure if we'll ever see a Criterion release.

Considering the Fantastic Mr. Fox is being done by Sony, don't expect a Criterion release there either.

Whatever.

More time to focus on making a great Bottle Rocket Criterion.

I'll get Darjeeling at Target for $15, then watch the two scenes in the film that make it excusable.

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 14, 2007, 08:55:24 PM

Quote from: overmeunderyou on December 14, 2007, 08:43:37 PM
At least Hotel Chevalier is on it. Life Aquatic makes it to Criterion but not the Darjeeling? This puzzles me.

Criterion always made it known they were not working on the DVD for this film. I don't know the reason why, but I have to assume a smaller company like Fox Searchlight is protecting its own. It isn't a simple matter of large companies allowing Criterion to release smaller films. I think Darjeeling Limited is more valuable to Fox Searchlight. And considering the price, I'm not sure if we'll ever see a Criterion release.

Considering the Fantastic Mr. Fox is being done by Sony, don't expect a Criterion release there either.

Plus didn't disney and beauna vista have a deal with criterion about wes anderson's films? Or was that just regular hollywood bullshit I heard?

Quote from: SiliasRuby on December 14, 2007, 09:26:28 PM

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 14, 2007, 08:55:24 PM

Quote from: overmeunderyou on December 14, 2007, 08:43:37 PM
At least Hotel Chevalier is on it. Life Aquatic makes it to Criterion but not the Darjeeling? This puzzles me.

Criterion always made it known they were not working on the DVD for this film. I don't know the reason why, but I have to assume a smaller company like Fox Searchlight is protecting its own. It isn't a simple matter of large companies allowing Criterion to release smaller films. I think Darjeeling Limited is more valuable to Fox Searchlight. And considering the price, I'm not sure if we'll ever see a Criterion release.

Considering the Fantastic Mr. Fox is being done by Sony, don't expect a Criterion release there either.

Plus didn't disney and beauna vista have a deal with criterion about wes anderson's films? Or was that just regular hollywood bullshit I heard?

I imagine they did. Wes Anderson pushed for his films to be released by Criterion but he can't work miracles. Fox Searchlight was likely wanting a large percentage of sales and Criterion couldn't allow for it. The company does wonderful things, but they are also notoriously cheap and very obnoxious. They've shown an attitude before that they are the greatest and studios should be grateful to allow them to release a film or just hand over extras free of charge. Fans may think that, but it's a different situation for companies trying to make money. You might get a release of Darjeeling Limitied down the road, but it has potential to make the best money now. I just don't think Fox Searchlight could have passed up on the financial opportunities the way other companies were willing to.

I liked this movie more than anyone here, it seems.

I really liked it too. At the moment it's in my number 3 spot for 2007.

while there is no way really to measure one's admiration and appreciation to another's, I seriously doubt Mesh's claims.  Just becase you're a cunting snob don't mean you've got more love.  Stop hipster-ruining something that's already been so davastated. 

Quote from: pete on January 13, 2008, 04:01:49 AM
while there is no way really to measure one's admiration and appreciation to another's, I seriously doubt Mesh's claims.  Just becase you're a cunting snob don't mean you've got more love.  Stop hipster-ruining something that's already been so davastated. 

I've got plenty of love to give. I just don't know where to put it.

well i went into this with low expectations and it still managed to be underwhelming. im sorry, but everything about this movie was "off" to me. the attemps at humor felt flat, already done in other movies from the same guy; the "emotional" aspect, ditto; the "tragic" event in the middle of the film, now a trademark, has none of the impact that, for example, luke wilson's suicide attemp has in royal t...

you can see there's a probable genius behind this, but everything feels tired. every character feels like a rehash of past wes's movies. at some point it was just painful to watch so much potentially good stuff miss the mark. the consensus around here seems to be positive, so I'll give this another chance someday. My personal view on this whole thing is that Wes Anderson really needs to go against himself, the way that PTA decided to kick it up a notch after PDL. He nees to make a list of things to not do, which could include slo-mo takes, left and right pans, overhead shots and not writing with Owen Wilson.

When the guys drop the baggage at the end I smiled. Could this mean tht Wes Anderson will finnally attempt something RADICALLY different, as we all know he can?

I liked The Life Aquatic, and I think it will age pretty well. Not this one.

i've loved all his films, including the much maligned Life Aquatic, but i felt pretty similiar to what you said about Darjeeling. i have a small hope that when the dvd comes out and i watch it again that i 'see' something i did not see on the first viewing.

i don't even care much about using the same cinematic techniques, but something about the characters and story did not connect with me like his other films.

dude should make a dogma film...probably scare the crap out of him. (wow I sound like Jim Rome)

Saw this today, and liked it a lot. I'm not the world's biggest "Life Aquatic" fan, and expectations weren't really high on this one, unlike with "Life Aquatic", so it may have helped. But I really did feel the vibe again, and it was great. Emotionally, this may have been the one that attracted me the most - I have two brothers, and even though we get along pretty well, I guess that's what connects me in such a big way to movies about brothers (like "Cassandra's Dream"). There were great moments, great music and visuals, and the only slight beef I have with it (SPOILER) is the parts with Anjelica Huston, which seem to me that kind of don't belong there. Maybe the characters needes to be abandoned by their mother again, but it just wasn't handled pretty well (END SPOILER). Oh, and watching Kumar in the bg is always the greatest thing in the world.

Quote from: bigideas on February 12, 2008, 02:22:32 PM
i've loved all his films, including the much maligned Life Aquatic, but i felt pretty similiar to what you said about Darjeeling. i have a small hope that when the dvd comes out and i watch it again that i 'see' something i did not see on the first viewing.

i don't even care much about using the same cinematic techniques, but something about the characters and story did not connect with me like his other films.

You know, a second viewing really helped. I felt I knew and understood the characters better this next go 'round. It also confirmed for me that, starting with the river scene, the village sequence is some of the best work Anderson has done.


I dunno if this also played a part, but I think it helped not watching Hotel Chevalier right before viewing the film.

Wes and Jason Schwartzman shop for CDs and DVDs at Borders in 2008...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdRC9oDeVjk

DVDBeaver review of The Darjeeling Limited: Criterion Collection Blu-Ray:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews35/darjeeling_limited.htm

Quote from: modage on October 13, 2010, 11:03:27 AM
Wes and Jason Schwartzman shop for CDs and DVDs at Borders in 2008...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdRC9oDeVjk

that 8min clip was as interminable as the film that bears this thread's name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lshQ2LL0-3Y

check out this little tribute video on youtube I found for darjeeling. it would be the greatest trailer in the world for a film (albeit a key spoiler throughout) if it played in a theatre, check it out. I love the way it starts with the same shot it ends on w/darjeeling limited/train. i'm stoned right now so this all makes crystal clear sense to me, I just hope that all that makes crystal clear sense to you all too.

Quote from: P on October 14, 2010, 03:01:19 AM
that 83min clip was as interminable as the film that bears this thread's name.

just watching the clip reminded me of what a tiresome experience that film is.

Well, keeping my courage from the Malick/Good Will Hunting thread, I here by state that this is one of my favorite movies of the past 10 years, and a deep emotional experience to me. Wes is becoming very unpopular in the past few years, and I can't say I don't understand that (his movies seem to be getting more and more peculiar and in a way very hermetic), but to me he still is one of the most interesting guys making movies these days.

It's funny how a couple of years ago, there was a bit of a polemic that started from something a critic wrote on a paper here in Portugal about Slumdog Millionaire. Something like this: 'When Wes Anderson went to India to make his movie, he could make us sense the spices and the aromas of the place, and Boyle can't do more than make us smell its shit.' In a sense, I can say pretty much agree with him.

Quote from: Alexandro on January 07, 2011, 01:49:55 PM
just watching the clip reminded me of what a tiresome experience that film is.

Me too.  I could take about 0.52 seconds.  Blah.

i shot my computer in the motherboard after 0.009 seconds of that turgid bullshit. i just stood there, firing. it took several minutes before i realized that the chamber was long empty. the clicking sound still haunts me.

once more with feeling, guys! joking aside, you all really loved it...right?

i don't think the film or the clip are turgid bullshit. but the film was exasperating to me.
loved fantastic mr fox though, i've seen 7 times. i'm not a wes anderson hater.

I don't think I made it to the minute mark of that clip. Didn't get the point of it. They're walking left to right, they're walking left to right, they're walking left to right, oh - walking right to left, they're walking left to right...

However, I do absolutely love the film. I think it's a fascinating mash-up of Wes' very stylized mise-en-scene and on the fly filmmaking. And yes, it had some very profound emotional impact on me too. As great as Rushmore and Tenenbaums are, for me, Darjeeling is my favorite film of his on a personal level.