The Darjeeling Limited

[72teeth]

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  sounds fun!

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Yeah he seems really out of it, but the video is funny at parts.

[Redlum]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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

[SoNowThen]

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

[tpfkabi]

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....

[The Red Vine]

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.

[Pozer]

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.

[MacGuffin]

'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.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

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.

[tpfkabi]

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.

[tpfkabi]

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.

[OrHowILearnedTo]

The flashback sequence at the garage is the best thing Wes has ever done (so far).

[Gamblour.]

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.

[Redlum]

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.