I promise I won't ever be your friend
I finally got a chance to see The Darjeeling Limited this week. It's so hard to see movies in the theater these days what with having an 18 month old daughter, so I've been relying on Amazon Unbox and iTunes, and The Darjeeling Limited just appeared last week as a rental.
I've been a fan of Wes Anderson ever since I saw Rushmore in college; Rushmore is one of my very favorite movies, but I think I've liked each successive movie less. Maybe this is because the scope of the earlier movies was tighter, or maybe it's because the adolescent neuroses the characters all seem to share work better in the context of adolescence than the larger world, even if it is fantastical and highly stylized. To be fair, this latest offering did have a tighter scope, but I just can't get excited about the same rich, high society losers with the same daddy and mommy issues.
But maybe Wes Anderson should direct someone else's story for a change, because the design of this movie -- the settings, the colors, and especially the cinematography -- just blew me away. I've spent a lot of the past couple years (since Wes Anderson's last film) becoming a photographer, so probably for the first time I was really in a position to appreciate the wide angle planimetric compositions he uses -- I would say at least half the shots in the movie use this intimate schema. And then there is a the slow motion, which when combined with the flat compositions makes some of these scenes as photographic as anything I've ever seen in a movie. The scene where the three brothers walk by the funeral preparations is just breathtaking. How many times did I watch it?
I liked Darjeeling (Life Aquatic is the only of his I haven't liked), but it's true that he's pretty much repeating himself when it comes to the stories and characters. Rushmore is definitely a great movie, but he probably would do better to work with some different material.
I hadn't heard that "planimetric" term before. Going from that Bordwell post, I think Kurosawa liked the sort of shot he's talking about and used it pretty often.
I haven't seen any Kurosawa in a while, but maybe I'll pick something up. Anything in particular you recommend?
It's tough to go wrong with his most famous movies. Rashomon and Seven Samurai are both regularly ranked among the all-time greats, and I think deservedly so. Ikiru is a great one that's pretty different from his more famous samurai period pieces. He also made some great modern crime thrillers, like Stray Dog and High and Low (which had a bad DVD release from Criterion but will soon be re-released by them in a better version).
I've not seen Rashomon or Ikiru, so maybe I'll start there. Thanks Haggai!
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