I just watched Darjeeling Limited and it turns out it's really good. Why didn’t anyone tell me?
"Anderson is still a maddeningly cool filmmaker. He's remote from his characters, which makes him remote from his movies. There's also a way in which he uses race as a novelty, suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world."
Paging Dr. Obvious: Salon.com needs you in the operating room STAT. (What? Somebody please teach me how to use that expression.) Saying that about Wes Anderson is like complaining that Jane Austen’s novels are all set in drawing rooms or that gold is maddeningly expensive. That’s just how it is. The sun provides heat. This movie is about the white-kid view of the world. And who doesn’t want to spend two hours seeing the world through the eyes of a rich globe-trotting expat? It’s Henry James, if only Henry James didn’t take for boring eternity to read. It’s not an oppressive colonizing of normativity, it’s “normative fan fiction,” and it’s beautiful.
“I give this painting a bad review because Whistler doesn’t seem to love his mother.” – overheard at Salon.com’s great-great-great-great-grandfather (just a physical salon).
The Darjeeling Limited is a movie about literature, and it’s better than most short stories. The two best parts of this movie come close to being the two worst parts: one, the scene where Owen Wilson takes off his bandages and the brothers say that he’s still healing. First you’re like, “really??” Then you’re like “oh. The metaphoric and the literal have been caught in the world’s most charming feedback loop. Well played.” It’s Nick Adams making coffee, coffeemaker design courtesy Marc Jacobs. And a Rolling Stones B-side playing in the background that I’m going to download right now.
The other best part is the scene toward the end where the train goes by and you see all the individual compartments, like the frames of a film strip. Oh yeah, did I mention this is also a love letter to the magic of cinema? That's right. Fuck you, Salon.com.
Then, as a final twist, Angelica Huston as the mom says something about trying to communicate without any words, and you realize what this is: a short story written by the smartest kid in your senior-year fiction writing workshop, who you were jealous of at first, but by the end of college have come to admire not even begrudgingly, translated into cinema.
Wes Anderson: dude is for all time. I blogged it. No turning back.
5 comments:
Wes is awesome, Darjeeling is my favorite movie, and tea! It is great to know I don't have to re-read Henry James, I can just watch this gem.
God, liz, put your raging hard-on back into your pants. Do your docking with Darjeeling Limited in the privacy of your own home. Only tender hand-holding is allowed on the internet.
Lesley, I don't think you understand what the internet is. Let me tell you: it's a giant chalkboard where you're forced to stand up and reveal your boner, but then it turns out that the whole classroom has one, too, and suddenly there is no such thing as shame. Lazer's with me.
Liz, perhaps you've never heard of a little thing called the erotics of shame? Don't you - and lazer! - think your relationships with Wes Anderson would be much more delightful if you were forced into hiding with it? I mean, if you publicize your love of Wes Anderson so much, soon you will be forced into even more socially harmful forms of pleasure. Soon you will be staying home to treat yourself to a double feature of Garden State and Shopgirl. And you'll be making racist comments the whole time.
This is what you've come to, Liz. Such a waste.
Liz, I like the idea that the Internet is not build for judgment; usually I cannot find people (outside the matriculating world, i.e. college) who think so highly of Wes. It breaks ones silly heart to read something good about the lanky bastard.
I *just* watched Garden State over the holidays! Stop spying on me!
I'll call your Shopgirl bluff and raise you one Juno!
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