There are Anderson movies I really, truly, deeply hate.

But Asteroid City isn’t one of those. You people are high. That movie was great.

Asteroid City sucked. Astoundingly bad film from the jump.

Dude's one heart-string trick (dead wife/mom, prodigy kids) is driven into the ground, again. The narrative framing device (oh look, a story about a story) was really half-baked.

Can't recall a time where a movie made me that angry to be honest! Kinda impressive, sincerely.

I liked the two animated ones a lot, so as to not seem deeply anti-twee or agains wholeheartedly 'precious' films. Those two were fun and genuinely unique.

Asteroid City was a sleeping pill in the form of a film.

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A_Man_Who_Tries wrote: Fri Jun 23, 2023 11:19 am

losthighway wrote: Fri Jun 23, 2023 9:25 am Never once is his face twisted with grief before he slits his wrists.

I'd have that down as a rare instance of emotion being accurately reflected in a Wes Anderson film.

I Agree.

I've typed out several posts and deleted them.

I will probably always love Royal Tenenbaums. At the time I hadn't been exposed to anything like it & just clicked. Also I think I was still heavily self-medicating. I doubt it still holds up since his style has been beaten to death (by himself no less)...so probably will never rewatch.

Asteroid City had exactly two parts that surprised me & I laughed out loud in the theatre. Unexpected and funny, probably just that much tension after so much droning goes on helped punch it up a bit & so I have some doubt those moments would have even registered if the entire film was actually good. Visually great, but honestly felt like he was really trying to do a Charlie Kaufman-lite thing and...didn't work for me. So many cringe moments throughout, clearly feels like at this point he is high on the smell of his own farts and no one can say "this just isn't good" to The Great Master anymore at any point during production...but also let's see how many big production films I've had become widely-beloved by millions cocksocket. I will say the visuals were perfect and if I were still self-medicating, it probably would have been best described by teenage me as "a trip."

He created what's been branded as his own thing though (more knowledgeable film buffs could probably tear that to shreds though, I'm somewhat uneducated in this area) and credit where credit's due for that I guess.

Crap.

BOTTLE ROCKET and RUSHMORE were absolutely huge movies for me. They came out at the perfect time, when I was getting really into film in high school, including the folks that were significant influences on those films (Renoir, Truffaut, Bogdanovich, etc); I was also an ambitious high school theater kid who helped start our own youth community theater program when the theater department at our high school was closed down for a semester.

I've never been more hyped for a movie as I was to see THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS in late '01 and it just felt...kinda flat to me.

I'll always catch up with his films, and some I like more (LIFE AQUATIC, MR FOX, MOONRISE KINGDOM, Benecio Del Toro part of FRENCH DISPATCH) than others (other parts of FRENCH DISPATCH, etc). There's usually at least one moment in every film that makes me laugh out loud or get a lump in my throat, even if the thing on it's whole doesn't work for me.

Would still rather have him around than all the terrible 00s movies that ripped off the most obvious parts of his style or the current filmmakers who make 1-2 promising films and then go into prestige TV or Marvel greenscreen sludge.

I still think the way all the kids say "handjob" in RUSHMORE is hilarious, one of a myriad reasons why it's his best film.