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gpuzzle · 10 months

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Big ol' review of Asteroid City, with a blatant disregard for spoilers and extremely long:

The way people talk about Asteroid City - if at all - has spanned somewhere between the myopic, the hypermetropic and the astigmatic. Yes, it's ostensibly Wes Anderson telling a thousand of his intertwined stories, at least at the small level. You do have the classic Andersonian parade of characters, of tiny fragments, of recurring characters. It weaves in plot in plot in plot. I’ll start with the subplot and move up into the true metaplot.

You get a dizzy little romance between June (Maya Hawke), an appropriately religious elementary school teacher with a class of incorrigible ten-year-olds that she attempts to corral throughout the movie, and Montana (Rupert Friend), the only member of a gang of singing cowboys with any speaking lines. It is the purest of artifice; the singing cowboy is an American invention, and Hawke’s character struggles to handle how her reality has been shattered and the kids have seemingly become obsessed with an alien that has come to Asteroid City and picked up a meteorite, culminating in a scene where one of her pupils deliver an appropriately silly Western Swing number “Dear Alien (Who Art In Heaven)”. It is by far the most whimsical, dumbest, and most ostensibly “regular movie” metastory within the entire thing. But in its extreme artifice and very obvious “fakeness” in every aspect, this subplot being the least Andersonian save for the dialogue and framing rather than plot and theming really highlights the levels. Here’s Anderson delivering a straightfaced story with only his aesthetic leanings, drawing back into the past, but making it so blithely artificial it’s impossible to even consider it serious for an instant.

You get Woodrow Steenback (Jake Ryan) and Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards) as part of this quintet of brainiacs that all come up with fully sci-fi devices; spanning projecting images on the Moon from the Earth (that gets mentioned as a potential application for space advertising); a jetpack; an honest to goodness disintegrator; a new element; and radioactivity-assisted plant growing. In a handful of scenes, these five brainiacs introduce themselves - first by naming an increasingly large number of famous people, then eventually with the introduction of an alien, as a dedicated group of five that are intent on figuring out just what it is, where it came from, and how to get that information out; intertwined with Tilda Swinton as Dr. Hickenlooper, a scientist who burned the stars in her eyes, literally - and how they come into conflict with the US government regarding that, notably in the figure of Jeffrey Wright as a General Grif Gibson and Tony Revolori as his aide-de-camp. It eventually culminates in a passionate kiss between our two teenaged romantic leads, with Ryan's character projecting a heart with "W.S. + D.C." on the moon, visible from everywhere.

This is a Wes Anderson movie, but he's given us only the outline. The scenes that feature these characters are not few and far between, but we don't get a true look into that romance. But that's not the point. The pace of the romance happens at nigh breakneck pace, since we don't get to spend nearly as much time with the characters as you'd expect where this the entire plot of the movie. That's an underlying Andersonian story that weaves and pops. It’s fascinating; I’ve never seen the crux of a Wes Anderson movie down to its barest essentials like here. But that's not actually the story being told.

The other 3 space cadets have mirror relationships with their parents: Aristou Meehan plays an daredevil who takes on dares compulsively, usually of a self-destructive nature (including climbing a cactus and jumping from the roof of a building), and yet is given a moment of extreme sincerity and the need to be noted against a father that is at once both incredibly protective and absolutely at his wits' end with this kid (played by Liev Schreiber); this guy could be any of quite a few characters on his run from Bottle Rocket onto Darjeeling Limited. Sophia Lillis plays a girl scout clad in girl scout attire all through the movie, mirroring her mother (Hope Davis); they both individually have a great appreciation for Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), an in-play movie star and Dinah's mother, first directly by Lillis' character outright stating that she's a fan of Johansson's character, and by Davis' character later in the play in a small scene while they wait for the communal showers to open up where she actively voices her appreciation for Johansson's character in a way that actively mirrors some of Johansson's earlier lines; while Ethan Josh Lee plays the brainiac that breaks the alien story and is the one that most actively fights the US government, in a way mirroring his dad (Stephen Park) confronting the motel manager (a wonderfully cast Steve Carrell) but also taking on bigger and bigger challenges. This too is very Wes Anderson, in the same way that you'd get in The Royal Tannembaums; the way parents and offspring mirror one another.

The other two parents are instead the main characters of the play – Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Campbell is a star who often plays women drawn to cruel and violent men, but holds artifice – she spends most of the movie with a greasepaint black eye, to constantly remind the audience on all levels of the sheer degree of artifice in movie making. She blends real and imaginary by having long conversations with Steenbeck out of a bathroom window, opposite his bathroom and makeshift photography studio. Raising again the matter of “this is all artifice”, the only way you can see the two of them presents us with the desert mountain skyline – and a billboard as part of said skyline, bringing ever forward the degree of cinema is an invention. She acts out scenes with Augie Steenbeck that blend real and imagined, and Midge Campbell’s metaactor (Mercedes Ford, also Johansson) is similar; the brief train scene where she’s convinced to return to the play at the last hour blends character and reality. She says she’ll be found dead in a bathtub, having drunk herself to a pill overdose – and we briefly do get to witness that. During a line read with Steenbeck, she coaxes him to use his grief to get the line across – the grief from losing his wife. The meta implications are obvious. She is a resounding foghorn that tells us that we are dealing with a fundamental level of artifice. Johansson gets to wax and wane in three different roles of doomed, self-destructive women – Midge Campbell’s next character, Midge Campbell herself, and Mercedes Ford – and that blend makes it difficult to assert how much she’s telling the truth, and how much is she acting at all times. She’s excellent; by far the best role that Johansson’s ever taken and she executes it perfectly.

Schwartzman's in-play character begins with a fundamental drama - a widower who has yet to tell this kids their mom died. About two scenes into that play, that entire suspense is just delivered into a brief scene. This plot returns every so often most symbolized by the character of Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), Augie's cantankerous father-in-law, and Augie's three daughters, Pandora, Cassiopeia and Andromeda (played by Gracie, Willan and Ella Farris, respectively), who take on this nigh Weyrd Sisters quality of trying to be three witches to bring their mom back. He finds himself involved in an affair with Midge Campbell as the two dialogue through bathroom windows, and culminating in a scene where Midge Campbell reveals that she’s told her daughter the affair, and Augie Steenbeck burns his hand on a griddle for no apparent reason. This too is an Andersonian plot, with all its inherent quirkiness and family drama and ultimate yearning and learning to deal with an emotion.

But he's also a war photographer who got wounded multiple times, including shrapnel to the back of the head. He takes a lot of pictures, from nuclear explosions to Midge Campbell eating some waffles to eventually the alien plot. The entire framing of pictures, of capturing images, really comes to a head with one picture that he takes and keeps and that becomes the key part – that of his first (and now dead) wife, played by Margot Robbie. This is the link that gets us to the blending of metacommentary from his side. If Scarlett Johansson’s meta commentary arrives by dint of her own character blending the line between performance and reality, Jason Schwartzman’s metacommentary arrives in a crucial scene that ends the third act of the play; the actor breaks from the scene, and exists via the stage, Truman-show style, stunned, trying to understand the motivations for his character, such as burning his own hand on a griddle on purpose. And thus the two worlds that we had existed in start to intertwine as they unravel rapidly. The first world is the in-universe play which is the gorgeously produced. The second one is the TV production presented by Bryan Cranston about how that play was made.

Asteroid City is established as a series of lies and artifice on top of more lies and artifice. It establishes this from the word go; we are immediately presented to a TV broadcasted, presented by Bryan Cranston, who has a brief cameo nearing the end of Act 2 and start of Act 3, finding himself in the wrong spot. We have Edward Norton as Conrad Earp, a playwright that channels the parody image of the asshole playwright. It introduces the setting of the play, the characters, their actors. And then, once we cut to the play, it's very obvious that we're following the directions of the playwright - are shown the entire city following the exact directions of the stage laid out. Then we start following the acts of the play, and it is similarly made explicit – scenes and acts are labeled and presented to us as they appear. When we return to this broadcast in black and white, we are presented to vignettes in the lives of these characters. First, Earp and Jones Hall (Schwartzman, playing Augie Steenbeck’s actor) have what can be considered a minor romantic meeting in an early meta scene, wherein Hall delivers ice cream, punches a window and becomes Steenbeck to convince Earp to let him be in the play, which forms the core of Hall’s arc. We are next presented to the scene where the understudy (Jake Ryan) convinces Mercedes Campbell to return to the play at the last minute. These intertwine with Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), a womanizing director who similarly helps blur the line between acting and reality. It leads to a scene in an acting school that introduces us to most of the adult metactors, as well as there being a discussion about dreams, and the importance of dreams to writing, and getting into a dream state.

And then the two worlds rapidly collide when Schwartzman exits through a stage door, playing Hall unable to comprehend Steenbeck’s motivations, with Green (Brody) telling him that he doesn’t need to understand, he’s doing great. This rapidly collides into the last scene. Dreams aren’t a part of this movie until the end, where the meta breaks. As Hall goes to take a cigarette break, he spots, opposite his theater – the actress who was supposed to play Steenbeck’s dead wife (Margot Robbie), clad in Elizabethan attire. The two have a brief heart to heart, she reveals she found another role after a scene was cut, and they go over her scene – one where she appears to him in a dream and they have a conversation about the alien. For all intents and purposes, this is the cut scene from the play, delivered to us in the setup of the TV show, in a way that’s not clear it even happens in the TV show. We never return to the play.

We instead cut to the description that Conrad Earp died at 50 in an automobile accident, with the empty chair as the obvious sign, and then we return to the acting school scene and the talk of dreams, and to get into a dream fugue state. The scene resumes from the last time it was presented, in a comic “everybody falls asleep instantly, from falling on the floor to somnambulism to regular naps” – and Jones interrupts with “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” that culminates in everyone saying it in mantra like fashion, with the alien showing up in the actual scene and walking towards the camera. It is genuinely unsettling. And that theme is the underlying message; the way that stories intersect with the real. Jason Schwartzman plays an actor playing a character burning his hand on a griddle to see if he’s awake, but this is also acting. He shows little of the actual reaction to it, and even comments that “this really happened”. That movies, plays, stories – they’re artifice, they’re not real. They’re dreams. But if you live in a dream all the time, you cannot be awake; you cannot experience the real.

The epilogue wraps up the play. Augie has overslept and everyone else has already left but his family. They bury the ashes in that plot, Woodrow admits he no longer believes in God – and it’s highlighted when Augie’s order at the diner features now one less flapjack and one more black coffee. The threads of the Steenbeck family wrap up, and they drive away.

While I’d wager that Asteroid City is a delightful watch and its minute-to-minute watching is effervescent the way the best Wes Anderson scenes are, clad in its tones of pink and orange blending into a singular tone and blue, teal and turquoise, as well as cuts of bright white; Asteroid City is a complex, difficult movie in the way that its message involves the metastory, and that we are shown a level of metastory, of talking about stories, about the way that stories are about the artifice, the way stories are a falsehood, the way that we must thus engage with them is with the full awareness that they are falsehoods. It is excellent, postmodern cinema by way of Thomas Pynchon. Fully recommend if you’re willing to see it for what it is, but you’ll despise it if you don’t, because otherwise it can read as a series of barely connected threads that are never developed.

But that was never the point.

#asteroid city #spoilers

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mogwai-movie-house · 10 months

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Asteroid City (2023)

Visually, compositionally, Wes Anderson is without peer, and any individual shot out of his latest film will make practically every other movie released this year look like a provincial teenager's first TikTok video. Everywhere you look the details are never-endingly exquisite and hilarious, and my eyes haven't experienced so much pleasure since the last Wes Anderson flick. He's the only director left standing that I will still pay to go to a cinema to see.

The downside is that the story itself is awkward, convoluted, flimsy and whimsical - flimsical, if you will - and it's often hard to follow or care about what is going on, especially in the larger story arc, which flits between a black & white 1950s TV production and the glorious technicolor of the main story. I would have been perfectly happy to have lost the needlessly distracting B&W sections, as they add very little in the long run, and sap the energy and pace of the rest. The clever story Anderson is trying to tell here could work, but he doesn't have a strong enough grip on all the narrative and character elements to convey it in a clear and emotionally engaging way, so there are parts that feel more of a private joke or a personal fancy than a work made for the wider world. It could be I'll think differently about that on further viewings, but I would still expect to find this is what weakens the film the most.

The ridiculously stellar cast is dazzling, but there's just too many famous faces here for one film to do them justice: newcomer Tom Hanks is a great fit but woefully underused, and something similar could be said for Steve Carell, Tilda Swinton, Matt Dillon, Jeff Goldblum, Margot Robbie, Hope Davis, Bob Balaban and Willem Dafoe, all of whom are most welcome sights, but simply aren't onscreen long enough to convey anything of real substance, and they all deserved more fleshed-out roles they could get their teeth into.

For the first time in a Wes Anderson movie there is some rather obvious diversity hiring in the casting department (presumably in order to meet the new qualifications for an Oscar), some of whom work better than others, but the returning Jeffrey Wright and Tony Revolori are both excellent, and Ethan Josh Lee is a good new addition to the family.

Bryan Cranston and Edward Norton get more screen-time than most, but the first feels like a walk-on guest spot in a TV sketch show and the other looks somewhat lost in the confusing shuffle. Jason Schwartzman is, of course, the perfect Anderson avatar, and Scarlet Johansson is, for the most part, very dependable too. Liev Schreiber fits in surprisingly well, and the running gags with his son Aristou Meehan are perhaps the funniest high points of the film.

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All in all, it's hard to know how to rate this: it's definitely one of the weakest Wes Anderson movies, but for all the undeniable flaws in narrative it still gives me more joy to watch than just about anything else modern cinema has to offer, and I think by December I might still regard it the best thing I've seen all year. So that's odd.

★★★★★★½✰✰✰

#film reviews #asteroid city #wes anderson

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usagirotten · 1 year

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Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City' Trailer

Wes Anderson is leaning toward sci-fi in his upcoming summer film, Asteroid City The summary of Asteroid City is, unsurprisingly, not hugely forthcoming: The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events. As is expected from an Anderson film, the cast list is long and star-studded, including Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Hong Chau, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Matt Dillon, Grace Edwards, Rupert Friend, Jeff Goldblum, Maya Hawke, Ethan Lee, Sophia Lillis, Aristou Meehan, Edward Norton, Stephen Park, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Liev Schreiber, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Rita Wilson, and Jeffrey Wright. Based on the trailer, their characters include an actress; a widower who is reluctant to tell his kids their mother is dead; the kids’ grandfather; Jeffrey Wright as some military. ish? leader; and a whole lot of other oddballs who are stuck in Asteroid City when a quarantine order comes down. Asteroid City, which Anderson and Roman Coppola co-write, is not the director’s only film to appear in 2023; he’s also got the Roald Dahl adaptation The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar coming later this year. Asteroid City has a limited release on June 16th and will expand to more cities on June 23rd. Read the full article

#AsteroidCity #MargotRobbie #scarlettjohansson #scifi #wesanderson

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onenakedfarmer · 7 months

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Currently Watching

ASTEROID CITY Wes Anderson USA, 2023

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Jake Ryan, Scarlett Johansson, Grace Edward, Tilda Swinton, Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, Jeffrey Wright, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Liev Schreiber, Aristou Meehan, Ethan Josh Lee, Sophia Lillis, Tom Hanks, Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, Willan Faris, Deanna Dunagan, Margot Robbie, Jeff Goldblum, Adrian Brody, Willem Dafoe, Steve Carell

#watching #Wes Anderson #Jason Schwartzman #Scarlett Johansson #Tilda Swinton #Jeffrey Wright #Hope Davis #2023

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gabenvrhappened · 9 months

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MoviesOr... Asteroid City

Wes Anderson's aesthetic is all over social media nowadays, which is incredible. There's something about directors being able to create a signature look for their work that makes me appreciate what they do even more, even if I haven't watched their movies. Of course, that's not the case with Wes, since I've already watched two of adventures on the big screen: the great The Grand Budapest Hotel and the not-so-good Moonrise Kingdom.

With that, it's safe to assume I went to watch Asteroid City really excited, and I had three mainly reasons. First, this looks like his biggest aesthetic movie so far, as if he has taken it to the next level and embraced his genius and weirdness to the max, which is amazing. Second, Scarlett Johansson is in it, and I love her. Every movie she's in, I'll want to watch — using common sense, of course. Third, the miniatures are another signature of his work that is incredible and needs to be seen on a big screen.

The movie is great and confusing, in a not too complex. Mainly it tells the story of a father traveling with his three childrens to their grandfather's house after a serious event, when they end up strained on the desert where, not only a convention for young kids is happening, but also where a meteorite (or asteroid, if you prefer) once hit and made the place famous.

The meta-language of the movie, play, and reality is incredible, and I really liked seeing the story being told in acts (especially with one of them in black and white) since I'm a theatre kid myself. The downside is that, at least for me, I was always trying to make sense of what I was seeing with thoughts like, "Okay, in what reality of the movie is this happening again?" or "What does this mean with all the context I'm seeing so far?" which can distract you from paying attention to really understand the movie. And, inevitably, it's one of those that you feel like you will understand more if you watch it again, which is a concept I don't like. For me, you have to watch a movie again because you liked it, not because you didn't understand it.

Like Oppenheimer, this movie shocked me by having actresses I didn't know were in the movie, doing scenes I never thought I would see them doing. If in the nuclear physicist movie, Florence Pugh shocked me by being there and being naked — I haven't searched anything from that movie, including the cast, so her being in it was a surprise —, in Asteroid City, the nature of the shocking moments was the same, but divided: first, Scarlett being naked (speaking of it, I really gasped aloud thinking she had killed herself in that scene), and second, Margot Robbie's appearance. Now that was the crossover Oppenheimer needed.

Still speaking about casting, it was the best. It was nice to see again the faces Wes likes to work with, but the kids Anderson chose were the best possible, especially Aristou Meehan. He. Is. Incredible. Sophia Lillis was also a good choice, and I gasped when I realized it was her — she hasn't changed a bit since It. It was like she did that movie only yesterday. Crazy. I could go on and praise Woodrow's actor and his sisters, but then this review would be too long than it already is, but yes, they were great. The whole cast was perfect, which reminds me of Barbie, but for being completely opposite: the actor choices there weren't all that good.

And even with the spoiler of the movie having an alien right at the beginning because of the credits (remember, I don't like knowing too much about a movie and, ion fact, when I was in the theater last week, I covered my eyes and ears when the trailer for this was being shown. I know, I'm weird that way) and the confusion I felt here and there, I really enjoyed the experience of this movie; and I'm a bit preoccupied to admit it, so I left this for the last part, but the best thing about this whole thing was all the roadrunner's appearance. Ergh, such a show-stealing choice. What's up, Wes?

#MoviesOrGabeNeverHappened

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