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Don't forget - 'Wez' signed that rapist release letter. Boycott the fox! Ok... honestly dude, there is thousands other reason to boycott his films, like, you know: Proudly made for douche bag hipsters.

hmm, i'm a fan of wes flicks. so i'm a 'douche bag hipster'?

(maybe you should go watch 'trannies deux' - proudly made for silly boys - and get that fragile male ego stroked by m-bay)

Are you drunk Dave? You're slurring your words.

"The event of this all has been pleasant indeed. "

to be fair, JBD, DP did say "smarter writing to come..." ;-)

Promises, promises...

Went to the Liecester Square Rocky Horror Picture Show back in '92. When Riff opened the coffin at the beginning of Time Warp, somebody yelled out: "Hey, Riff, show us Robert Maxwell's skeleton!"

Have no idea what the truth is about "Wez" and his non-directing of Mr. Fox.

I know I think he is pretentious.

I know I do not like any of his films.

I know he seems more and more irrelevant everyday.

If he really did not come on set for the duration of the shoot he should not get a directing credit. You can't get a directing credit based on what you want to do. It has to be based on what you actually do.

It would be like giving a Nobel Prize to a med student who wanted to cure cancer but had not done any research yet. And we all know the fine folks at Nobel would not do anything like that.

Haven't seen it, don't know if it's good. But a director's job, particularly on an animated film, is to supervise a bunch of different departments, not to manipulate the puppets and paint the backdrops himself. What's the rumpus?

How can you not like BOTTLE ROCKET or RUSHMORE? Or TENENBAUMS? The others, yeah, I can see it. But those movies are amazing.

And pretentious has been invalidated as a criticism. It's a multisyllabic word used to hide someone's inability to describe something.

I love Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and like his other films. My biggest hesitation for Mr. Fox is the seemingly primitive stop-motion. It looks so choppy that its distracting.

DP, can you address this?

Ahh inane political resentment and whining. Is there anywhere on the internet I can escape you?

"Pretentious" just seems like the wrong word to describe Anderson, no matter what you think of his movies or what you think of using the word in general (I agree, Nordling, it's often used as a catch-all, but if applied sparing its meaning could be recovered). I've never understood how worked up some people get about Anderson being self-indulgent or pretentious or any of that, because his movies are so damn funny. Even if you think Life Aquatic is twee as fuck (and I don't, considering the level of violence and how unlikable Zissou is for most of the movie), I dunno, it works pretty damn well as an irreverent comedy. I think of "pretentious" things as being a bit more self-serious than the fun I have at Anderson's movies.

I do think Anderson should cool it with the "moving death in the last half-hour" plot turn. Tenenbaums (my favorite of his and one of my personal favorites ever), Aquatic, and Darjeeling, all pull this, and while I really like all of those movies and would say that they find different ways to use that death, he's in danger of turning it into formula, sort of like how shocking death of a totally innocent and likable character became a Joss Whedon trademark and then sort of a tic. But unless he's made some radical changes to Fantastic Mr. Fox (or if I'm not remembering the book clearly enough), that shouldn't be a problem here.

I think "precious" is probably a more precise word to describe what bothers people about Wes Anderson's style. I've never found too much pretense in his work, perhaps except in Darjeeling Limited, although I was bored by it and thus don't remember it too well.

I adore Rushmore and Tenenbaums, but started getting tired around the time of Life Aquatic. Anderson himself probably isn't entirely to blame for that, as his style is easily and often imitated by lesser filmmakers. But there's also a bit of smugness in a filmmaker using such an affected style again and again without really pushing himself in any way. It just seems like he finds it so much more entertaining than I do. (What's strange is that I never get this sense out of other auteuristic comedic filmmakers, e.g. the Coens.)

A real departure from his own past is just what he needs, and in theory an animated feature is just that. Not sure yet if it's departure enough, but I'll gladly see it and hope for the best.

What an awful filter you have for viewing the world Nicol. You were objectively incorrect about HAROLD AND MAUDE'S continued popularity into the 21st century and then you throw out a lame "Wez iz pretentiouz" bon mot along with a wholly unrelated Obama Nobel jab. You might have a career at FOX!

Anderson has just enough Texas in him to keep his feet on the ground. Watch BOTTLE ROCKET and tell me what's high-falutin' about Dignan. Good Grief.

At the University of Houston, Edward Albee teaches playwriting, and I teach social aspects of film. Really, could students ask for anything more for their tuition dollar?

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/6660223.html

"I teach social aspects of film." I'm curious what that means, Joe. Do you look at how film reflects social issues? How it influences social issues? Something else?

Blackcloud: A little bit of both, actually. The name of the course is, quite literally, Social Aspects of Film. Sometimes, I focus on war films, from Shoulder Arms to Three Kings. Currently, as I state in the syllabus, the course is designed as a "study of films made and released during the 1967-80 'New Hollywood' period, with emphasis on how these films reflected, and were affected by, social, political and financial upheavals of the period."

Yeah, "pretentious" isn't the right word for Wes Anderson. I sorta hate Rushmore, but love Royal Tenenbaums. Ambivalent to Life Aquatic and was surprised by how much I enjoyed Darjeeling. Haven't seen Bottle Rocket. I'm all over the place when comes to Anderson.

'Precious' is accurate as a descriptor. 'Pretentious' is in the mind's eye. I could call Michael Bay pretentious even though he doesn't have an intellectual bone in his body.

Nicol, is there anything you don't have a strongly inflected ideological opinion on?

Anderson is definitely too precious and twee, and he's pretty much gotten old now. Wilson's death at the end of Life Aquatic was sort of the turning point for me on him.

I don't see how anyone could say Anderson didn't direct the movie when it sounds like he was giving constant emails on details and even making those movies showing exactly how a character should move. He dictated the style and character design pretty specifically in what he wanted. While if I were directing a movie I'd show up on set from time to time, it doesn't seem like absolutely necessary in that case.

Maybe Nicol would have been there looking over the animator's shoulder, showing them frame by frame the body positions of a character, but Anderson got the job done.

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