Let Wes Cook! 'Asteroid City' Is Pure, Uncut Anderson
#230: "Asteroid City," "Extraction 2," "Y tu mamá también," "Murder at Yellowstone City"
Edition 230:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Wes Anderson has a new movie out starring literally every famous actor in Hollywood. Go see it, so you don’t have to stay home and watch Extraction 2 on Netflix. Of course, we’ve got our streamers, and then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Zendaya is starring in a tennis movie from Luca Guadagnino. I’m so in.
Asteroid City
Ask any average moviegoer to name all the directors he or she knows, and I’d be impressed if they can think of more than five. If you ask if they can describe the specific filmmaking style of any director, that list shortens to just one: Wes Anderson. Whether or not you’ve seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums or any of his other movies, you can identify his work almost instantaneously.
Anderson’s style — symmetrical framing, pastel colors, quirky or off-beat characters, dead pan delivery, intricate set design — is so iconic that it’s become a TikTok trend over the past few months (this despite the theory that TikTok-aged audiences don’t go to movies anymore!), and AI has even been able to transpose his style on everything from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings. It’s hard to imagine any other filmmaker getting the same treatment, simply because the tweens and software wouldn’t know what to spoof.
Asteroid City is the most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson movie to date, stacking artifice upon elaborate artifice from its base construction — a television special about a stage play presented as a Hollywood movie, set in a Roswell-esque desert town during the 1950s. Jason Schwartzman, nominally our protagonist, is himself an actor who here is playing an actor, playing a photographer, who in one scene is trying to be an actor.
The movie proceeds along these two paths, one a behind-the-scenes story of the creation of the play (in black and white) and the other the play itself — but don’t worry, this isn’t some reality-questioning mind-bender like Synecdoche, New York. Anderson’s “style” is about more than the way his frames look, of course. His doll house constructions (or in this case, Russian nesting doll) are embodied with a sort of juvenile spirit and simplicity.
This is where the common criticism of his movies being “twee” or “trite” comes from. The most ungenerous reading of Asteroid City, and his other less successful projects is that the fancy architecture disguises a rather simple, innocent, perhaps even substance-free center. This perspective would say the movie is amusement for amusement’s sake, even if the plot is a an incredible Rube Goldberg machine and interconnected pieces that’s a high wire balancing act to pull off.
I disagree. What’s incredible to me is that within many of his stories, the characters similarly employ precision or procedure to sort through their emotions. They do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, and come to their emotional reckonings slowly and reluctantly. This “over-intellectualization” is pure Wes, a guy who jam packs his movies full of dense references, like here to Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando and the Misner method and A Streetcar Named Desire and probably 20 other things I didn’t catch.
I think this makes the movies more rewarding upon close inspection and rewatch. You can be amused on the surface, and have to work a bit for the true payoff (the pretense that Wes Anderson movies are for people who are smart, or think they are smart, is resonant). When I see this movie again I’m sure I’ll better understand the melancholy at the heart of it, pondering the question of “is all of this worth it?”
Until then, it’s basically a Where’s Waldo of every famous actor in Hollywood. The cast list runs easily 30 names deep with A-list talent, including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, and the usual Anderson collaborators Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe et. all. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you basically everyone is in this movie, even just for three minutes. It’s wild.
Do I think this is one of Anderson’s very best works? Upon first viewing, I do not. But he’s made 11 movies and I can confidently report that every single one of them is at least “very good” to “great.”
He’s a master at work, and in the opinion of this newsletter, going out to see the new movies from our true masters is always good policy. Proceed accordingly.
Something New
Extraction 2 (Netflix): It’s pretty incredible the degree to which modern action movies now are just copying what videogames were doing 5-10 years ago. I talked about this phenomenon with John Wick 4, but the action set pieces in this Chris Hemsworth shoot-em-up gave me déjà vu from “Call of Duty” missions years ago they were so similar. I’m not really sure we need to see real life renderings of these moments (or in many cases, I should say, life-like CGI animations), but who am I to tell Netflix how to spend $100 million.
The action sequences are pretty cool here, as they need to be, because the handful of talking scenes stitching together the action are doomed from the start. Everyone is trying their best to make a story out of the globe-trotting nonsense, but I have a hard time believing anyone watching the movie really cares about the emotional ties holding together our characters before they begin punching, stabbing and shooting each other. The first movie worked well because it was so simple, and there wasn’t a need to connect a larger universe mythology to the whole thing (what I call “franchisitis”). This movie on the other hand feels burdensomely laborious and disappointingly familiar. Another big budget dud (creatively, that is) for Netflix’s film department.
Something Old
Y tu mamá también (2001): With the release this weekend of Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings, and the trailer for Challengers (see below), there’s been several references in the discourse to Alfonso Cuaron’s (Children of Men, Gravity, Roma) breakthrough feature. I’d never seen it, mostly due to its reputation as nothing more than a raunchy road trip movie about an older woman showing two boys “the ways of the world” (if you catch my drift). I wasn’t really prepared for something as profound and layered as this coming-of-age story about male friendship.
The kids, played by a young Diego Luna (“Andor”) and Gael García Bernal (Old), are at that stage of late adolescence where they become aware of the pending responsibilities of life and cling tightly to their last few days of carefree fun, luring a woman into a road trip across Mexico to a secret beach they entirely made up. A steady stream of new revelations plunge the story into deeper emotional territory, until by the end this very simple construction has taken on deep resonance. What an awesome movie, highly recommend (with a sticker warning for sexual content).
Something to Stream
Murder at Yellowstone City (Hulu): This micro-budget indie itself isn’t nearly as interesting as the story behind it. The producers bought some land in Montana and built an entire, to-scale western town with the hopes of luring future productions to the site (they’ve since gotten a Rolls Royce ad and a Nic Cage movie The Old Way). In that way, one can see how this movie is being used as an advertisement for the property — wide shots of the open vistas and interiors of a saloon, church, stable are frequent and enticing, even if they don’t always serve a story that is as cliché as the locations. A prospector finds gold then turns up murdered, and everyone blames the mysterious cowboy who just rode into town. But suspects include the sheriff, the preacher and the prostitute.
The reason to watch this movie is the surprisingly awesome cast inhabiting each of those archetypes. The “Old Spice Guy” Isaiah Mustafa is the cowboy; Gabriel Byrne is the sheriff; Thomas Jane (Boogie Nights, The Punisher) is the preacher; Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws) is the saloonkeeper; you’ll also recognize the faces of Zach McGowan and Anna Camp. The vibes are quite high even if the writing is suspect, to be enjoyed mostly by hardcore Western fans (who admittedly have been underserved recently). I can’t wait to see what some more ambitious filmmaker does with this Yellowstone Film Ranch in the future.
Trailer Watch: Challengers
If you had a chance to see Bones And All last year, which I really liked, or Call Me By Your Name a few years earlier, you know Luca Guadagnino’s talent for grimy, pulpy, sexy storytelling. Combine that with Zendaya, the ascendent No. 1 movie star of the young generation, and you automatically have something special. Setting this in the world of professional tennis is just an added bonus, where she plays a young tennis phenom flirting with a pair of up-and-coming male players, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (who was great in West Side Story!). It may be a little gnarly but I have extremely high hopes for this one.
“I’m taking such good care of my little white boys.” Iconic.