Asteroid City (2023)

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
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Looks like a parody.

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Used to really like Anderson's stuff, but his style is getting as formulaic and repetitive as a superhero movie.

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radewart wrote:
March 29th, 2023, 9:21 pm
Used to really like Anderson's stuff, but his style is getting as formulaic and repetitive as a superhero movie.
The problem with superhero movie is that too many of them don't have a distinctive style, so I really don't see how they can compare with Anderson's work.

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Masterpiece, as expected. Wes has really reached the height of his art.
While people focus on his visual style, his scripts have reached an amazing level of freedom. He can go anywhere, dare anything and it works.

To understand Wes' approach, I would point out that like in TFD, the most sincere scene is the one that is supposedly cut. In TFD, it was the meeting between Stephen Park and Jeffrey Wright, that Wright's character wanted to cut from the article, here it's when a character recite a scene from a play which was cut after the first rehersals.

Wes is afraid to be sincere, his characters are afraid of their emotions. Zero tries not to talk about his wife, Wright would rather talk about food than the loneliness of the immigrant, and here Augie would rather burn his hands than deal with his emotions.
Even more heartbreaking, a very secondary character yet one of the most moving of Wes' filmography, a young boy, would rather make his father mad and hurt himself than not have his father's attention, because of how lonely he feels.

There's some joy here and there, the happiest storyline would probably be Maya Hawke and Rupert Friend's one. Two characters old enough to not feel alone and odd with the world but young enough to not have suffered too deeply.

But in the end, even with tons of laughs, it's one of the saddest movie I've seen. And one of the most creative in its form too. And while again, Wes heavily underlines the structure as he always does, it is also a structure once again completely different from his previous films showcasing his creativity, that so many people fail to see when talking about his style as if it was always the same.

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Location: “Where are you?!” “HERE.”
This is lower tier Wes Anderson for me. MUCH prefer Fox, Moonrise, Dogs, Budapest etc.

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I liked it.

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