Live Watch: Asteroid City
Wes Anderson movies answer the question of what if you were trad but also not a loser and had talent
“This is so meta and gay” I thought before Ed Norton and Jason Schwartzman kissed on the lips. With no warning except for how their monotone delivery devoid of any emotion made me think “This is really gay, they should kiss”
We should normalize whiteface. Cause I get the desire to hire the best actor for the role. And to hire actors of color. But it’s often confusing to wonder if the actor is playing a role written for a white guy. Or if the movie lives in a universe where there' wasn’t racism in the 1950s.
The acting in this movie is distilled autism. Any emotion in any performance has been ruthlessly excluded. The DeNiro-esque fear of over acting leading to little more than rote recitations of lines is fully realized in this movie. Sad to see this dog shit being put out by Wes Anderson in an age where the only original projects being made require a big name behind them. And this is what we get.
This feel like if someone gave an AI a prompt to write a movie in the style of Wes Anderson. Rather than being a Wes Anderson movie
Adrien Brody has expressed the movie’s first emotion. It’s not much, but it’s at least recognizably human.
I get the sense that it’s so deeply personal that parts of it abandoned all artifice. But also parts heightened the artifice into the realm of pointlessness. Like I have the feeling that the Adrien Brody scene is a distillation of something that happened. But the instinct to make it into a self consciously “Wes Anderson” style resulted in a dry and monotone performance.
The movie almost more aspires to autism as a romanticized idea than is actually about it. Like it views itself as if everyone were Spock. When in fact Wes Anderson movies have always been about raging emotion hidden behind formality. Not dryness.
Don’t cast a kid so aggressively Jewish as an Episcopalian.
The sexual tension between Maya Hawke and cowboy guy is palpable. They just danced. But given this movie’s indulgence in subtext it wouldn’t be crazy for him to take her on the table in front of the children. Like I don’t expect it. But I bet there was a draft of the script with that in it.
Pretty obvious that the Jew playing the Episcopalian kid was about to make out with that actress who looks weird and kinda sexless.
I hate this movie. Is that Margo Robbie? It’d make sense in her theme of only making terrible movies.