Word: wes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wes Anderson has spent a decade as one of America’s most important filmmakers, and the better part of that same decade shaking the good will earned by the films that gave him his reputation. Anderson’s characters—idiosyncratic, often emotionally opaque and depressive—inhabit worlds whose visual splendor assumes the sentiment, both delicate and deliberate, of an auteur—his awareness of the history of cinema giving way to reverence and innovation in equal parts. His films identify with a generation still in turmoil over lost innocence and the transition...
Live actors in a Wes Anderson movie put on a sort of theater of artifice; faces become masks, from behind which the humanity of a character can either struggle or fail to emerge. Perhaps the greatest failure of “The Darjeeling Limited” was in reversing this formula instead of developing on it. But the utterly blank faces of Fox, his family, and friends—posturing, wry, flummoxed, or brooding countenances as they fit their respective characters—allow for development that’s left totally up to the script. Fox?...
...more specialized fare, Wes Anderson's stop-motion-animation delight Fantastic Mr. Fox, with George Clooney contributing his voice to the Roald Dahl children's classic, purloined a so-so $7 million in its first weekend of wide release; it earned about the same per-screen average as the much feebler animated feature Planet 51. The Road, with Viggo Mortensen enduring many a hardship in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, took in a sturdy $1.5 million at 111 theaters, to finish a mere $10,000 behind Clooney's 10th-place The Men Who Stare...
...hero is back to his dapper self in Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach and animated, in gloriously anachronistic stop-motion, by Mark Gustafson. In his corduroy suit, Mr. F. is a woodsy gentleman crook, a raffish Raffles specializing in chickens. When his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) becomes pregnant, Fox retires to write a newspaper column and help raise his underachieving son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Yet the artist in Fox yearns to pull off one last heist: raiding the farms of Franklin Bean (Michael Gambon) and two other big landowners...
...Director Wes Anderson was very easy to fall in love with. His debut film, Bottle Rocket (1996), starring his goofily charming friends the Wilson brothers, won him early cult status. Rushmore was built on a witty and distinctive voice, and Anderson's visual brilliance came into sharp focus with The Royal Tenenbaums, an elaborately wrapped present to a generation that wanted its own J.D. Salinger, one without the hermit-like lifestyle and creepy Joyce Maynard baggage. (See the Top 10 Troubled Genius films...