BEFORE: Out late again last night, working at a little cobbled-together film festival - a rather unique event, it seems somebody was running some kind of scam festival, I don't know all the details but entry fees were collected, a screening was arranged and then the organizer started hitting the filmmakers up for money, forcing them to buy blocks of tickets or else their films would be cut from the program. Threats were made, harsh e-mails were exchanged, and then the filmmakers got together and arranged their own screening, cutting the organizer out of the picture. I only learned of this after the fact, so my information is all second-hand, but it felt good to work on the event knowing that it was done grass-roots style to fulfill the promise that the original organizer maybe had no intention of fulfilling. Hey, I'm glad the films got screened, also that I got paid for my time, there are no guarantees in life, especially when dishonest people are involved. It just reminded me of the documentary "Narrowsburg", and some of the filmmakers were shocked to find out that this sort of thing has happened before, and probably will happen again. How easy is it to create a bogus festival, get a listing on FilmFreeway, charge a lot of people entry fees, and then just NOT put the screening together and pocket the money? This is why we all have to band together and call out people for their B.S.
Bill Murray carries over one more time from "The Saint of Second Chances" and now he's tied with Jamie Lee Curtis and Idris Elba. That seems about right.
THE PLOT: Wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda appoints his only daughter, a nun, as sole heir to his estate. As Korda embarks on a new enterprise, they become the target of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists and determined assassins.
AFTER: Bill Murray plays God in this film - well, at least Wes Anderson got that right. If Bill Murray isn't your God or at least your spirit animal, then what exactly are you doing with your life? We should all be the sort of enigmatic, nomadic, carefree bon vivant that Bill Murray represents, somebody who can fit in just as well at a college dorm party as he would at a fancy wedding, and be funny and entertaining and not give a damn about what anybody thinks of him. He works when he wants to work, and travels when he wants to travel and everybody else can really go and take a flying fuck at a rolling donut if he's not their cup of tea.
I've become a big Wes Anderson fan, and I programmed this one with great antici...pation, but I just don't know if it lives up to the hype I may have inadvertently created for it. It's just not as BUSY as "Grand Budapest Hotel", and it doesn't feel as meaningful on a personal level as, say, "Moonrise Kingdom", so what gives, it is me or Wes that's the problem here? First off, there almost zero story here, and that's on Wes, not me. He based the main character on his own now-late father-in-law, Fouad Malouf, a Lebanese engineer. He considered that man to be wise and larger-than-life, but full of various business plans and he had his files and memories organized in shoeboxes near the end of his life. I do kind of the same thing, but with receipts for tax returns. But the business plan here is really just an attempt for Zsa-zsa to get closer to his daughter, perhaps. This whole father-daughter thing kind of carries over from "The Saint of Second Chances", maybe.
But is there any THERE there? What, exactly, is the Phoenician Scheme? Like I watched the whole film and I can't even tell you what that was about. Zsa-zsa Korda had to travel from the U.S. West Coast to France, back to the U.S. East Coast - and he doesn't even have a passport, mind you, how the hell does THAT work - and at each stop he meets with his investors and drops the bombshell that he has to alter their contract, those investors have to start contributing more to make up for some kind of budget shortfall, which is caused by a bunch of government agents who are intentionally driving up the cost of building materials in order to drive him out of business.
In the meantime, people are constantly trying to assassinate Korda, and the easiest way to do that is to shoot down his plane or put a bomb on it, I think he survives like THREE plane crashes in this film, and each time he has a vision of the afterlife, in which, as stated before, Bill Murray plays God, as it should be. Korda is very hard to kill, it turns out, he even takes a bullet meant for his investor in Marseilles, and really, they just have to pluck the bullet right out, like it wasn't even a thang. Korda and his daughter (and his son's tutor) get rescued from the jungle where a plane crashed, but they get rescued by militants that tried to rob the casino in France, who just bring them back home, which is mighty convenient.
Then Korda travels to meet his second cousin, Hilda, and he offers to marry her, and she accepts but also refuses to increase her investment in the Phoenician Scheme, whatever that is. Finally, with nowhere else to turn, Korda is forced to meet with his half-brother, Nubar, who might be responsible for the death of Korda's first wife or something, and Nubar denies being the biological father of Korda's daughter, which I guess is something, but he's still not a very nice guy. He might even be the one sending all those assassins to kill Korda, but how can we be sure? Korda has a change of heart and offers to pay his slaves, cover the budget shortfall himself, and present his scheme to his investors as the Desert Oasis Palace hotel, only to have the whole thing disrupted by another battle with his half-brother. Is that right? This was very, very hard to follow.
Well, if Korda is really Wes Anderson's father-in-law, then I guess that means that Anderson himself is represented by the character played by Michael Cera, who has feelings for Korda's daughter. If I read between the lines a bit, that means that Anderson views himself as part-secret agent and part insect expert. Yeah, sure, that kind of tracks, I've long imagined that Anderson lives in a birdhouse and composes folk music in his spare time when he's not directing films and admiring symmetrical things.
With each film it feels like Wes Anderson's films have become more intricate, more interwoven and complicated, however it seems to have reached the point where they are also in danger of becoming incoherent. If you look back on, say "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Darjeeling Limited", yes, they're quirky and oddly beautiful but to my point, I care about those characters. I want them to do well, even if they're all sort of disconnected and self-obsessed. Then sometime after "Moonrise Kingdom" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" it began to feel like maybe the art direction was driving the bus, rather than the story. By the time we get to "Isle of Dogs" you can really see that the narrative has taken a back-seat to the eye candy, how it looks has become much more important than whether it all makes sense. I simply loved "The French Dispatch", even though it was a complicated set of (sometimes very) short pieces. But now I think we've reached the point where it's all quite lovely to look at, but what is it all about? What does it MEAN, if anything? Possibly nothing. "Asteroid City" - again very complicated and it looks great, but I had no idea which half of the story was "real" and which part was the "fantasy", or were they both a little bit of both?
OK, this is done, now I need a new goal - beyond "Spinal Tap II", which I think is going to be easily worked into the Doc Block, even though it's a Mock Doc. What about "Wake Up, Dead Man"? I did get a very good recommendation from my BFF, so perhaps I should try to link to that one ASAP. In fact I could go straight there from here via Jeffrey Wright, or I could go to "Freaky Tales" via Tom Hanks - hell, from here I could go just about anywhere, it's one of those giant holes at the center of the map, like in "Time Bandits". But I have a plan for January already in place, one that's going to get me to the romance films exactly on time, so I kind of have to stick with that. Maybe one year I should just do the whole 300 films one step at a time instead of 30 at a time - life on the edge, I wonder what that feels like. OK, so the two new goals for the year are to work in "Wake Up, Dead Man" in April and "Spinal Tap II" in June or July. Not much of a plan, but it feels do-able.
Directed by Wes Anderson (director of "Asteroid City" and "The French Dispatch")
Also starring Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "Reptile"), Mia Threapleton (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Riz Ahmed (last heard in "Nimona"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "Here"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Get a Job"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "Sound of Metal"), Richard Ayoade (last seen in "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More"), Benedict Cumberbatch (ditto), Rupert Friend (ditto), Benoit Herlin (ditto), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "Rustin"), Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Nosferatu"), F. Murray Abraham (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Steve Park (last seen in "Death of a Unicorn"), Alex Jennings (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Jason Watkins (last seen in "Hampstead"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Karl Markovics (last seen in "Resistance"), Tonio Arango, Stephane Bak, Aysha Joy Samuel, Truman Hanks, Carmen-Maja Antoni, Mattia Moreno Leonidas, Alexandra Wysoczanska, Shabram Kohestani, Thuli Wolf, Jenny Behnke, Luisa Steinmann, Yekta Arman, Giuseppe O'Bruadair, Sanjay Hari, Alexander Kuhne, Young-sam Kim, Andreas Krafft, Faysal Omer, Werner Ort, Alexander Yassin, Hans Carl von Werthern Harry Wiggins, Simon Weisse, Matthew Jordan, Sönke Möhring, Max Mauff, Philipp Droste, Merlin Sandmeyer, Edward Hyland, Kit Rakusen (last seen in "Belfast"), Milo James (last seen in "The Boys in the Boat"), Ogden Dawson, Hector Bateman-Harden (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Benjamin Lake, Gunes Taner, Gabriel Ryan (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Antonia Desplat (ditto), Mohamad Momo Ramadan, Jonathan Wirtz, Sabine Hollweck, Daniel Steiner (last seen in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), Jaime Ferkic, Antonia Schröter, Beatrice Campbell, Freya Feyrouz, Mardini Abdulaziz, Johannes Krisch (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness")
RATING: 4 out of 10 bashable rivets (and giving this score, pains me, it really does)
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