Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.) If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012
For many independent film directors, making commercials is just business. It’s a way to keep working, put a healthy sum of money in the bank — and, as likely very few people will know that they even directed the ad, it’s not something they need to worry about after the shoot wraps. Wes Anderson, however, is one of those rare directors whose commercials feel like a direct extension of his feature work. Anderson has been helming ads for a decade or so. His IKEA spots “Kitchen” and “Living Room” from 2003 — some of his earliest commercials — have a […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 17, 2012Not often does a director with an indie pedigree seamlessly segue into subject matter like… children’s literature. But in many ways Wes Anderson has been training for the moment to use his hyper-stylized, extremely detailed storytelling to make a film like Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on the Roald Dohl classic, Anderson (and co-writer, Noah Baumbach) use the book’s premise of a sly fox who outwits his farmer neighbors to steal their food to create a film that dazzles children and adults alike with it’s Andersonesque storytelling and stop-motion animation. When we meet Fox — voiced by George Clooney with motormouth […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Mar 23, 2010NICOLE KIDMAN IN DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH’S MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE. If you believe what you read, Noah Baumbach’s films — sharp, witty, poignant and sometimes devastating — are drawn directly from his life. The son of Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown and novelist and film critic Jonathan Baumbach, Baumbach debuted as a writer-director in 1995 with his acclaimed Kicking and Screaming, the first of a number of films made during his twenties about New Yorkers in their twenties. After his second film, Mr Jealousy (1997), Baumbach admits that he got “derailed” and ended up making Highball […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 16, 2007