Amazing visuals, lots of laughs and an A-list cast – including Bill Murray – make Anderson’s tribute to the New Yorker a real treat
No one is more spoofed than Wes Anderson: his savant mannerisms, sonorous voiceovers and detailed rectilinear compositions are now so familiar that certain quarters of YouTube have become overrun with Anderson pasticheurs, like Elvis impersonators in Vegas. And with this over-familiarity has come a bit of a backlash – a feeling that Wes Anderson is a tiresome undergraduate taste.
His new film, The French Dispatch, long delayed by Covid, has on the strength of the extensively picked-apart trailer, been condemned as more of the same. To which I can only say … sure, yes, more fun, more buoyancy, more elegance, more marvellously eccentric invention, more originality. It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat.
The French Dispatch is a riff on and tribute to the New Yorker magazine, with its legendary roster of writers, famed insistence on standards, collegiate office culture, distinctive cartoons and typographic layout, metropolitan sophistication targeted at a general American readership – in fact, I wonder why we haven’t noticed the New Yorker as an Anderson influence before now.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/36sZ4gp
