Asteroid City (2023)

Direction: Wes Anderson
Country: USA 

Directed by Wes Anderson, Asteroid City blends romance, sci-fi, western, and comedy in an offbeat manner, but stumbles on a few metaphysical questions - death, human existence, the extraterrestrial - that leave us adrift. The bits and pieces of this uninspired chamber film are choppily assembled, with clumsy dialogue serving as a makeshift bridge for passionless scenes fabricated with an enforced mood and drowsy vibes. Here, everything is artificial, including the scenario. 

Anderson and his regular collaborator, the screenwriter Roman Copolla, worked together for the fifth time, drawing inspiration from films by Robert Altman, John Sturges and Paul Newman. The year is 1955. Days after the death of his wife, the confident photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) begins a romance with the unenthusiastic actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). He doesn’t get along with his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), and is proud of his shy little genius son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a Junior Stargazer winner. All these and other characters, along with all their moves, are products of the mind of Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a renowned playwright.

With a convoluted scrip, fatuous characters, and obtuse comedic tones trailing off into alien-invasion nonsense, no dream cast could succeed in turning this fabrication into a hip and funny cinematic experience. Both its surface and essence are phony but, worse than that, is the movie’s inability to offer any insight about anything. Asteroid City is equal parts tackiness and boredom. As a result, I urge you to avoid being quarantined by this desert of ideas.

The French Dispatch (2021)

Direction: Wes Anderson
Country: USA

The cinematic world of Wes Anderson remains fascinating, abundant in detail and eccentrically rich. All of these factors contribute to make The French Dispatch, a literary avant-garde anthology comedy whose skillfully constructed stories form a love letter to journalists, one of his best film in recent years. 

From an insane cast to a spectacular staging and dynamic backgrounds, Anderson gives us a slice of journalistic life of other times with his peculiar comic touch. It’s a keenly affecting and visually ravishing homage to the weekly American magazine The New Yorker, in particular to its co-founder and lifelong editor-in-chief Harold Ross and the journalists that followed him.

The film is structured with four stories, the first of them linking to the other three via Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), an indefatigable editor-in-chief who gathered a group of expatriate journalists to bring news from the fictional French metropolis Ennui-sur-Blasé to Kansas via The French Dispatch, the magazine he founded when he was a college freshman. Each of the other three stories feature a journalist and one of his/her highlighted article.

The first of these, an unhinged account about a genius painter and dangerous psychotic inmate (Benicio Del Toro) who uses a sculptural female guard (Léa Seydoux) as his artistic muse, is narrated by writer J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) during a talk. The painter is made famous by another inmate (Adrien Brody) with an eye for the modern art business.

Simultaneously romantic and tragic, the following story connects the respected journalist Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) to a revolutionary student (Timothée Chalamet), while the last article is described by the reporter Rombuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) during a TV interview. It features an animated sequence as climax and involves two policemen - a lieutenant/chef (Stephen Park) and a commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) whose son is kidnapped.

Curiously, the antique visuals lead to a contemporary greatness, and Anderson’s filmmaking accuracy leads to a charming film that works pretty well in French and English.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Directed by Wes Anderson
Country: USA / Germany

Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion animation film is a kitschy Japanese canine adventure with a cool posture and deadpan humor. The celebrated filmmaker, author of cult comedies such as “Rushmore”, “The Royal Tenenbaums”, “Moonrise Kingdom”, and “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, co-penned the story with regular partners Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, but this time also counted on Kunichi Nomura in the script and voice. Besides the latter, the ensemble voice cast includes Courtney B. Vance (narrator), Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, Harvey Keitel, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Yoko Ono, and many more.

The story is set in Megasaki City, where the authoritarian mayor Kobayashi (Nomura) orders the capture and extradition of every single dog to Trash Island after a mysterious dog-flu outbreak. The smelly dogs have to fight each other to impede starvation on a filthy island that is merely a pile of garbage filled with chemicals, toxic waste, and hundreds of rats looking for food.

Spots (Liev Schreiber), the faithful dog of Atari Kobayashi (Royu Rankin), the mayor’s 12-year-old nephew, is the first dog officially deported from the city. The brave Atari flies to the island to retrieve him. His plane crashes, but he is rescued by a pack of five dogs led by Chief (Cranston), a stray that never sits or fetches and usually bites the humans who try to pet him. Against the odds, man and dog embark on a frenzied adventure threaten by Kobayashi’s robotic dog-machines and the uncorroborated presence of wild aboriginal cannibal dogs.

In the meantime, Dr. Watanabe (Akira Ito), the one who invented the dog-flu serum is assassinated in a conspiracy theory unmasked by American exchange student Tracy Walker (Gerwig).

Delightfully atypical, and conveying a deliberated laid-back narration filled with a bunch of political metaphors, “Isle of Dogs” disconcerts with a decaying spectacle of images that, even not so colorful or stunning, go well with the impeccably stylized, surrealistic atmosphere. Just like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”, this is another funny, clever, and imaginative animated fable.