Wes Anderson

I went into the Wes Anderson unit not really knowing much about his films and not really wanting to know anything about them. I thought he was a bad director and there was no reason to watch his movies. I am happy to say that I have completely changed my mind (Klobs should be happy with that). I watched The Darjeeling Limited, a film about three brothers who meet in India on a train after they haven't spoken to each other in a long time. They are a strange lot, the three of them, summarized perfectly in this review. The author talks about the strangeness of the three brothers and about how they never seem to quite fit in the world they live in. Also the "principles" of the movie never seem to fit, making the film a very "irritating and inconsequential" movie. Because I can't seem to make this image appear in underneath these next sentences, the image I am talking about it at the top of the page. This, shot from the movie shows all three brothers and how out of place they look in their environment. It also shows the idealized India, made to look picture perfect when it is definitely not.

Wes Anderson does many of the same things throughout his movies. He will always create strange characters with personalities that are incredibly unique. It could be Dignan in Bottle Rocket or Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic or any of the three brothers in The Darjeeling Limited, not to mention most of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums, each person has such a unique personality that it leaves a lasting impression on your mind. Wes Anderson also uses these characters to fit his far out there plots and story lines, making the audience feel that the events that happen might have a change at being real. Anderson not only uses his characters to his advantage, but the way he uses sound (mainly music) and very intricate sets, makes him a master at his craft. I love the way that the sets in all of his movies are so very intricately created that they seem almost to over the top. And the way that he throws music in his films is masterful. All in all Wes Anderson has a very dry sense of humor (which I love) and he uses all of the elements of film to accent his dry humor. I now have a new found respect for Wes Anderson and the movies he makes

Call it...Friend-o

The Coen Brothers unit was by far my favorite one yet this year. I had never seen Fargo or Raising Arizona and I liked them both, even though the accents in Fargo were a bit much. The Coen Brothers do a lot of different things with their film making keeping the audience involved throughout the movie. One of my favorite things that the Coen Brothers did with their movies is the way that an "ultimate evil" was always portrayed in the movie. It took different forms in the movies, the big Swedish guy in Fargo, and Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but it was always present and was always a focal point of the movie. The Coen Bros. always seemed to play off of the fact that the main characters had to battle this "ultimate evil" and the struggle was shown throughout the movie. The way I see it is that the Coen Bros. are trying to show you the true side of life that no one looks at and the way that ordinary good people have to confront it. It makes the audience think about how they would confront such a evil if they were in the situation that the characters were in.

The Coen Brothers also loved to play off the accents that people have in the places that their movies were set. Who knows why the accents they use are so over exaggerated but I think it is because they make fun of the people that are in the movies. It gives them a flaw, humanizing them, even making them seem less likely to be in such extraordinary situations and excel, even though they do. Along with the accents the Coen Bros. used desolate settings in the movies they created. This gives the feeling of such and isolated, hopeless feeling that the movies sometimes feel doomed, or at least that's how I felt. All in all I liked the Coen Bros. movies and liked how they created their films too.