The first trailer for Are You Here, the first feature film directed by Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, was released earlier today. While apparently early reviews weren’t too great, Are You Here had me at Matthew Weiner. It also had me at Amy Poehler, Zach Galifianakis, and Owen Wilson.
The Grand Budapest Hotel constructs a European past that looks like a game of Candyland, yet feels like a very serious history lesson about events that never actually happened based on events that really did happen.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, the eighth feature film by the one and only Wes Anderson, is his most dense, elaborate, and cartoonish (even though he has made an animated film). It seems like the kind of film you get to make once you turn stories like Moonrise Kingdom into Oscar nominated hits.
At times, this film feels like Wes Anderson’s attempt to top his own whimsy. There are only a few moments that are annoyingly typical of him (oh look! a humorously disabled child!). However, I think it is better to invent your own clichés than to steal them from others. More importantly, he weaves those clichés he invented into gold. I mean, this is about a girl reading a book about an author telling a story about how a man told him a story. It turns out, F. Murray Abraham makes as good of a narrator as Alec Baldwin (in The Royal Tenenbaums) once did.