Kicking off this week’s This Week in Posters and Stills, here’s the latest poster for Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film, directed by Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem, opening November 9th. If you weren’t already thrilled for this latest Bond movie… I doubt this poster is going to change your mind.
Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom opens May 25th and today four new charmingly glib featurettes are online, narrated by Bob Balaban (“Balaban” backwards is “Nabalab”). In each one, he introduces us to the Island of New Penzance (filmed in Rhode Island) and then shows some quick behind-the-scenes footage of each of the players — Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and the little wiener kids who play the Khaki Scouts. Mainly I’m posting it because it includes Shirtless Bill Murray holding a bottle of wine, and as you know, Shirtless Bill Murray is my spirit animal. Still, the rest of them are worth a watch, though I’ll admit, even as a Wes Anderson fan, the smoky French pop music was a little much. At the end of the last one, Wes Anderson even skips a rock across a pond for the kid actors. Sadly, he did not raise his hands above his head and shout “WHIMSY! I LIVE IT, MOTHERF*CKER!” Call it a missed opportunity.
You can whine about Wes Anderson being overly twee and precious all you want, if Ed Norton, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, and Harvey Keitel (you’re barely skating by, Schwartzman!) are all in a movie together, I’m seeing that movie, even if it’s a cripple snuff porn directed by Hitler. My smug liberal arts boner is all tumescent with soy chai for this one. I regret nothing. In the name of the father, the son, and shirtless Bill Murray holding an axe, amen.
Wes Anderson is so polarizing that even his fans (like me) will argue to the death amongst themselves over his best and worst movies (best: Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Fox; worst: Darjeeling, Bottle Rocket). One thing you can’t deny is that his movies all have a “look,” self-referential as that look may be. The poster for Moonrise Kingdom (full size below) has all the retro fuzzy Earth tones and yellow text we’ve come to associate with Wes Anderson projects, but without Futura text this time. Baby steps, I guess. Also, call me crazy, but it kind of reminds me of something Napoleon Dynamite would’ve had in his house.
Friday Free for All has increasingly fallen by the wayside as I get lazier and lazier on Friday afternoons, but I’m bringing it back, with another sweet supercut/mash-up/montage/whatever you want to call it. (A while back I think we decided “Clipzkrieg” was preferable to “Montage” because it sounds angry and German instead of nice and French, but I digress). Some internet genius (Slacktory, to be specific) has taken every slow-motion shot from Wes Anderson movies and set it to Ja Rule.
Wes Anderson is well-known for getting a lot of emotional mileage out of his slow-motion shots, usually set to classic Rolling Stones tunes or folky indie rock. It works, because it’s cheating. Slow-motion anything set to music always feels important and deep. It’s video editing 101. But here I’d always assumed that Wes Anderson movies were stealing the emotional power of the songs for the visuals. The interesting thing about this edit is that it shows that the reverse is also true: Bill Murray walking through a crowd of photographers with his kid on his shoulders in Life Aquatic actually makes Ja Rule’s music seem less shitty.
You can see the original Royal Tenenbaums scene below.
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