This Wes Anderson movie sweeps you along with its hodgepodge format of fun and cloaked statement. Yesterday, it won the Writers Guild Award’s top prize for its mad caper screenplay. ( My fav “Her” won last year.) On February the twenty-second, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” may just win Best Picture of the year. It has garnered nine other Oscar nominations!
Anderson is a Texan and a philosophy major who likes to create alternative realities that showcase ideas. It may be totalitarianism or pure serendipity. Much has been written about his use of repetition, inserts, certain camera shots and the color yellow. I feel akin to him because his favorite movie is “Rosemary’s Baby”,and he feels like I do that walking down any street in Paris is a movie. I find him like his movies: engaging, smart, open and fun.
Anderson is also imaginative in his introduction of large casts of characters. Viewers have fun with all the celebrity sightings. Here beyond the keenly-animated Raif Fiennes and incredible Tilda Swinton, try the magnificently voiced Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Adrian Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Owen Wilson as Chuck, a networking concierge of note.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is pretty pitch perfect. Anderson balances homage and irony,nostalgia and current debate with humor and panache. Did I spot an NRA critique from this Texan in the balcony shoot-out scene where everyone with a room had a gun firing away?!
I loved the narrative-story-telling beginning that draws the viewer in and the romantic verse that strings all the stories together.Mentoring a lobby boy becomes a deep life’s work. Hurrah for Gustave and Zero. Don’t miss this imaginative romp.
filmflamb 