The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has bowed to reviews that link the occasionally staggering scale of its production design to the director’s meticulously ordered stop-motion film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Certainly the two stand as the most thoroughly crafted works in the oeuvre of a man whose trademark is his fussy attention to detail; in The Grand Budapest Hotel, hotel lobbies, prisons, even Alpine monasteries are created in such lavishly minute precision that the logistics of each impeccably straightened sign, every spotless carpet threaten to divert all attention away from the narrative at hand. In execution, however, the film belongs more with its immediate predecessor, Moonrise Kingdom, as both an unmistakable continuation of its maker’s singular style and an increasingly sophisticated breakdown of it.

From a narrative standpoint, no Wes Anderson film has ever been this convoluted. Typically, the director’s films spend more time merely introducing the characters and their strictly regimented habits than they do detailing what those people get up to. That is not to say that there is not conflict or drive in Anderson’s movies, but that said conflict typically arises from the intrusion of reality and lived, experienced wisdom upon the myopic headspace of stunted wunderkinder, a forceful denial and eventual acceptance of how ignorant these self-perceived geniuses truly are. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films in which the outside sources of awakening do not come as a natural course of maturation but from the direct imposition of actively hostile forces. Set primarily during WWII, the film presents a series of nested narratives involving characters whose pluck, intelligence and wit is slowly revealed to be utterly inadequate a defense against forces hellbent on eradicating the old way of things. Anderson routinely presents a sense of style and fashion far removed from the present; The Grand Budapest Hotel hones in on the last moment such modes were considered contemporary and proper before being violently stomped out.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

The opening shots of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris show the titular city from the perspective of a tourist, focusing on landmarks as tour groups walk and ride ferries around town. Occasionally, he spares brief glimpses of back alleys occupied by locals who know how to avoid the shuffling guests. Meanwhile, Allen lays French-flavored jazz, a Parisien take on American music, over such shots. He even literalizes the other part of the title by spreading the montage over the course of a day from sunrise to starless night, watching the blossom of the City of Light as dim interior lights grow into the full dazzle of Paris after dark. Despite the simplicity of Allen's static montage, he conveys a number of important ideas with the first moments: we do not see the Paris of those who live there but of tourists who visit it, and the sight of centuries-old landmarks looming over modern urban bustle shows the past mingling with the present.

That juxtaposition magnifies as Allen follows Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful hack screenwriter who looks to Paris for inspiration for his novel. Drunkenly wandering Paris one night while his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) dances with friends, Gil suddenly finds himself sucked into an old car after midnight, ending up amongst flappers, ex-pats and, most importantly, a host of legendary artists who dwelt in the city in the 1920s.

The Darjeeling Limited (& Hotel Chevalier)

In his video essay for the film, critic Matt Zoller Seitz calls The Darjeeling Limited "Wes Anderson's 2001." It is an apt description: like Kubrick's space odyssey, Anderson's spiritual journey not only displays but summarizes all his themes, styles and motifs. Furthermore, much of Anderson's movie visually recollects Kubrick's magnum opus, particularly in its use of wide-lens framing of confined areas, epic composition that makes characters small and meaningless within the sets than contain them. However, that space is a double-edged sword, as the lens is so wide that it captures the edges of the sets: in pulling back to minimize the power of the individual, the camera also sets down the dimensions of the rooms and corridors. These areas are big enough to dwarf a person, yet because we can see their ends, we know they cannot support free-roaming human life.


All of Anderson's films operate in this mode, of course, but this is the first one to think of the world outside luxurious but lived-in hotel rooms and train cabins. The compartmentalized, ultra-detailed set design that makes all of his films resemble immaculate dollhouses is suddenly thrown against the real world. What's more, it's a world opposite to his Western, privileged settings. The Darjeeling Limited, and its short-film prologue, Hotel Chevalier, represent Anderson's first attempt to take his theatrical and literary characters off the stage and page and into something grander. Unsurprisingly, where previous films owed stylistic ties to theatre (Rushmore) and literature (The Royal Tenenbaums), The Darjeeling Limited must directly invoke the cinema, and not in the "movie about movies" manner of The Life Aquatic.

Predators

Predators is a movie about a group of savage but highly evolved alien warriors who hunt people for sport by boring their targets with constant inactivity until they eventually stand unafraid before the monsters and their energy cannons just to spice things up a bit. Its most unexpected moment involves the sudden blaring of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" over the credits, the first thrilling bit since the opening. That this nevertheless stands as a marked improvement over the last two films to feature the fierce hunters is a source of deep depression.

The original Predator, the events of which are referenced at one point by, for some incredible strange reason, an IDF soldier, does not deserve the reputation it enjoys today, but it was still an airtight sci-fi thriller that maintained a steady suspense until it finally broke down into pure '80s carnage. Predators, previously one of Robert Rodriguez's endless list of upcoming projects that he ultimately turned over Nimród "Too Easy" Antal, attempts to follow this format, gathering a group of professional killers to fend off the attacks of genetically and technologically superior creatures. But it never achieves the same stupidity of the first film, and thus it never approaches that movie's simple brilliance.

The first 20 minutes or so of Predators, however, make up the most skillfully arranged section of any action film yet released this summer. Its opening few minutes alone masterfully drop us in the middle of a tense situation, showing Adrien Brody plummeting through the sky in its first shot as he stirs from unconsciousness and notices that he's 30,000 feet above a jungle with a chute that doesn't open. After fumbling with the chute for what seems like hours, he finally managed to open it, only to crash into the ground as the frame smash-cuts to the title card. So invigorating and pulse-pounding is this opening that you push out of mind the question of why Predators would go to the trouble of teleporting people onto their game preserve planet to hunt them, and then not bother to give them a decent parachute (and why does the parachute need to be activated electronically when a ripcord is far more efficient and trustworthy a system?).

Brody's character, a mercenary left unnamed until the end, discovers that others are falling from the sky with the same faulty chutes: there's an IDF sniper, Isabelle (Alice Braga); Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov), a Spetsnaz commando sporting a minigun; a Mexican cartel enforcer (Danny Trejo); an RUF officer (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali); a death row inmate (the always great Walton Goggins); a member of the Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien); and Topher Grace. They are representative of the deadliest humanity has to offer, and Topher Grace is there too.

The initial distrust between these trained killers (and Topher Grace) creates a rich bedrock for the coming hunt, sowing seeds of individualism that will get people killed in short order. Even when the characters reach a hill and notice giant moons looming in the sky, finally figuring out the situation, these people do not band together closely to ensure their survival. The greatest enemy of any monster movie is always the infighting among survivors, and I hoped that Predators would build on this idea.

Sadly, Antal wastes this atmosphere, and Predators quickly devolves into a plodding hike across an alien jungle, broken up by the sporadic attack of the titular aliens, who bring creatures to this planet to make themselves better hunters, yet man cannot truly be called the most dangerous game if a being superior in every fashion is the one hunting. How difficult is it to kill a man when you have acute senses, active camouflage and energy weapons? But even the invisibility does not lend itself to an air of sustained tension.

Instead, characters sit around waiting for attacks to come, which could be suspenseful if they did not spend so much time anticipating raids that lack any hint of surprise and are themselves unexciting. The killers (and Topher Grace) spend so much time walking around yet the film does not even do us the courtesy of setting up numerous setpieces in which big action scenes can occur. Everything looks the same, save for a sequence inside an abandoned drilling station, and by the end of the first hour I decided I'd rather see the forced construction of action stunts than this endless meandering.

To their credit, Antal and Rodriguez, who stayed on the project as a producer, want to return the alien characters to their roots, scrubbing away memories of the cartoonish versions seen in the Alien vs. Predator films. But they've also sapped the menace out the Predators. Now they're just meant to be feared because of their size. They become better hunters with each season, refining techniques that work and adapting ones that fail, yet these hunters succumb easily to the slightest tricks. When the Yakuza uncovers evidence that the Predators' habit of bringing humans to the planet stretches back centuries, the revelation begs the question: how inept were these things hundreds of years ago? No wonder these dangerous people (and Topher Grace) react with minimal fear when confronted with a Predator; it's a small miracle one of the creatures doesn't shoot itself in the foot.

Thankfully, a few performances enliven the material. Brody's "Batman" voice amuses greatly, but he still has a mysterious gravitas to him that he's always had and I've never been able to explain or fully comprehend. But the most entertaining of the group is certainly Goggins, who plays the inmate with just the right mixture of arrogance, filth and underlying cowardice. Goggins' high forehead and his wild eyes make for great dark comedy in themselves, and the insights he gives to the true pig beneath the wisecracking comic relief actually makes the character even funnier, making Topher Grace's presence even more pointless. Best of all is Laurence Fishburne, who channels Colonel Kurtz as an Air Cavalry soldier who's managed to survive on the planet for 10 hunting seasons, but at the expense of sanity and humanity. He is every bit the one madman who brings destruction upon the survivors, and the filmmakers' failure to channel Fishburne's unsettling tics, whispers, and conversations with imaginary partners marks the greatest misstep in the movie.

Everything else has the feel of mediocrity. Antal appears to be less concerned with putting forward an auterial aesthetic and instead delivering a serviceable blockbuster, but this admirable intent leads to awkward execution, with so little standing out in the endless trek through the trees. So many moments intended to carry weight fall completely flat: Brody's character finally saying his name, a perfunctory speech about how men are the true monsters, the revelation of why Grace's character is in the movie at all (which will go down as one of the most stupefyingly useless and jejune twists in recent years), these bits thud into the ground like malfunctioning bombs, smacking into the mud with a great whomp.

To be perfectly honest, of the two warring space creatures who occasionally stoop to killing humans, I'd much rather see the reputation of the xenomorphs from the Alien saga repaired. Far more interesting creatures (and the subject of two certifiably great films), the xenomorphs still have potential, visible even in the final two installments of the series proper, both marred by studio tampering and conflicting visions. But I went into the theater hoping, in opposition to my frothing rage over 2010's '80s obsession, that the creative team could revive an entertaining piece of action cinema. Instead, I got one of those episodes of Lost where all anyone did was walk to a place that would be eventually important, and just like the show, Predators ends at the moment where it just might become intriguing. By that point, I'd already scrapped writing notes in favor of simply forming a checklist, ticking off the inevitable as, one-by-one, the Predators got to the killers. And Topher Grace.

The Brothers Bloom

It's perfectly possible that The Brothers Bloom, despite its erroneous title -- one of the brothers is named Bloom, and neither seems to have it as a surname -- is a work of top-to-bottom genius. Meticulously crafted and highly stylized, the film is a labyrinth worthy of Escher, twisting and turning until it reaches the end and refolding upon itself to start anew. If the point of a con-man movie is to keep the audience guessing, then I suppose it succeeds wildly.

With only one prior film under his belt, director Rian Johnson certainly hasn't wasted time in establishing a distinctive visual flair: his Brick -- a film I once watched but was too distracted to follow properly -- has a reputation for visual acuity, and those I know who have watched it studiously assure me that its use of pitch-black noir in a high school setting is interesting and engaging. I shall return to it someday (soon, I hope), but for now let us focus on his latest feature, the con caper The Brothers Bloom.

Bloom's titular brothers have been running scams since childhood. Stephen (played in adulthood by Mark Ruffalo), planned the schemes, invented the characters and wrote the scripts, while little brother Bloom (Adrien Brody) did what was asked of him. Before they even hit puberty, they can run advanced cons: Stephen tells their schoolmates of a fairy in a cave and collects $30 from the other kids to reveal the location. When the parents come to collect their children's money, however, the narrator informs us that the real payoff came from the local cleaners who washed all those kids' muddied clothes.

25 years later, Bloom is 35 and at last fed-up with playing second fiddle to his brother's whims. He agrees to help Stephen for, yes, one last job, though he does not do so immediately, presumably just so the crew could visit Montenegro. Stephen's mark is Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a gorgeous heiress isolated from the world due to misdiagnosed allergies in her youth and the burden of caring for dying loved ones in early adulthood.

From here the plot slowly begins to corkscrew. After they ingratiate themselves to Penelope -- albeit not entirely according to plan -- Bloom, Stephen and Stephen's girlfriend/explosives expert Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, who may or may not have a "no speaking" clause in her contracts for Western films) "reveal" themselves to be art smugglers, aware that the reclusive Penelope will be intrigued enough to follow them around.

There's always a danger when you can see actors having fun with their roles; occasionally the sense of fun can add to a film's sense of whimsy, but if we're meant to take the story seriously it can break the audience's connection to the narrative. Despite the lightweight feel of The Brothers Bloom, it's trying to work as a complex caper, yet the glee evident on the actors' faces is a delight. Ruffalo is terrific as the rakish confidence man, almost always unflappable even when plans go so wrong as a miniature diversion inadvertently blows out the wall of a basilica (well, he at least places his face in his palm on that one). Brody is an underrated straight man, and he's the closest thing the film has to a believable character. By far the most interesting, however, is Weisz: Penelope comes alive with the gang, and she proves a capable companion. In the film's best scene, she infiltrates that basilica that accidentally blew up, and when the chief of police captures her on the way out with a stolen book she manages to convince him to let her go (she even keeps the prize). When she discovers the truth of her new friends' intentions, the look of confusion morphing into pain, balanced with a slight willingness to overlook this betrayal to keep her buddies, is heartbreaking.

These actors are so interesting, in fact, that they manage to keep up interest long after the plot loses all grasp on self-control. Johnson crams every twist he possibly can into two hours, yet he has a shoddy feel for pacing. The Brothers Bloom moves it fits and spurts, lingering in some areas so Johnson can waste our time with beautiful yet arbitrary and ancillary shots of the surrounding area -- admittedly, one must admire how he visited all these gorgeous locations and kept the budget at $20 million. Then, we he hits upon a section of the story that deserves closer attention, Johnson leaps ahead, preferring to move to the next batch of exposition rather than focus on any emotional impact of all the double crosses. By the time "one last job" becomes a precursor to the real farewell gig which leads to yet another con, whatever technical expertise exists in the script is wholly irrelevant to the sense of ennui even the punchiest script can create when it gives you no sure footing with anything. I'm not asking for a cut-and-dry narrative without surprises, but this gang embarked on more farewell gigs than KISS.

Roger Ebert compared the too-smug feel of the film to Wes Anderson's bloated and listless The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a comparison I find rather fitting: both demonstrate visually striking artists whose hip characters and exacting camerawork and set design are let loose without restraint, a soulless display of technique that deceptively flirts with greatness on a surface level but reveals its emptiness upon even a cursory inspection. I confess that I found Brody, Kikuchi, Ruffalo and Weisz so entertaining that I didn't terribly mind that my time had been wasted -- I should also mention the great Robbie Coltrane, who makes the wholly unnecessary character of "The Belgian" a welcome edition with his natural and charmingly overbearing screen presence -- but The Brothers Bloom is clearly the work of an artist who still has some growing to do. If Johnson can put his considerable talents toward a story with some degree of human connection, he might just morph into a formidable force.

The Pianist

The Pianist is as much an autobiography by Roman Polanski as it is an adaptation of the memoirs of Władysław “Władek” Szpilman. Polanski too survived the Jewish ghettos, and he too knew the pain of losing a dear one to the Nazis. Szpilman's story is even more horrific: where Polanski escaped the ghetto and lost his mother, the pianist aided the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but lost his entire family to the camp at Treblinka. I often hear from uninformed friends or smarmy, clueless critics that historical films carry little weight, as you already know the outcome. But this is not a story of how a man survives, it is the story of how he deals with survival.

When the Nazis invade Poland in 1939, Szpilman and his rich family assume it will all end quickly, as Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Help never comes, however, and the Germans slowly strip away the rights of Poland's Jews. First, they limit the amount of money a Jew can carry, then force them to walk in the gutters, then brand them with those blue armbands.

In the first act, Szpilman barely notices the decay around him. His family has plenty of money, and he still enjoys a cushy job as a pianist. When the Germans move the Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, he still gets by playing for the other residents. He declines an offer to join the Jewish police, for he does not need the pay enough to beat other Jews.

Then it all comes crashing down. Szpilman makes less and less until he loses his work completely and must help as a laborer, his family is loaded on a train to an extermination camp and he retreats into hiding. Adrien Brody gives a commanding performance, moving from the kind if aloof rich boy at the start into a man just able to contain his horror and panic behind a stoic face that won't attract attention. Szpilman witnesses unspeakable horrors, all filmed with a certain detachment that emphasizes their cold brutality without giving into the need to sensationalize it.

He stays and hides in the ghetto after the mass exodus to the concentration camps, and even helps the other remaining residents smuggle guns and food. As Szpilman bounds from hiding place to hiding place, we see the flamboyant showman shrink to a rail-thin, haunting creature, barely able to move at times from malnutrition. When a German officer, Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), discovers Szpilman and learns that he is a pianist, the captain bids the Jew to play for him, and Spzilman is so weak he can hardly even play a lick of Chopin at first, before it suddenly comes back to him.

Hosenfeld proves Szpilman's salvation, so taken with the musician that he allows the man to continue hiding and even brings food on occasion. Kretschmann perhaps plays the requisite "kind Nazi," but it's important to remember that A) these were real people, not all of whom could callously carry out their orders and B) this actually happened. Kretschmann gives Hosenfeld a stoicism to match Szpilman's.

The Pianist contains Roman Polanski's finest direction, neither the brilliantly psychotic style of his thrillers nor the stately retro throwback of Chinatown. His camera moves gently through the Warsaw Ghetto, capturing the horrors with a matter-of-fact style that calls to mind the clinical mind of Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick wanted to make a Holocaust movie, in fact, but shelved it when Spielberg announced he was making Schindler's List. Kubrick later expressed disappointment in that film's narrative approach, and I can't help but feel that this movie would come a great deal closer to what Kubrick wanted to make (even though it never ventures into the concentration camps). It also contains a personality that Kubrick, genius though he was, could not have given it: Polanski has something invested in the project, but he does not let his feelings get in the way.

I don't know that I would call The Pianist Polanski's best film; he has a number of masterpieces that makes ranking difficult and pointless. It is, however, one of the finest films ever made to deal with the Holocaust, and surely one of the finer films of the decade. Its period design, acting, direction and cinematography are beyond reproach, and if its final act seems a bit short, that's only because Polanski avoids repetition.