The Bowdoin Orient

Wes Anderson is an enigma. No other American filmmaker today is so equally praised and lambasted—his pictures are ravenously entertaining, but a tad too twee. There are too many visual flourishes and too thinly sketched characters.

Yet Anderson continues to evolve with each new picture. His last and perhaps most universally beloved film, “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), packed a great many of his visual tricks (slow-motion tracking shots set to triumphant music, bilateral symmetry—where the characters seemed framed onscreen as if in a pop-up book) but it also revealed a big, heavy beating heart that centered around a touching story of young love.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” his seventh feature, expands upon this kind of earnestness. It’s a cute caper narrative with some elaborate set pieces, but in many ways it’s his most adult film since “The Royal Tennebaums,” boasting by far the most extravagant cast since, well, Tennenbaums. (It seems that once you’ve been in a Wes Anderson film, you are contractually obligated to appear in every subsequent one).

I want to examine one brief, wordless, but unquestionably crucial scene, one that I consider to be a cipher for the film as a whole.

Partway into the narrative, the film’s lead character Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes at his absolute best, speaking faster than a speeding bullet) is detained and thrown into some cross between a prison and a concentration camp. A plot is organized for him to escape, and this being a Wes Anderson picture, the plot is necessarily elaborate and requires sneaking in a number of digging instruments through the prison’s tight security.

Shortly thereafter we cut to a prison guard who inspects all of the incoming mail. The architecture of this facility almost perfectly suggests Robert Bresson’s “A Man Escaped” (1956) but the costumes undoubtedly signal Auschwitz. Auschwitz references in a Wes Anderson film? You read that correctly. And it’s not a superfluous reference either. There is a drab suffocating quality to the air in this prison that suggests all hope is doomed.

We watch as each incoming piece of mail is brutally hacked by the attending guard. Loafs of bread and food sent to inmates? Down comes a machete. A parcel modestly wrapped in parchment paper? The machete strikes down swiftly. Each gift for the prisoners is torn to shreds to ensure nothing mischievous sneaks through.

But then along comes a different package. This one is an ornate pink box donned with an attractive bow. The bow unties and the walls of the box fall neatly and symmetrically to the sides. Framed perfectly in this small geometrical wonder are three hammers to assist Gustave in his escape, only they are decorated as pastries.

The obviousness of what’s being concealed in these pastries provides the sequence’s humor, but the prison guard cannot help but be moved by the ornate design of the packaging, or the delectable application of the icing. He’s touched, and Anderson pans up to his curious face to ensure we understand this. The guard allows the package to move on, the machete temporarily kept at bay.

I’m not the first to acknowledge this scene as a kind of synecdoche for the overall message of the film. Sam Adams of Indiewire was wise to title his review of the film “A Pastry Covered Hammer,” noting the profound seriousness hidden just beneath the sparkling surface of Anderson’s seventh feature. 

A pastry covered-hammer: that is “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

While at first glance it may appear to be Anderson’s most ornate and stylized pictures, it’s also by far his most political film. And it’s a strangely acute one at that.

The film’s message? If only more people cared about the little things in life—a perfectly decorated pastry, the appropriate greetings to visiting guests, impeccable manners, etc.—than maybe the horrors of world would be a tad less frequent. Perhaps if there were a few more Gustaves and a few less prison guards, Auschwitz may have never happened.

While it packs heavy film references, Anderson has been quite vocal that the primary influence on this new film is 1930s Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who lamented the rise of fascism in Europe.

In Nick Pinkerton’s recent review of the film, he references a quote attributed to another Viennese writer, Karl Kraus. It’s a quote that gets to the heart of the passion of Gustave H and the little things in life. Pinkerton writes: “While the news of the bombing of Shanghai was on everyone’s lips, a friend encountered Kraus sitting in some coffeehouse and quibbling over matters of grammar. ‘I know that everything is in vain when the house is burning,’ Kraus said, ‘But I have to do this as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always at the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.’” 

And that’s Gustave H in a nutshell. There’s something commendable about his commitment to hospitality. And while he panders so often to the rich (specifically in his bedding of rich, blonde octogenarians), he also cares deeply about his modest and poor protégé, the film’s protagonist Zero Mustafa (played by Tony Rivoli, a welcome addition to the Andersonian cannon). Gustave later sees to it that Zero inherits the hotel in his passing, and even if Zero is unable to stop the oncoming war and the rise of fascism, his recognition of a glorious past keeps him optimistic.

The film opens with a framing device (a girl reading a book at a writer’s grave) within a framing device (that writer addressing the audience in 1985) within a framing device (that writer first visiting the eponymous hotel in 1968). While it may seem like a superfluous Russian doll set up, the tone of these temporal shifts is in keeping with the film’s overall project. There’s a sense of nostalgia that gains weight as Anderson dives further in the past. The unseemly concrete exterior and drab interior colors during the sequences in 1968 remind us of the aesthetic volatility of communism, and allow us to yearn for the exuberant pinks of the pre-war years.

In just a few short cuts, Wes Anderson has created in his viewer a true sense of nostalgia that allows us to connect with Zero, who we find recounting his story as an old man in 1968. It’s not just a gimmick; it’s a well-planned narrative device. And it is about time we start taking Wes Anderson seriously, despite how cute the icing on his films may appear to be.

In 2000’s “Almost Famous,” Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the rock critic Lester Bangs, says, “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you are uncool.”

I’ve thought about that line a lot over the years. It was the first thing I thought about last Sunday morning when the news of Hoffman’s untimely death reached my woebegone ears. When I was a camp counselor for four summers, I used to repeat that quote to my campers, 14-year olds entering high school, and we’d talk about the ways it rang true—what it meant to be cool in a world filled with rejection and judgment. 

The above line comes at the end of “Almost Famous,” when a young rock journalist—the night before the deadline of his first major Rolling Stone article—calls his mentor and asks for advice. To be fair, they are writer-director Cameron Crowe’s words, but as he did in every single role, Philip Seymour Hoffman made them come alive. 

Although the hoopla of awards seasons can make any year seem like a strong one for film, 2013 truly was a knockout punch for American cinema. 

And because there’s little to look forward to in 2014 (with the possible exception of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), I suspect we’ll all be spending some of this year wading through the annals of 2013.

Top ten lists are silly, obligatory, and ultimately baseless, so I’ve decided to present my favorites as a collection of unordered pairs—or ‘double bills’—I think would make for intriguing viewing. Enjoy:

Many of us are familiar—to varying degrees—with the following terms regarding modern entertainment: digital media, digital filming, Youtube, Vine, GIF, Buzzfeed, Netflix, web series, reality television, Facebook, Tent-poles, Sequels, iPhones, iPads.

All of these terms are reflections of the way in which the Internet age has pushed visual entertainment to new places. Films are now created utilizing new forms of presentation with a new language of cultural exchange—a language defined by perpetual interconnectedness. It seems, however, that this Internet Age hasn’t quite found a film that truly speaks to the way new media makes us feel. Perhaps the closest example would be David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (2010), the acclaimed chronicle of the creation of Facebook. 

However, while the subject matter of David Fincher’s film may be concerned with technological advancements of our time, the overall look, narrative construction and atmosphere of the film is not radically different than any courtroom drama or historical biopic. (I happen to believe Fincher’s film is a direct heir to “Citizen Kane,” but that’s another article altogether.)

One might say we’re currently in a golden age of the documentary.

Given the rise of independent cinema in the past decade alongside the widespread application of cheap digital technology, it’s become easier than ever before for both professional and amateur filmmakers to create documentaries—the documentary is a form that has actually been helped rather than hindered by the bare-bones approach digital technology offers.

Bowdoin has, just in the past few weeks, brought two phenomenal, widely-acclaimed documentary films, along with their filmmakers and subjects to campus; “The Central Park Five” (Ken Burns) and “How to Survive a Plague” (David France). 

Every couple of years the film community gets a picture that is critically divisive to the point of riots; a picture that compels nearly anyone with a pen and a Film 101 course to their name to provide personal input (“Zero Dark Thirty”, “Amour” and “The Tree of Life” are a few from recent memory).

Such films ascribe to the moniker of “art-cinema”, but are generally well-known enough to gain considerable viewership and invite debate as to the value of their worth as popular entertainment (God forbid something of that sort should carry something resembling a moral agenda).

Regardless of whether we consider such works “good” movies, their value lies in their ability to spark intellectual debates, which allow critics to constantly reassess the (gasp!) purpose of cinema and popular entertainment (the worth of criticism itself frequently crops up in this conversation).

That was a rather strange Oscar night, wouldn’t you say? From the take-it-or-leave-it misogynistic and racist jokes of the first-time host to the bizarre exaltation of the Hollywood musical (since when was “Chicago” a landmark picture?), the  85th  Academy Awards were full of surprises—there was even a tie (they might as well just chop the statue in half). 

But to me nothing was stranger than the quick jump over to Washington for Michelle Obama’s oddly intrusive presentation of the Best Picture Award. 

Nothing against our lovely first lady, but didn’t it seem like she showed up at the wrong party? (That party being one in which the entertainment industry’s moguls and beautiful people pretend for one night that they are the most important people in the universe.)

Plenty of ink has spilled over the polarizing new Kathryn Bigelow film “Zero Dark Thirty.” During the past few months it has sparked perhaps the most heated discussion over politics in cinema in recent memory. “Zero Dark Thirty” has its share of vehement defenders and detractors; the debates concerning its merit had been fought long before it’s release. The discussion surrounding the film—chronicling a scrupulous procedural depiction of the ten-year C.I.A. investigation that led to the epic nighttime raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound and the terrorist’s execution—has spurred political scrutiny. It’s difficult to assess a film like this without also considering its moral and ethical dilemmas.

From the art-house to the multiplex, fiction to documentary, domestic to foreign, film was stellar this past year.

And by “film” I intentionally invoke the debates that continue among film critics about the death of the medium, usually coupled with a wary and obligatory acceptance of film’s cheap successor: digital video. To the doubters, I say look around and let the celluloid on display speak for itself. This was a year where we were blessed with the gorgeous 16mm compositions of “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of Southern Wild”, as well as the delectably rich 70mm panoramas of “The Master”. Yes, the business and technology are changing, but as Richard Brody of The New Yorker noted back in September: “The movies aren’t dying (they’re not even sick).”

Even standard Hollywood awards-bait (such as “Lincoln,” “Life of Pi” and “Argo”) was a cut above the usual cheap-swill we’ve gotten used to around this time of year. As per usual, our superheroes still saved the world a few times (“The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” unsurprisingly topped the year-end box-office), but we also received action gems like “Skyfall” and “Django Unchained.”

With no body of work to compare it to, a debut album should define an artist's ambitions, and set some direction for their future by leaving the listener with a hum or a beat that sticks with him well after it has left his ears. No one is looking for perfection in a debut's material. We look for a quality that may come to define the band's sound—an element to build upon to form an improved second effort and, eventually, a balanced career.

Electronic music, broadly speaking, has separated itself into two camps in the past several years. One of these camps is dominated by the pursuit of the colossal, the attempt to create waves of noise that overwhelm the ear and the body. Dubstep, a prime example, has become a musical arena for the survival of the thickest tones, the most audacious arrangements, and the most powerful, visceral reactions.

"What are you listening to?" "The Shins. You know them?... You gotta hear this one song. It'll change your life."

William Bevan, the electronic solo artist also known as Burial, has attracted much critical acclaim, but his music has always struck me as too detached and too unfeeling. His 2007 release "Untrue" lacked the emotional truth that characterizes the strongest and most poignant electronic works. Bevan's DJ stints around London and the four EPs to his name have taken strange and innovative stabs at redefining exactly what electronic music can be, and the result has often been far from accessible.

It's been a busy week for music. We lost a legend, there was an allegedly important award ceremony Sunday evening, and Usher and Diplo got together. But what most caught my attention this week was the well-received release of Goldfrapp's compilation record "The Singles." Who knew that a relatively new band like this one was so deserving of a greatest hits album?

Of all of the remixes, music videos, and performances one can find online of Lana Del Rey's hit single, "Video Games," none are more beautiful or poignant than her performance at the Corinthia Hotel in London.

This final installment of The Hum and the Beat for 2011 will review the highest achievements in a year of music brimming with high-profile collaborations (Kanye and Jay-Z, Lou Reed and Metallica), ever-budding teen sensations (Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber), a number of fantastic self-titled releases, and some ineffably marvelous sophomore records. Without further ado, here are my top 10 albums of the year.

This year at Bowdoin, there has been no band that has played with quite as much tenacity—and frequency—as The NARPs.

I first heard White Denim in late 2007, a time when I would spend hours on various music blogs, downloading anything that caught my attention. I'd quickly listens through the dozens of songs I had downloaded, hoping a few would be worthy of repeated listens.

Up until now, Beirut has always held a special place in my heart. Their first two albums rank among my favorites of the past decade. Their French- and Balkan-inspired sound distinguishes them from many others in the contemporary alternative music scene today. I listened to their songs countless times in my high school days. On numerous occasions, I've spent hours online downloading any unreleased demos I could find, some of which are now amongst my favorite Beirut tracks.

I suppose I've been in a concert-going mood as of late. This Sunday, I ventured to Lewiston to the Androscoggin Bank Colisee to see renowned DJ and electronic sample artist Pretty Lights perform.

Last Tuesday evening, a friend informed me that Washed Out was opening for Cut Copy at the State Theatre. A few phone calls and some extra daytime hours in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library later, I was in a car with four friends driving to Portland.