My immediate reaction to Wes Anderson isn’t hatred, love, or even annoyance. It’s jealousy. After scorn-filled years spent perceiving him as a threat to my personal identity, this is the unsophisticated truth. I am not jealous of the fact that his films exist, it’s not the envy of an artist to another’s success and popularity. Instead I’m jealous that I don’t belong to the group that’s thrilled and inspired by his work. I want Anderson’s anti-authority themed films to matter to me (an anti-authority themed person), in a significant, or at least delightful way, and I’m frustrated that they don’t. And though he has his critics, it feels lonely not to fall in love with Wes Anderson. In his new […]
Theatre
The Cinema: Deadly & Holy
The other night, in a sleepless mania not unfamiliar to me, I rummaged through all my old school papers. They were abysmal, as unfortunately all academic writing is, but I paused self-beration to read one paper in particular. I remember it was handed in for extra credit in a last attempt to pass Dramaturgy. In it I reviewed theatre and film director (Marat/Sade) Peter Brook’s fantastic book The Empty Space and his categorizations of the theater: Holy, Deadly, Rough, Immediate. And as I trudged through my soulless, double spaced writing it suddenly occurred to me that these categories could be applied to the cinema. With the exception of the Immediate, they really are applied quite neatly, and I admit this […]