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LGM Film Club, Part 253: The French Dispatch

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I haven’t done much blogging outside the grave and labor series lately due to some unfortunate family circumstances. I haven’t done much movie watching either. But I did watch The French Dispatch last week. This seems like a good place for an open thread on it and not on Ukraine. Take some time away from the doomscrolling!

Even for a Wes Anderson movie, this is an oddball. Whether The New Yorker theme works or not depends on how you feel about it all. It’s cute, not much more. What no one seemed to talk about is how it was obviously also an homage to William Allen White and his global media empire based out of rural Kansas, but those aren’t references normal people get. What I found odd about it though compared to other Anderson films is that the stories, even though they were slight and there were three of them, had more pathos than usual. Maybe that’s not so true for the revolutionary movement one, though that was enjoyable. But the police inspector and his son and the prisoner-artists were real and somewhat touching stories. He’s capable of that. Darjeeling Limited wasn’t his most successful film, but it did have a slice of this. I liked it. Of course ALL THE STARS are in his films, but because you expect it, it’s less distracting than this might be otherwise. As for the style and cinematography, it’s typically A+ material. Anderson may have a limited vision of things, but he knows how to do those things very, very well. Also, Jeffrey Wright does a hell of a James Baldwin impersonation.

Anyway, it’s a fun film. I hope most of us can agree on that, though some people hate Anderson entirely and I get that if you don’t like it, he would really annoy you. Where it fits into his larger career though, that’s one I have to think about it. I think I would place it slightly above his average film, but definitely not at the very top.

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