How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into “The French Dispatch” | Hacker News Reader

How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into “The French Dispatch”

newyorker.com

49 pointszeristor42 comments

This was the Wes Anderson movie that would (in my very humble opinion) have benefited most from being a limited TV series instead. Have five or six episodes, one per story. As a film, like every anthology film I can bring to mind, it's a curate's egg. Good in parts, not good as a whole. (Of the three stories, the first is wonderful; the second insufferable; while the third relies too much on a thing, the policemen's chef, that isn't a thing.)

While I’m a huge fan of Andersons earlier work, The French Dispatch was just… too much Wes in one sitting. Like tomato soup with extra ketchup.

A mini-series sounds like grand idea.

Watching that as a French was for me like watching what an american would fantasize about the country. It was very weird and interesting and completely discordant but not in a bad way. The May 68 protest part was so weird, both insulting and naive, with a sort of truth to it but exagerated like only an american would.

I wonder how Americans feel when playing "Life is strange", a French fantasy about what America is like.

For reference, I’m American but lived in Paris for awhile. I wouldn’t say The French Dispatch is indicative of American views of France, more a very specific, Brooklyn-based, literary industry one. Which is also what The New Yorker is. A movie like Amélie is probably more in line with the American fantasy version of France.

Oh I see, I guess us French are very heavily exposed to the NYC mirror ourselves so for us that's "american" when for you there s a clear distinction with how a North Carolinian or a Californian would dream up a French fantasy?

Or social classes would fantasise differently ?

I guess it s not too deeply explored, how a bias towards France develop across different layers of foreigners ahah

But it s obvious the reverse is true: coming from Normandy my family accepted Iraq a lot more than the rest of France and felt even more betrayed when it turned out to be a lie for instance.

Sadly the truth is more mundane than all those fantasies: we have an approximately similar distribution of morons, fascist, religious, generous, competent, savant and ignorant people and I guess bar historical deviations we're pretty much the same. I live in China myself and I cant really find a structural difference in people themselves.

The media industry in NYC (and LA) is so dominant as compared to the rest of the country, so when viewed from abroad, the NYC/LA opinion ends up being “the American opinion.”

I got the same feeling about Japan as depicted in Isle of Dogs. it's the Japan as fantasized by Wes Anderson, not real Japan. "Weird and interesting and completely discordant but not in a bad way" is the perfect way to describe it.

"Fantastic Mr Fox" is also strange but charming in its own way, with it's odd mix of 20th century English countryside and very American characters and dialogue. The source material being authentically English probably helps this one.

"Life is strange" (at least the first one about Max & Chloe) did have the odd bits of dialogue that didn't seem like something native English speakers would say, but in terms of setting, it was set at a fancy boarding school, which is a setting most Americans have little familiarity with (except maybe from Harry Potter), so the weirdness of setting even to Americans may have hid a lot of gaps in the authors' knowledge of American culture.

Genius

Yeah i didn’t realize the author behind life is strange but I watched a play through of the first one and I really enjoyed it

It was probably pewdiepie even though he hated it, the plot twists resonated with me and i looked forward to his commentary

Reminded me of the butterfly effect with ashton kutcher

I love foreign fantasy representations of America. My favorite is the Italian music video of a high school class where they sing in made up English.

https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8

The difference of course being that Adriano Celentano intentionally created something that sounds like English to prove a point, while hollywood is primarily based on ignorance.

I'm reading 'An Editor's Burial', which is a collection of essays which inspired the film. There's an interview with Wes as a foreword, and that's exactly what he describes as his intention for the feel of the film.

Agreed. I would have also liked to see more exploration on the "Americans in Europe" theme in an Anderson style. Especially in the WW1/1920s era, with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.

Brillant idea. As an anthology movie, I felt that the movie was a little too disjointed and didn't really work.

It's a sad and beautiful obituary, a miniseries would be unnecessary long.

I think the Ballad of Buster Scruggs was a TV series that they turned into a movie, and I think it benefited from it. That's also the only anthology film I even like I can recall.

I’d wondered if you have a particular affinity for the mid-sixties. You were born in 1969. There’s a psychological theory that says what we tend to be most nostalgic for is a period in time that is several years before our own birth—when our parents’ romance might have been at its peak. The technical term for the phenomenon is “cascading reminiscence bump.”

This is a pretty interesting idea and as someone born in the early nineties, I definitely find aspects of the 80s to be appealing, especially when it comes to tech and sci-fi. I wonder if this phenomenon could be linked to the popularity of cultural trends in general.

Hard to say, I was born in the late 80s and I have an affinity for the early 90s.

Perhaps that is when your parents’ romance was at its peak?

I do find this interesting too. As if this affinity comes from wanting to understand the cultural circumstances around one’s birth. I wonder if that can be extended to nostalgia for the era of one’s parents childhood as well?

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie when I came out. And have watched it several times since. I often wonder if I’d like it even more if I knew the first thing about The New Yorker.

I wish I caught all of those references to French cinema mentioned in TFA. I nonetheless love Anderson’s style. I just eat it up like soup.

The French Dispatch is likely Wes Anderson’s worst movie.

Not just likely. Definitely. https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/the-french-dispatch/

Good to know there's a definite measure for that.

I for one liked it.

Why did you link us to your own review of a film?

It’s sitting at a 3.8 out of 5, in the upper half of his films, on letterboxd. https://letterboxd.com/director/wes-anderson/by/rating/

I suppose they linked to their own review because they made their arguments there as to why they thought it sucked, but anyway I thought it quite a bit better than the Darjeeling Limited.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, but would rank it in roughly the middle of Wes Anderson's filmography. My personal rankings (in this particular moment) are:

    The Royal Tenenbaums
    Fantastic Mr. Fox
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Rushmore
    French Dispatch
    Moonrise Kingdom
    Isle of Dogs
    The Darjeeling Limited
    The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Bottle Rocket

Funny. I think he has decent engagement metrics behind the scenes because my list is

Moonrise Kingdom tied with Grand Budapest Hotel

French Dispatch

Then Fantastic Mr Fox

and not liking anything else he’s ever made, I tried. I thought I “liked Wes Anderson movies”, but really I like the direction his recent ones have gravitated more towards

and the French Dispatch doubled down on what he’s become known for, and I’m glad he did it. Third act was too much and I like the limited series idea.

I definitely think his audience may have changed (maybe at the risk of being too niche and alienating) because I really liked it

so, praise the algorithm

I think The Grand Budapest Hotel is definitely his best. For once, the retro bric-a-brac aesthetics isn't purely gratuitous but is used in a narrative framework where history (as a source of tragedy, melancholy and loss) has a real purpose beyond the faux-retro gloss. And the slapstick action-adventure mystery makes it a great Tintin story.

I like Rushmore as a coming-of-age movie.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is my favourite movie of all time. Partially because it's a great movie, but also because it's the last movie I saw with my dad before he passed away. It just holds a special place in my heart because of it.

It must be heart-wrenching.

The Grand Budapest Hotel was also one of Wes Anderson's strongest collaborations at the story level. Hugo Guinness was awarded a story credit for it and the framing of the film acts like it is an adaptation of a book by Hugo Guinness (that at least so far, has not been published as such). Grand Budapest leaves me wondering how much Wes Anderson would serve to benefit from more collaborators at the story level and larger writer rooms rather than soloing most of it. The French Dispatch being about that but written solo, seemed ironic in a bad way to me.

But of course, it could just be that Wes Anderson's writing doesn't speak to me as it does to some. I think Life Aquatic is often under-rated as a capture of what I find to be the more fun parts of Anderson's voice and Rushmore quite often over-rated. (I've just never liked Rushmore. It has never worked for me.)

Agreed, Life Aquatic is one of his strongest offering.

Totally different genres but what you are saying about Wes Anderson's writing remind me of Mamoru Hosoda's movies; left to his own devices, most of his movies after 2006 are basically a fevered fantasmagorical snippet of what his Facebook timeline would have looked like at the time.

This seems to be a love it mildly or loath it kind of movie. I thought it was the worst Wes Anderson movie, by a long margin, full of the "Wes Anderson" style but little substance. It made me re-evaluate his other films

Bottle Rocket is at the bottom for you? I find it charming, but I do have an affinity for first films/albums/novels.

Well, in terms of his released features, it's near the bottom going by those numbers: it's above only The Darjeeling Limited and Bottle Rocket.

The other things listed there that are lower-rated are shorts and a few things that aren't out yet.

I found it insufferable as well. The same tired style, the navel gazing..

If you’d like to see a great parody of Wes Anderson check out this short SNL did some years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDIAZCwHQE

I hadn’t seen it before watching the French Dispatch and it nails him perfectly.

I prefer this short "What if Wes Anderson directed X-men?"

https://youtu.be/UngE0qn3VRY

https://archive.ph/S20w2

The article is about Wes Anderson's inspiration for the film, the main thing being the characters from the New Yorker.

I have been gradually learning more about James Baldwin, and was quite touched by his story.

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