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Costume designer for Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, Karen Patch is currently featured in an article on W’s website called “Dressing the Part.”
(Mary Zophres, Jacqueline Durran and Karen Patch, from W)
IGN U.K. interviews Mr. Wes Anderson (hulu.com):
Nice post from OMG Lists, a site that apparently specializes in… lists? Nothing earth-shattering here, but worth a look.
The text is reproduced below, but be sure to visit the original post for video evidence.
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He’s one of indie filmmaking’s biggest names. If you ever find yourself watching a film you’re not sure who directed… here’s a checklist of signs to know you’re watching one of Anderson’s films.
5- Bill Murray Being Serious
If you’re seeing this comic king in a movie that was made in the past ten years it’s probably a Wes Anderson movie. Of the last fifteen film projects Murray has done four have been with Anderson. It was his role in “Rushmore” that made him an indie-film darling with such directors as Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. Murray has a strong commitment to Anderson, backing up the director by pulling out of his own pocket to help shoot a scene and also working for free in “The Royal Tenenbaums”. Their film relationship has produced some interesting film experiences as well as a partnership of respect and comradeship.
4- Slow Motion Endings
In all but one of his films, Anderson has ended with the slow motion shot. We saw Dignan leaving for prison in “Bottle Rocket”, Max’s Dance with Miss Cross in “Rushmore”, Royal Tenenbaums’s funeral, and Steve Zissou walk the red carpet all in slow motion into the end credits. It’s a signature style that Anderson has replicated in most of his films. Also notice the credits, first name in lower and uppercase but the last name is always uppercase. The only movie that broke the slow motion ending tradition? “The Darjeeling Limited,” which began with a slow motion shot of Peter Whitman barely making the namesake train.
From reader Michael:
Ahoy,
I randomly stumbled across this just now, not sure if you’ve seen it…
I’m submitting this because a) I hadn’t seen it before, and I’d up until now been fairly certain I’d read literally every interview Anderson conducted in promoting Darjeeling, and b) I’ve been visiting your website at least once a day since I found it, which was some time a few months before Darjeeling was released.
Here’s the pertinent bit for your convenience:
“Noah [Baumbach] and I started working on a…story for a movie without really realizing we were doing it. It wasn’t ‘The Life Aquatic.’ It was something else that we haven’t even finished writing. Whenever we would go to dinner or something, we’d just start making up scenes for this thing and then we just started writing them down because [we realized] that we’ve got a lot of stuff now.”
Best, and thanks for all the work. It’s a great site, and I appreciate the good writing.
Back in October (or thereabouts), Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody assembled their own Darjeeling Limited playlists for the iTunes Store. While old news to many, this is new news to us! Thanks to Owen for the lead. Track listings after the break.
Waris is in a new film.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead.
Sean Lennon is set to participate in the forthcoming film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead, Billboard.com reports. According to director and writer Jordan Galland, the film is “a vampire comedy involving Shakespeare and the Holy Grail, starring Jake Hoffman [who also has a rather famous father], Devon Aoki, Johnny Ventimiglia, Kris Lemche, Ralph Macchio and Jeremy Sisto, with a cameo from Bijou Phillips.” The indie flick (about an off-Broadway production involving not-so-deceased scriptwriters, no less) will feature music scored by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s talented kid (Paste).
I hope all our Istabuli readers will be heading to the Istanbul International Film Festival (April 5-20) where The Darjeeling Limited will make its Turkish premiere. The Festival has an overall “‘68 Generation” theme and will be presenting some wonderful films (Godard’s Rolling Stones doc Sympathy for the Devil to Hopper’s Easy Rider). TDL will show in the “American Independents” category alongside The Savages and (Team Anderson collaborator) Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding. Two hundred films will be screened in all. If I am not mistaken, this is the second Middle East showing for TDL, after the Israeli premier earlier this year. So Bosporus bathers, don’t miss this wonderful opportunity!
Yes, another semi-fashion related post with Waris Ahluwalia. Waris is really proving to be one of Team Wes’s most prolific members. Is there nothing this man can’t do with Style? We’re going to have to coin a new term around here: Warilicious (too much? Suggestions?) Waris is still hard at work in the Jewelry and fashion business and teaches us to always say “yes”. In this Dejour Magazine interview he also mentions his upcoming film work (”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead” - a Zombie movie, among others), talks about his girlfriend’s film, being Sikh and much more.
It’s just a funny thing. Half my year is spent sitting on the floor working with my craftsmen working on the jewelry, and then the next day I’m off to Tokyo for the Jalouse party for the cover of Jalouse, and then I land here and literally land into fashion week so it’s defiantly a funny mix of worlds.
Keep cool, Waris!
February 25, 2008, DVD review by Richard Brody (link)
It’s unjust that the Academy didn’t nominate Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” (Fox) in any category, but inexplicable that they didn’t invent a special one for it: Best Luggage. An exquisite set of suitcases, credited to Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, plays a large role in this blissful, loopy comedy of family anguish and sublimated tenderness.
The film’s subject is coming home, and it’s a sign of Anderson’s comic genius that it takes a picaresque jaunt through India by three brothers, estranged since their father’s funeral a year ago, to do so. The domineering Francis (Owen Wilson), who is recovering from a motorcycle accident, has convened the other two—Peter (Adrien Brody), a regular guy in a panic over the impending birth of his first child, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), a literary romantic trapped in a troubled relationship—for a “spiritual journey,” which he plans down to the minute.
The trip brings odd misadventure, off-kilter romance, and sudden danger, but the real story involves coming to terms with a lifetime of ingrained resentments plus grief of more recent vintage. For Anderson, such troubles are too big to blurt out without bathos and ridicule. Following other Wasp modernists such as Hemingway and Howard Hawks, he relies on high style, sly gestures, and arch pranks to evoke intense emotion with bite and grace. His tight, sketchlike structures bring out the best in his actors, especially Schwartzman (who co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola), a Dustin Hoffman for our time, who doles out Zen wisdom with a carnal leer. In Anderson’s world of brothers without sisters, the ribald rituals of male bonding suggest the unfathomable otherness of women—including the trio’s mother (Anjelica Huston), whose life haunts them no less than their father’s death and who turns out to be the real reason for their trip.
Where people prove elusive, material things play an outsized, totemic role. The brothers’ grudges emerge in their wrangling over their father’s relics—glasses, keys, toiletries—but pride of place goes to his luggage. Dark tan, finely tooled, and adorned with a faux-naïf intaglio of wild animals, it follows them around on their journey at great inconvenience, a perfect, literal metaphor for their heavy emotional baggage.
The film begins with a neat dose of backstory: a short preface, featuring Jack holed up in a luxurious Paris hotel before his passage to India, where he receives a surprise visit from the woman he adores (Natalie Portman, chomping a toothpick, her hair cropped martially short). Movingly, stoically, whimsically, Anderson suggests the difficult self-restraint and self-mastery that the most intimate relationships demand. Love, in his book, is tolerance and acceptance—facing up to pain in order to take the pleasure that’s given.
Team Wes’ nattiest dresser and jewelry designer Waris Ahluwalia had been popping up in fashion news with New York Fashion week in full swing this past week. He was spotted at Israeli designer Yigal Azrouel’s show and seen front row at the Cynthia Rowley’s runway show. Kempt, a men’s fashion site, features Waris as their “Man of the Hour” after spotting him dressed to the nines at The Beatrice Inn (where else!):
” The other night a Purple magazine Fashion Week party at Paul Sevigny’s crypto-swank Beatrice Inn, his favorite haunt, Waris bowled us over in a bespoke brown, green and burgundy flecked herringbone wool tweed suit with a forest green wool waistcoat and a crimson knitted wool tie: a perfectly balanced and seasonal palette that’s as warming to look upon as it must be to wear.”
Thanks for keeping Team Wes looking sharp, Waris!
