The trailer for a new HBO Series starring Jason Schwartzman premiered tonight.  Unfortunately we can’t embed the video, but if you go here, you can see the preview. Looks pretty damn good to me.

According to Variety…

The pilot will center on a Brooklyn writer (Schwartzman) who nurses a painful breakup by acting out his dream to live as a character out of a Raymond Chandler novel. As a result, he finds a new lease on life by offering up his services as an inexperienced private eye.

In the preview alone, besides Schwartzman, are the great Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Ted Danson, and Parker Posey. John Hodgman and Olivia Thirlby will also apparently have roles on the show as well. The series was created by author Jonathan Ames, who you can follow on Twitter. (Where you can also follow us.)

The series will premiere September 20th on HBO.

“Welcome to the Dahl House”
August 18th, 2002 – New York Times
By Wes Anderson

My brothers and I grew up reading Roald Dahl’s stories. Our mother had gotten us nameplates to put in our books, and we used to steal one another’s copies of ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and ”The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” tear out the other’s nameplates and replace them with our own. Dahl was our favorite.

For me the best were ”Danny the Champion of the World” and ”Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Last year I decided to find out what it would take to make a movie from ”Mr. Fox.” I arranged to meet with Dahl’s wife, Felicity, or Liccy, who runs the Dahl estate and helps to produce the films, operas, etc., that have come from his books.

She is a very charming and energetic woman, with an infectious enthusiasm for her husband’s work. She invited me to Gipsy House. I knew about Dahl’s residence in Great Missenden near Oxford, and I was especially eager to see the tiny hut where he wrote for four hours each day in an armchair with a green-felt-upholstered board across his lap for a desk.

Read the rest of this entry…

Homage or rip-off?

In this month’s issue of Interview (June 2009, Björk on the cover), Wes Anderson interviews (more of a discussion between close friends than an interview) Fantastic Mr. Fox collaborator Jarvis Cocker. Be sure to pick up a copy at your local newsstand!

Jarvis: I wanted to ask you something, actually. It’s an obvious question, I suppose, but on the film that you’re making now, Fantastic Mr. Fox, you’re using old puppets — well, do you call them puppets? What do you call them?

Wes: I think puppets more or less covers it.

Jarvis: So you’re used to working with live actors. How have you found the experience of working with things that will do exactly what you tell them to do?

Wes: Well, as it happens, they won’t. As you know, the voices are recorded before it’s animated, and that process is more familiar to me — working with actors in that way. So when we’re recording the voices, there can be the same sort of excitement that working with actors normally has — there can be the same surprises and spontaneity. But then when it comes time to animate it, I’m working with people who each bring their own interpretations to it, even if we have very carefully determined what is going to happen in the scene. Sometimes I will do a video version of myself doing what I think the puppet ought to do, and then I’ll discuss it with the animator — and there are many different animators working on different stages all at once. But in the process of going one frame at a time to bring the puppet to life, the animator will sort of sculpt things out, and they have somehow trained their brains to sync in this ultra slow-motion so there’s a performance that they’re giving. And so you can find in that process that you’re going very slowly being pleasantly surprised over the course of several days or weeks and saying, “Oh, look at what’s happening here…” Or you can slowly see the shot falling apart before your eyes and see that it’s not working. So there’s no real corollary in live-action movies, but it’s interesting anyway — and fun.

Jarvis: So the animators are kind of the nearest thing you get to actors in that process, basically.

Wes: They’re the nearest thing you get to working with actors in a sense, yeah.

Read the rest of this entry…

MSNBC takes a look at the summer indy flicks (including “Away We Go”) and finds the term “twee” to be a common thread in this article. The author blames none other than our man, Wes Anderson for leading the charge here (and Molly Ringwald). He doesn’t necessarily fault Wes for his style:

Twee comes in many forms in current indie cinema: At the top of the heap are stylists like Anderson and Rian Johnson (“The Brothers Bloom,” “Brick”). While these two filmmakers certainly traffic in twee visuals and other aesthetic choices, the look of their movies is so completely not of this world that these artists stand alone in their own tastefully-designed alternate universes.

What do you think: is our man twee, or too twee?

Over on Stickers and Donuts, Maria documents her pilgrimage to the Tenenbaum house in Harlem:

In my quest to see NYC-things before I leave NYC, I spent this Saturday cavorting around the city. I went to the Whitney, but that only paled in comparison to the pilgrimage I took with my friend George to see the house where Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums was filmed. The house (not on Archer Avenue, not in an inconspicuous city) is actually on 144th and Convent Ave in Harlem (more).

With the school year winding down, A. O. Scott takes a look at one of cinema’s more offbeat students, Max Fischer, in the director Wes Anderson’s 1998 film “Rushmore.”

“What makes “Rushmore” so profound and so poignant is that it tells two stories in counterpoint,” Mr. Scott says. “It’s about an adolescent coming to terms with his limitations and an artist coming into possession of his powers.” Mr. Anderson has created a signature style with his films and has gained a cult following. Are you a fan of Mr. Anderson’s films? And if so, which one do you like the best?

Watch the video.

Ian Dingman, the artist who designed the cover of the Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket, graciously agreed to make a banner for the site.

You can see the glorious result above!  Thanks, Ian!

Something about Polaroid photographs always reminds me of Wes Anderson. Why is that?

The New York Times has a fantastic gallery of reader-submitted Polaroids today. Check it out.