Asteroid City

not to be that guy but cmon wes it’s a meteorite not an asteroid “you can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep…” there’s a beautiful moment near the end where jason schwartzman’s character is speaking to adrian brody’s character that his eyes reflect three little lights (re: tilda swinton’s convo with woodrow). i think wes’s answer to what symbol should go on the moon to represent mankind, our yearning, and our meaning is the ellipses (…). life goes on, despite the trauma and the hardship and the suffering and uncertainty and unknowability the asteroid crater mirroring the hole for the tupperware 🥺 the three witchy daughters are probably my favorite characters… they’re meant to be the Fates/ MacBeth witches right? i need to rewatch and pay closer attention to their dialogue cause i have a suspicion it’s important i can’t help but feel like there’s some commentary i’m missing with jason schwartzman playing an actor playing a pastiche of his uncle francis ford coppola. (speaking of that family; when is wes gonna work with nic cage??? i feel like that’s a perfect match). schwartzman’s actor character is constantly changing identities, he seems to not know himself at all, especially with the loss of the edward norton’s love interest/playwright character. that convo w/ margot robbie at the end is the perfect unsaid thesis to the movie; that there are no answers, just ellipses. appreciate wes including more gay characters cause that’s half his audience lol a cast so stacked margot robbie isn’t even advertised. i just wish we got more with all of them. every performance was top tier. matt dillon is so underrated in everything he does. steve carrell, tom hanks, and bryan cranston are perfect fits. i’ll watch anything hong chau or jeffrey wright are in. also it’s amazing knowing he also watched succession and also loved hope davis and fisher stevens. wes’s most toybox film but also his deepest. packed with symbolism and meaning and philosophy. ponderous, exploratory, groundbreaking, personal. wes anderson is single-handedly keeping auteur theory alive. fascinating to compare this to the tiktok trend copying his style, because frankly it’s inimitable. it’s so much more than just symmetry and pastels. there’s so much movement, so much melancholy, so much fascination with the details of the mundane. maybe it’s the arizona-native sci-fi fan in me, but i think this is the best wes. all his trademarks are there (bad fathers, sad artists, autistic nerds) but this also felt much more self aware (i.e. a meep-meeping roadrunner) and self-expressive than recents like The French Dispatch or Isle of Dogs. loved loved loved it