jennings rampage

I’m drawing a line in the ornate set.

If you’ve been paying attention, it shouldn’t surprise you at all that I absolutely hated The Darjeeling Limited.

I mean, really, how many “tales of the ennui of the privileged” do we really need, Wes Anderson? Your visual aesthetic is charming and delightful, but you’ve written exactly one script, yet you keep building new massive and detailed sets to pan across. Now, the details and the visuals remain incredible (loved the name of the perfume), but what I wouldn’t give to see you direct someone else’s screenplay right now. And by “someone else’s screenplay,” what I mean of course is “another screenplay other than the same one you keep shooting over and over.”

Here’s my case-in-point, and it’s the teeny-tiniest spoiler, so deal. We spent a lot of time on this ornate baggage (designed by Louis Vuitton), and we eventually establish that it belonged to their father, and we’re treated to about seventy shots of it being loaded and unloaded and carried very cumbersomely and awkwardly. Gosh, what could this REPRESENT??? So anyone who’s passed a sixth grade language arts class knows what fate awaits the fancy suitcases, and when we finally get to it (in slow motion and set to music, otherwise we wouldn’t know it’s important), not only does it happen, but it gets CALLED OUT. Really?

It’s funny, because the short film before the feature was actually pretty well done — said the right things and left the right things unsaid. Told a whole story in a few minutes, didn’t treat me like I needed Cliff Notes to understand the dynamic between the characters, let the acting do its job. And then the feature promptly threw all of that out the window and hit us over the head with every parallel in every fucked-up relationship and made me hate every character and didn’t give me any reason to believe I would ever like them in their lives. It was a shitty story.

Wes Anderson, you must be stopped.

I forget who said it, but someone once said that 90% of everything is crap. These days, I fear, I think we might be up to like 92% overall.