Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson

The Wiz DOES NOT RECOMMEND Asteroid City Ever since seeing Rushmore back in the 90s, I've looked forward to seeing all of Wes Anderson's films. I can freely admit: Wes Anderson is an acquired taste. You either like the way he shoots his movies and the deliberate way he has the actors perform or you don't. But if I'm being honest, his last few films have not really done much for me. Isle of Dogs felt like a mess in numerous ways, I did like parts of The French Dispatch but it's also not as tight as his best films. And now Asteroid City is also another miss for me. But what I didn't expect is that Wes Anderson's quaint, colorful, postmodern style would be the problem I would have with the film. Telling a story about loneliness, despair and depression through a large cast could possibly be done well, but two problems arise: the movie clocks in at about 100 minutes and you barely know much about any of the characters and the emotion you would expect is drained due to Anderson's style. There's also a meta-narrative involving the creation of this story (which is a play created by fictional playwrights) that felt largely pointless to me. This just resulted in a mess that, after the end of the film, made me miss his more personal, dialed back films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.