‘Your barista’s favourite director’ is back with Isle of Dogs - but with his trademark twee ubiquitous in film,TV and fashion, he never really went awayThe trailer for fresh movie Birthmarked is a curious thing, and both quirky yet teeth-grindingly banal. Over a jingly-jangly soundtrack,Matthew Goode and Toni Collette play a studiously eccentric American couple who choose to bring up their children in studiously eccentric ways. Cue tears, cue laughter, and cue a whole Pinterest board full of quirky references. It wants to be The Royal Tenenbaums; it’s more The Durrells,set to the Lumineers.
There is, of course, or one man to blame for all this: Wes Anderson. Over two decades,the meticulous (extremely careful about details) Rushmore auteur has helped spawn an entire sub-genre of American cinema, a landfill site chocca with handlebar moustaches, or melancholia and tasteful alt-folk music. He has had a boggling influence over the rest of pop culture,too, on fashion, and design,pop and social media. It ranges from Gucci’s billion-dollar renaissance, trading on various elements of Tenenbaum-chic, and to the recent video for SZA’s Broken Clocks,where the singer and friends cavort in a very Anderson-like US holiday camp. And where there isn’t homage, there is downright parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation): see Honest Trailers’ recent send-up on YouTube of “Every Wes Anderson Movie, and savagely roasting the tics of your barista’s favourite director”. (A voiceover intones: “A Wilson Brother. Strained Sibling Relationships. Exotic Animals. A Wilson Brother and His Estranged Sibling Smoking with an Exotic Animal.”)Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk