Word: visual
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Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so supercool, it's chilly. In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by the camera's point of view shifting 90º or 180º--geometrically groovy but quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy but not the aptitude. His films are airless. Humor under glass...
...Internet: a wicked-cool invention that experimentalists would toy with just to see what crazy stuff they could make it do. Ernie Kovacs was the most innovative of TV's early mad scientists, using his comedy hour to spoof such then new creations as newscasts and ads and employing visual effects like upside-down pictures and tilted sets to appear to defy gravity. Comedy is lying done amusingly, and Kovacs knew that TV--which purported to show all but hid everything beyond the outline of the box--was a divine medium for lies. Kovacs would have been a natural...
Geoffrey Tabin, an accomplished American ophthalmologist, sent me an e-mail recently reporting on the week he spent in a poor village in Ghana, in West Africa. "We examined 4,600 people and documented their visual status, refractive errors and any pathology or disease," he wrote. "We gave spectacles to all who needed glasses and gave away 500 pairs of reading glasses. My retinal partner and I performed 159 cataract surgeries. All of the patients were seen one week postoperatively. There were no infections or serious complications...
...with all of the training and preparations we went through, because that is what resulted in the feelings we had. We had to do everything we humanly could to guarantee success. It was a time of reflecting on the bigger meaning of things and being in awe of the visual situation and experience. There was a sense that our souls were linked with the entire world...
...Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so super-cool, it's chilly. In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by with the camera point-of-view shifted 90 or 180 degrees - which is geometrically groovy, no question, but pretty quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy, but not the aptitude. His films are museum...