By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
The new male infantilism: Wes Anderson, et al
Matthew Wilder roughs up a wuss generation in City Pages: “Wes Anderson is perhaps the dean of the LittleBlue SmurfBoys™, having plied his middle-schooler wares for the past decade. Of this trinity of Smurfs, Young Master Wes seems to show the most promise as, if not a Big Bruiser, surely a Soigné Uptown Sophisticate. Where a stunted self-regarder like [Conor] Oberst seems condemned to an incommunicative trance, the 36-year-old Anderson is aware enough of the lineage of movie auteurs as lion-taming showmen to, some day, escape his autistic fugue state. In his bizarrely engineless recent effort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson left the Broadway aspirations of The Royal Tenenbaums to plunge headlong into a silo stuffed with a haut-bourgeois 12-year-old kid’s fetish objects. No longer concerned with suspense or surprise, or even story or character, Anderson gives himself a consolation massage as the screen widens with little red ski caps, zany matching Nike tracksuits, Hottentots out of Master Wes’s moth-eaten National Geographics, and a series of nautical vehicles that recall the playthings of bath time…. Still, the winning noblesse oblige of Anderson’s audio commentaries on [his] Criterion DVDs… leave me thinking that the director might one day possess the character traits of a functioning adult. [Wilder also describes novelist Jonathan Safran Foer‘s latest, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” as “‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ for the yellow Converse set.” … In the world of blue-state liberal-arts grads, and most especially in the world of movie/book/music criticism, there ain’t a lot of Big Bruising going on. In this Blue Smurfy climate, the outsized obsessions, red-hot rhetoric, and violent argument of the Bruisers would give the tastemaking class a panic attack…. I can only pray some hibernating Bruiser–Don DeLillo, say, or Robert Rauschenberg–will spring from his cave, tear [the] Saint-Exupéry scarf off [a] pencil neck, and show him how it’s really done: art-making revealed as high-wire act, fire-eating contest, bare-knuckle barroom brawl.”