the french dispatch…

Moira and I went to the Watershed this afternoon to see Wes Anderson’s film “The French Dispatch” – a tribute to the New Yorker magazine. It was the first time we’d been to the cinema together since the start of the pandemic (and also only my second visit to the cinema in 19 months).
I absolutely love Wes Anderson films – they’re always a visual delight… and wonderfully inventive, silly, hilarious and hugely entertaining.
This film did not disappoint! I loved it.
It really was an homage to a legendary list of writers and (in the words of The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw) “a famed insistence on standards, collegiate office culture, distinctive cartoons and typographic layout, metropolitan sophistication targeted at a general American readership”. Frankly, I’d never heard of the magazine, but I warmed to it immediately (and, frankly, it didn’t matter at all anyway).
The film is ridiculously FULL of famous actors… I can imagine actors queuing up just to be considered for any Anderson film.
Visually, I love Anderson’s symmetrical, front-on, backdrop facades and also his colour blends (these also included a number of black+white scenes and also some clever, amusing animation). Half way through the film, I realised that I’d taken the brilliant ‘background music’ completely for granted and so, in the film’s latter stages, I tried my best to focus on it. It really is very beautifully done. So impressively simple and yet so important.
It was lovely to be back in the cinema again and, frankly, if I’d had a free choice of film to watch, it would have been something by Anderson.
I loved it… and it made very happy.