The Phoenician Scheme
Focus Features
2025
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenwriter: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola
Novelist:
Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera
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I'm not sure when Wes Anderson got old. Isle of Dogs, perhaps? And yeah, I haven't seen R.T. or L.A. or D.L. or R. but I'm pretty sure I've seen all the others. M.K. was the best I think, so earnest. Nowadays his movies which are unrealistically still in theaters are forgettable, stingy, corny, shame-inducing, grotesque, egotistical, and yet, still, somewhat easy to consume. Like it's almost funny he like a cheap pendant can't even begin to imagine a new camera shot or a new approach to color or new storytelling device, he can only swish back and forth between opposing evils of cheapness in cameo diversity and aesthetic plague while finding at the bottom apex usually some crowd-pleasing unimaginative normalcy dressed up as verve. But maybe he's getting out of his slump, maybe he's remembered subtle characters again — Del Toro, Cera — and the scenes which make them — the airplane. But it's all still too much of the same and I hate when writers who don't appreciate finance or bureaucracy try to make light of it – it's like a kid drawing shitty pictures of a warthog in a small beautiful cave with the unbearable sense we're supposed to somehow appreciate the warthog.