Hollywood Elsewhere was a thriving business and a happy workplace for roughly 13 or 14 years. After launching in August ’04 ad income …well, it was touch-and-go for a while but found its footing sometime in early ’06. And then it grew and grew…offering stability, adventure, intrigue, annual European travel and a thriving lifestyle.
The worm began to turn with the horrific election of Donald Trump in November ’16. From that point on and certainly by the end of ’17 and into early ’18, you could feel the first tremors of wokesterism, triggered by perceptions of obstinate patriarchal whiteness as represented by the various bad guys of the moment (the Trumpster mob, Harvey, Woody, Roman and all the other alleged ogres who were being called out, many deservedly so).
Before I knew it the furies were swirling all over the place…anything that smelled even vaguely of older-white-guy attitudes or viewpoints became a form of evil. HE’s ad income began to drop in ’17 and ’18. It’s been a hellish four years.
I was reviewing all this after stumbling upon a post about a private evening tour of the Louvre’s Egyptian exhibit. It happened on 5.13.17, or four and two-thirds years ago. Life is never a bowl of cherries, but things felt relatively happy and settled at this point. The calm before the storm. Here’s how it went…
HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith invited me to join them early Saturday evening at the Louvre. A connected friend of Svet’s escorted us inside to a restricted–access tour of the Egyptian exhibit. I had never before wandered through this world-renowned museum as an invitation-only cool cat. No crowds or lines to cope with. The Egyptian statues, sarcophagi, relics and artifacts were nothing to sneeze at either. The highlight was the 4000 year-old chapel of the tomb (or “mastaba”) of Akhethotep, a bigwig in the Old Kingdom who was close to the king. (Egyptian rulers weren’t called pharaohs until the New Kingdom.)
Of course I love Wes Anderson creations…of course I do! It’s just that many of my Anderson faves are his commercials, and those dozens upon dozens of YouTube parodies. Feature-wise I’ve always been and will always be fully respectful of Anderson’s brand or stylistic stamp, and that includes, believe it or not, The French Dispatch, which I had a mostly unpleasant time with at Telluride last September.
But I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.
I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m 100% certain that one day he’ll reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.
Two and a half years ago I suggested that 2007 was and is one of the great film years, or roughly at par with 1999, 1971 and 1962 and 1939.
I listed 25 2007 films of serious merit — American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, Once, Superbad, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, I’m Not There, Sicko, Eastern Promises, The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, The Orphanage, 28 Weeks Later, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Darjeeling Limited, Knocked Up and Sweeney Todd. Just as strong as ’99, and perhaps even a touch better.
The idea in re-posting this is to note that 15 years have elapsed since ’07, and to ask if anyone feels that any of these annums have measured up to ’07 or any of the previous banner years.
I happen to believe that everything started to go badly the following year — 2008 — with the debut of Iron Man and the subsequent increasing power of the superhero genre (DC Extended Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe), and that “my” kind of movies haven’t been the same since. Strong, distinctive films have broken through every year, of course, but the pickings have been getting slimmer and slimmer since ’08, and especially since the Robespierre thought plague began to poison the water in ’17.
But don’t let me stop anyone. If you’re persuaded that ’09 or ’11 or ’16 were up to snuff, please make your case.
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