dudley's world
As far as The Royal Tenenbaums (which I keep trying to spell Tannenbaums), I think Wes Anderson is doing something important in keeping the performances and mise-en-scène highly stylized. The strength of film is its ability for rich and complicated mimesis, and by giving that mimesis a lot to work with Anderson skirts the medium's weaknesses for storytelling, as compared to narrative prose: 1) a short amount of subjective time; and 2) the inability to convey interior states, other than by clumsy devices such as the voiceover.
Of course, the problem is that Anderson's particular tricks lend themselves more easily to wit than pathos—so that while I thought a couple of scenes were genuinely moving, as a whole the film suffered from a dilution of heart. I don't know what to do with movies any more. The medium is 95 percent moribund and 5 percent confused, and I've lost any sense of how to approach it. So I'm removing the film section from the canon bar to the left, at least for now.
James Boswell, what's to be done with ye?
I drank too much. We had whist after dinner. When I returned to town, I was a good deal intoxicated, ranged the streets, and having met with a comely, fresh-looking girl, madly ventured to lie with her on the north brae of the castle hill. I told my dear wife immediately.
