Pictureland

It's a frustrated director's fantasy come true:  a light conveniently falls on a cast member's head during a play's rehearsal, putting an end to some excruciating line readings.  Putting to a merciful end, if only temporarily, the bad actor.  Suddenly, a chance to cast someone good in the hack's stead.  But whom?  Woody Harrelson?  No, Woody has already committed to the next Hunger Games sequel.  Michael Fassbender?  Nope - X-Men.   Jeremy Renner, perhaps? Sorry - he's busy with his Avengers pals.  So many super heroes, so few brave actors to be found. This is the dilemma, in more ways than one, for Riggan Thomson, adaptor, director and star of the play within the film which is Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) . Thomson himself knows something about superhero movie franchises.  The middle-aged actor played the fictional character Birdman in three films during more the more youthful and prosperous years of his...

Think pink.  Welcome to the Grand Budapest.   Popular this year in Andersonia:  mustaches, the colors purple and pink...and yet more mustaches. Continuing to trend very well:  uniforms, exotic names and art direction so inlaid with detail and saturated with color to produce retinal overload or high blood sugar.  Or both.  If mise-en-scene be the food of love, give me surfeit of it! one might say...if one happened to wander off the set of Twelfth Night and onto the set of Wes Anderson's latest film, where the forgetting of one's lines, not to mention connection to life on planet Earth would be quite understandable. It is the fictional European Alpine state of Zubrowka in which G rand Budapest Hotel is set.  But make no mistake:  we're deep, deep in the heart of Andersonia.  Perhaps deeper than we have yet been, we brave souls who have witnessed all eight of the director's feature-length films.  Yet only eight?  Can that be...

Devotees of Wes Anderson seem to regard the release of a new film from the director as a kind of cinematic holiday. Not quite an annual event, but always a cause for celebration. To film lovers so inclined, Anderson's latest feature, Moonrise Kingdom , should offer more of the festive same. And more yet; sort of Christmas and the Fourth of July. But to those of us - we few, we grouchy few - who come to this latest work from the writer/director with any sense of reservation, Moonrise Kingdom might prove to be rather too much, a holiday that's lost all meaning while clinging to its ceremonial excess. Sure, it's a lovely parade, a richly constructed 94-minute show complete with fireworks. But would it be impertinent to ask the point of all this? As the busy closing credits indicate over a child-narrated Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra , a small army of individuals were involved to achieve the look of Moonrise Kingdom . Nonetheless, the culmination of this var...