“One privately blind writer who wrote keenly through the eyes of others”

Did I post something on Wes Anderson's latest film Asteroid City (2023)? I think I did. It's easy to find out if I did. But who has the time! I know I do. I have the time. Though your time is another matter.

Fair to say that you either like appreciate Wes Anderson's films or you don't? ("There are two responses," says the improvised Anderson narrator, "each of them unacceptable.")

For all its aggravations, Anderson's Asteroid City behaved in a way that made visible its narrative thread oxygen tube. With his previous The French Dispatch (2021), a film only the New Yorker loved because it was modelled after it, attempts at an oxygen tube (voice-over) are secondary to the auteur's interminably long and aimless section portraits. Sadly, these are not portraits as Gertrude Stein would have written them, but as the fictive French Dispatch magazine writers would have posed for them.

What is The French Dispatch but a collection of Joseph Cornell boxes given to Mattel to make from them a Gypsy Barbie Caravan? It contains the usual Anderson fantasy of instant histories, attention-getting idiosyncrasies, because-I-can tableaux and adverbs ("... privately ... keenly ...") ad nauseam -- at times sounding as if Evelyn Waugh, fresh from one of his sleep medication nightmares, had written for Dr. Seuss. Of course the Dispatch is set in the French town of Ennui. Of course it's first section is a teen digest-version of Godard's La Chinoise (1967). Of course I had to stop watching after the first sixty minutes -- despite my crush on Léa Seydoux.

Alors. Eh bien. C'est dommage.