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Quickie Review - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Message boards, social media and personal conversation and I still don't get it. Why does anyone watch a Wes Anderson film if they don't appreciate his vision? The movies are all the same, in the sense that they will dazzle you visually and bewilder you if you're not accustomed to his style of dialogue, much like many of our youth who simply can't grasp those "silly B&W films."

While I wasn't trying to be philosophical, someone who also likes Anderson, asked me to explain in simple terms what his films are an why they work. I had just seen Jaws the night before and this is what I could offer. "Imagine Jaws, if the movie was told by Hooper and Brody, from the perspective of Quint, sometime many years after it happened." Just as the greatest scene in Jaws is Quint's telling of the USS Arizona, Wes Anderson allows time to turn the tales into memories and we all, nobody who we are, tend to embellish. All his movies are doing is embellishing greatly on simple subjects, like love and life. The Grand Budapest Hotel takes a very simply story, makes it into a five part insane spectacle and for all the complete zaniness, it comes across as nothing more than a man with a great story to tell, telling it, to a writer, who then turns it into his own tale. It might be short of brilliant, if only for the fact that, like all of his movies, they take multiple viewings and not all of us are willing to give them that time.

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