This quarter, I'm showing Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing to one of my classes. I've probably seen this film about twenty times and while I've enjoyed each viewing (and I always come away with something new), it can never match the impact of seeing it the first time back in 1989. For young film viewers today, I think it's hard to really appreciate how revolutionary this film really was. Spike Lee, along with Steven Soderbergh (whose Sex, Lies, and Videotape was also released in 1989) gave birth to the modern independent film movement. While Tarantino may have exploded the scene a few years later, Lee, Soderbergh, and to a lesser extent Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, also released in 1989) really laid the foundation for the great renaissance in American cinema during the 1990s.
One product of this renaissance was Wes Anderson whose 1996 film Bottle Rockets became a festival favorite. A couple of years later, Rushmore would become a hugely succesful hit (on an indie scale, that is) and help bring back Bill Murray to popular consciousness. When I first saw this film in the theater, I was stunned. While not quite as revolutionary as Do the Right Thing or Sex, Lies, and Videotape, it was still incredibly fresh and new. Watching it again thirteen years later, the film has aged well (although one might argue the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke, the two main stars of the film, have not had the same fortune).
The cinematography is incredibly clean and sharp. This is in stark contrast to everything else Anderson has done. Perhaps, he was limited by a smaller budget but the composition of each shot seemed so much more fully thought out. Anderson's later films, such as The Royal Tenenbaums, tend to be visually overwhelming. Anderson clearly prefers a manufactured, artifical world and there's certainly nothing wrong with that but in his later films, those worlds tend to be OVER manufactured. Similarly, the comic elements of Bottle Rockets works much better as well. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the characters seem too precious, too aware of themselves and their quirky nature. It feels insincere and affected. The characters in Bottle Rockets, on the other hand, simply are quirky.
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