Commentary: The Top 10 Films of the Decade

My criterion for selecting the top 10 films of the decade is very simple. These are the ten films from the past ten years that I cannot stand to live without. These aren’t necessarily the greatest films. They aren’t the most critically acclaimed. They definitely aren’t the most financially successful. They’re quite simply my favorite movies. So, in descending order …

#10: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Julian Schnabel’s story of the paralyzed French editor of Elle magazine is one of the most visually engaging and humanistic films of the past decade. We spend most of the movie in the head of Bauby, our paralyzed protagonist. Schnabel conveys his sense of isolation and entrapment through any number of innovative film techniques. Ultimately, as impressive as this film is on a technical level, it’s the engagement with the realities of death that makes it so watchable.

#9: A Serious Man (2009)
The only film from 2009 that made it on my list. The Coen Brothers have struck gold once again with this comically heartbreaking story of a Minneapolis suburban Jewish physics professor from the late 1960s. The Coens convincingly combined dark comedy, witty dialogue, and genuine pathos into a ridiculously engaging (post)modern retelling of the story of Job. I hope Michael Stuhlbarg, a relatively unknown stage actor, will become a household name sometime in the near future. His work as the protagonist is incredible.

#8: High Fidelity (2000)
Every time I watch this film, it’s as if the filmmakers have a window into my soul. John Cusack owns a record shop in Chicago’s Wicker Park, the hipster capitol of the Midwest. He and his fellow music geeks stand around all day discussing the artistic merits of Gordon Lightfoot and Stevie Wonder and creating such esoteric lists as “Top 5 Songs to Play on a Depressing Monday Morning.” In addition, Cusack takes us through the hazards of love, highlighting his top 5 most painful breakups. Jack Black, it should be given, gives one of the great comic musical performances of all time during the film’s inspired denouncement.

#7: Almost Famous (2000)
Another film that has a window to my soul. Cameron Crowe creates one of the best films about music of all time. A young teenager has the opportunity to work as a music journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, following the tour of a rock group based loosely on the Eagles, the Allman Brothers, and several other vintage bands. Kate Hudson plays one of the band’s principle groupies. Who knew she could actually act? Crowe clearly understands the importance that music has for individuals and conveys that passion through the inspired dialogue and killer soundtrack. Having seen this film, I could never listen to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” without crying just a bit.

#6: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Screenwriter/director Charlie Kauffman is the cinematic artist of the decade. He has created three fascinating portraits of the human brain’s inner workings. It was all I could do not to include all three films on this list. Nevertheless, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry and staring Jim Carey and Kate Winslet, is the most effective of the three, more confident than either Adaptation or Synecdoche, New York. In the great tradition of romantic comedies, Eternal Sunshine asks the question of what it really means to love someone. Can we ever truly forget those we love, or does their memory remain forever?

#5: Once (2007)
Yes, yet another film about music on my list! Obviously, you can tell where my passions lie. Musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova star in the love story of the decade. Once is the antithesis of all the big budget junk Hollywood shoves in our faces every year. The story of two Irish street musicians who find contentment in one another’s art is small, quiet, and intimate. The film’s soundtrack has carried me emotionally through many a difficult time. If I ever had the opportunity to make a film, Once is the movie I would most want to emulate.

#4: There will be Blood (2007)
Paul Thomas Anderson succeeded in making the greatest American epic since Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Anderson tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), an oilman in early 20th century America. He revolutionizes the oil business, but loses his mind in the process. There will be Blood is the kind of messy, larger-than-life film that would make D.W. Griffith proud. Indeed, Anderson explores the connections between capitalism, oil, and religion in a way that is prescient, yet never heavy-handed. The hypermodernistic score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood helps set the perfect menacing atmosphere for this tale of madness, big business, and the American psyche.

#3: Talk to Her (2004)
Every once in a while, I have an emotional connection to a film so deep that I can’t quite put it in words. Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her represents such a case. The plot is pure soap opera and the film contains so many moments of melodrama that I can’t count them all. But, somehow this intimate parable about the power of art and beauty to transform the human soul gets me every time. This isn’t a film I recommend for everyone, since it covers some dark and twisted territory. But, if you’re willing to take this weird journey with Almodovar, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

#2: Kill Bill (2003-2004)
This is the only time I really “cheat” on the list. Yes, Quentin Tarantino’s martial arts epic was divided into Volume One and Volume Two. While each volume has its own style and story arch, I feel the films are better considered together, since that’s how Tarantino originally conceived of them. Tarantino has said that with Volume One he tried to make the greatest action movie ever made. I’m not sure that I can really argue with him. He uses every cinematic resource available to him to deliver the goods in the Tea Leaf Room massacre scene, one of the most intense action scenes in the history of cinema. Volume Two is more emotional, taking inspiration from the best of Sergio Leone westerns. Tarantino is one of the true artists of the decade, making not only the audacious masterwork that is Kill Bill, but also the challenging and utterly beautiful Inglourious Basterds.

#1: No Country for Old Men (2007)
Any choice for the greatest film of the decade is going to seem absurd by default. How can one summarize all of the filmmaking that took place in a ten-year period and narrow it down to ONE film? This task is impossible, so the choice of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men represents my own tastes and sensibilities, not necessarily artistic quality. At its root, the Coen Brothers’ film is simply an incredible thriller. Every single frame contributes to the overall experience of watching this simple story unfold. The Coens manage to keep the tension up without the use of music or heavy-handed visual effects. Javier Bardem plays the villainous role of the decade. I also think that No Country speaks to something about the social and political issues we have faced in the past decade. Not everyone agrees we me, and that’s okay. Whether or not you buy No Country’s philosophical and political explorations, surely we can all agree that it’s one of the most well-made thrillers in recent memory. Then there’s the ending …

Other films from the decade I really, really liked (in more particular order):

Lost in Translation, United 93, The Hurt Locker, Before Sunset, Zodiac, Synecdoche New York, Waking Life, Let the Right One In, Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Brothers, The Lives of Others, The Three Burials of Melquaides Estrada, Pan’s Labyrinth, Munich, Gosford Park, Mystic River, Cache, Ghost World, A History of Violence, Punch-Drunk Love, Grizzly Man, Letters from Iwo Jima, Children of Men, Happy-Go-Lucky, Old Joy, School of Rock, Rachel Getting Married, etc., etc., etc., ...

Movie Review: Me and Orson Welles (2009, Directed by Richard Linklater)

Oh, how glorious to be young, in love, and living in New York in 1937! Jazz was pouring through the streets. Poetry was flowing from the pens of young intellectuals in corner cafes. A young Orson Welles was staging revolutionary Shakespearean adaptations at the Mercury Theatre and ticking off most everyone he worked with in the process.

The strengths of Richard Linklater’s new film Me and Orson Welles, an account of a young teenager’s (Zach Effron) experience playing in a progressive Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar directed by the great Welles himself (Christian McCay), are the meticulously-staged recreations of Welles’ miraculously dramatic stage production. The audience, even looking through the eyes of 2009, cannot help but be blown away by the audacity and passion of Welles’ theatrical vision. No wonder critics and audiences alike were buzzing madly about Julius Caesar, saying that Shakespearean theatre would never be the same again.

As for the rest of the movie … not so much. Effron is passable as Welles’ young actor, but his relationships with two different women feel contrived and overly sentimentalized. The trajectory of Effron’s story doesn’t really make sense and in the end we’re left to wonder what the point of the whole thing was, other than to see moments of Welles’ theatrical genius.

I suppose McCay may be up for an Oscar for his portrayal of the young, yet already arrogant and voracious Welles. He does a credible job depicting the big guy, but doesn’t bring any new insight into the great man. As I said, though, it’s enough to simply sit back and enjoy the scenes from Welles’ Caesar. It’s the closest any of us will probably ever come to being there.

Movie Review: The Princess and the Frog (2009, Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker)

I am not a part of the target audience for the new Disney animated (not computer-generated) film The Princess and the Frog. I was mildly amused with the film’s New Orleans milieu early on. However, the stereotypes about jazz, gumbo, and voodoo became tiresome very quickly. None of the songs were memorable to me. I am happy that the film features an African-American protagonist for the first time in … well … ever, and I like the play with gender roles and expectations that seems to be occurring on some level. I hope that the cultural differences between The Princess and the Frog and princess stories from the past will be beneficial in some way for the film’s target demographic. As for me, I’ll take the bold maturity and visual splendor of the best Pixar films like Up, WALL-E, and Ratatouille any day over this bunch of magic kingdom boredom.

Movie Review: The Road (2009, Directed by John Hillcoat)

Adapting the literary works of Cormac McCarthy is an arguably impossible task. The Coen Brothers’ 2007 masterwork No Country for Old Men worked primarily because the McCarthy source material is one of the author’s weakest works. The Coens were able to take McCarthy’s uncharacteristically conventional material and inject it with enhanced character development and crisp, darkly amusing dialogue.

Unfortunately, director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of McCarthy’s bestselling The Road is not as successful. The problem lies not with its visuals. Hillcoat and company effectively convey the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting through a monochrome cinematographic strategy and a set which invokes a tour through Dante’s Inferno. Nor are the lead performances problematic. Viggo Mortensen is nuanced and emotionally intelligent as always. Kodi Smit-McPhee, in the role of the boy, brings the right combination of bravery and pathos. The real problems with The Road are the script and the music.

McCarthy’s brooding, yet ultimately hopeful novel, full of the complexity and ambiguities of human survival, is transformed into a film worthy of Oscar contention. I don’t mean this as a compliment. The actors do their best with the material they are given. However, the script asks them to come right out and say what McCarthy’s source material subtly implies. As if this lack of subtlety in the screenplay weren’t enough to edge The Road towards conventional Hollywoodization, Nick Cave’s melodramatic score serves to underline every emotional moment with a musical punch in the face. The apocalyptic material is dark enough the way it is. We don’t need to be continually reminded with the dialogue and the music what a dire situation the characters find themselves in.

Ultimately, The Road commits the artistic sin that annoys me more than any other. It insults the audience member’s intelligence. We can speculate on the author’s thematic concerns without having to be told what to think directly in a voiceover. We can soak in the work’s emotional complexity without being subjected to Cave’s pulsating score.

Despite the film’s major shortcomings, it is still successful in visually replicating the world McCarthy describes. I enjoyed the film very much on this level. I just wish the filmmakers weren’t intent on winning an Academy Award. Hillcoat’s movie made me want to read the novel once again.

Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009, Directed by Jason Reitman)

Up in the Air, in the tradition of classic screwball comedies like Sullivan’s Travels and Bringing up Baby, serves as a snapshot of our times. Director Jason Reitman, of Juno and Thank You For Smoking fame, manages to tackle the recession and the soaring unemployment rate with a successful blend of witty banter and genuine pathos. He leads his audience down a well worn Hollywood path with the anticipation of a simplistic resolution and then thwarts their expectations with a heavy dose of reality. Reitman’s film manages to feel simultaneously like an old-fashioned entertainment and an edgy darkly comic indie gem. It’s Reitman’s most successful film to date, and one of the most genuinely exciting pictures to come out in 2009.

George Clooney, the closest thing contemporary Americans have to a Cary Grant, plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizing expert who spends 320 or so days of the year on the road (or, more accurately, up in the air). Bingham travels from city to city to inform employees of recession-plagued companies that their services are no longer needed. Clooney’s character is the kind of man who racks up frequent flyer miles with no particular purpose in mind. He is more interested in the status symbol of a “platinum card” than the possibility of a free trip around the world. Bingham “lives” in Omaha, although we see that his apartment looks even more austere and barely lived in than the anonymous hotels he frequents throughout the nation.

Into Bingham’s life come two strong, determined women. Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is a young hotshot who has plans to revolutionize the business of corporate downsizing. Why is Bingham’s company sending him and several other “downsizers” on expensive trips when they could be firing people from the comforts of Omaha via teleconferencing? Bingham, not a homebody by any means, opposes this strategy and is less than thrilled when his boss asks Keener to tag along on one of Bingham’s multi-city “downsizing trips” to show her the secrets of the trade. We also meet Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman so similar to Bingham in personality and lifestyle that it’s scary. We never find out for sure what Goran does for a living, but it doesn’t really matter. Both characters share a love for hotel food, platinum cards, and frequent flyer miles. They, as they say, “hit it off.”

The joys of Up in the Air’s humorous façade are tempered by the dark undercurrents of unemployment and economic insecurity. Bingham’s job is secure simply because he fires people for a living, an industry that is booming in these troubled times. However, the unfortunate individuals Bingham “conferences with” every day are not as fortunate. The fact that Reitman brilliantly casts recently unemployed Americans in these small roles as the “fired” makes us sympathize with their plights to an even greater extent.

I was afraid that Reitman’s film was veering into conventional movie land as it reached its third act. Bingham attends his sister’s wedding in rural Wisconsin, bringing Goran along as a date. For about twenty minutes, the movie feels incredibly uninspired as Bingham finds himself involved in a “runaway groom” scenario. He must convince his sister’s fiancé to go through with the ceremony using the most vapid Hollywood clichés in the book. As the film’s credits rolled, however, I realized why Reitman included these twenty minutes of sheer boredom. We are convinced for a bit that everything will be okay and Bingham’s character will “change” for the better based on his experiences. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but let’s just say the lessons learned by the film’s end are nominal. Reitman wisely avoids the path of least resistance and instead leaves the audience with an unsettled feeling. We sense that Bingham’s character will probably have a fulfilling life in the end, but we don’t know for sure. Up in the Air leaves it up to us to speculate on what tomorrow will bring. For this reason, Reitman’s movie manages to capture the uncertainties of our time better than any other film this year. Indeed, the future is truly up in the air.

Commentary: The Top Records of the 21st Century

This blog is devoted primarily to writings about film, particularly current theatrical releases. However, in the spirit of all the end-of-decade lists being published like they’re going out of style (which, by the way, they are in a few weeks), I couldn’t help but think about my own “favorites” of the decade. I will be sharing a list of top films of the decade within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to share my list of the top 10 records of the 2000s (or whatever we’re calling this 10-year period these days).

The only thing more subjective than an end-of-decade film list is an end-of-decade music list. How can one possibly cover all of the genres, artists, and musical movements from an entire decade in one top-ten list? The answer is simply “one cannot.” Therefore, I will not try to be objective in any way. The following list simply represents the few albums of the past 10 years that I like the best. This list reflects my current taste in music more than my past taste. Thus, you will find it heavy in indie and alternative rock. I deeply regret that I only included two jazz records on the list, since jazz is a genre I deeply love, as both a listener and performer. There’s also only one hip-hop record included, and only one album that could be remotely called “country.” Given my love of film, it’s probably surprising to see only one movie soundtrack. Oh well, following is my list of records that I cannot imagine going through the next 10 years without:

#10: Danger Mouse, The Grey Album
Favorite Track: “What More Can I Say”
This is not only the greatest rap record of the 21st century so far, but is also a paragon of excellence for the uniquely postmodern phenomenon that is the “mashup.” Jay-Z’s Black Album + The Beatles’ White Album + Danger Mouse’s wacky creativity = a masterpiece of a unique aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, what more can I say?

#9: Soundtrack from Once
Favorite Track: “When Your Mind’s Made Up”
My favorite soundtrack of the decade from one of my favorite movies of the decade. The soundtrack from Once, featuring musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, demonstrates that raw emotion sometimes trumps technical perfection in musical performance. This album is about love, loss, and other simple everyday emotions. The hauntingly quiet songs got under my skin and wouldn’t let me go for almost a year.

#8: John Coltrane with Thelonious Monk Quartet, At Carnegie Hall
Favorite Track: “Monk’s Mood”
This record probably constitutes the musical discovery of the decade. The tapes from this legendary meeting of the two great jazz modernists sat untouched in the Library of Congress for years. The sound quality is not pristine, but it’s enough to convey the urgent passion and utter beauty with which this ensemble played. If you only buy one jazz record per decade, this should probably be the one.

#7: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
Favorite Track: “Through the Morning, Through the Night”
When I first heard that Zeppelin god Robert Plant was teaming up with bluegrass goddess Alison Krauss I smelled disaster in the air. That was before I knew that the effort was being produced by T-Bone Burnett, one of the truly gifted producers of our time. The result is an instant masterpiece. The sounds that Burnett manages to capture on this unique record are simultaneously joyful and sorrowful, exuberant and creepy. The pedal steel and hollow drums alone are worth the purchase price.

#6: The Bad Plus, Give
Favorite Track: “Velouria”
Jazz traditionalists hate The Bad Plus. Progressive hispsters think they’re the best thing since sliced bread. I fall decidedly in the latter camp on this argument. The Bad Plus continues to be one of the most innovative and provocative groups working in jazz today. While their postmodern juxtaposition of seemingly disparate musical elements tends to alienate purists, I tend to think they are simply continuing in the great jazz tradition of creating great art out of the standards of today. Their versions of Nirvana, Pixies, and Black Sabbath tunes are to the 21st century what “I’ve Got You Under my Skin” and “Just You, Just Me” were to the likes of Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson. To this day, I can’t hear “And Here We Test our Powers of Observation” without getting goosebumps.

#5: The Decemberists, The Crane Wife / The Hazards of Love
Favorite Track(s): “The Crane Wife 1 & 2” & “The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid”
I thought for sure the Decemberists had created their magnum opus with the concept album The Crane Wife in 2006. Now, they have created a second masterpiece with The Hazards of Love in 2009. Who can possibly choose between the two? Both records share a common thread that hold them together, although who can say for sure what that is. They both rely upon Japanese folklore, tales from the American past, and obscure literary references in their lyrics. The Decemberists resist coming off as pretentious, however, because their songs are just so dang catchy. Who really cares what they’re talking about when the melodies are so tuneful, the grooves are righteous, and the Hammond B3 rocks like a hurricane?

#4: Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise
Favorite Track: “Chicago”
Sufjan Stevens, the most ambitious member of the so-called “orchestral folk” movement, has started a project to chronicle the histories, legends, and geographies of all 50 states. He has so far chronicled his home state of Michigan and the home state of our current president. If he simply stopped the project now, he will have created one of the definitive musical statements of the early 21st century. Illinoise is ostensibly about the Land of Lincoln. However, Stevens wisely uses the framework of “a concept album about Illinois” in the same way the Beatles used Sgt. Pepper and his band in 1967. We soon forget after a few songs that we’re listening to the history of the Prairie State. Illinoise is simply the most intensely personal record of the past 10 years. Stevens addresses issues of love, death, loss, rejuvenation, and faith, all the while giving us snapshots of local history and color. It takes a truly skilled artist to turn a song about serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. into a reflection on sin and guilt, a song about the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago into a personal statement about the pangs of creating art, or a song about the celebration of Polanski Day into a testament to the inevitability and pains of mortality. In addition to Stevens’ lyrical innovation, his instrumentation is bold and original. Stevens uses the full array of instruments available to him, from guitars to keyboards, from woodwinds to brass, from orchestral sings to folky banjos and mandolins. More than any other record, Illinoise has become the soundtrack of my life for the past year or so.

#3: The Arcade Fire, Funeral
Favorite Track: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
We have reached the point in the list where I start feeling like a failure because my top few choices line up so precisely with critical (but not necessarily popular) opinion. Liking Arcade Fire is one of the great 21st-century trends in hipsterdem. The fact that the Arcade Fire have found such an enthusiastic following among the indie crowd, though, doesn’t stop my love for their infectious melodies and unrelenting rhythmic energy. This is simply a band that cannot be stopped. Neon Bible was also a great record, but felt a bit heavy-handed in its lyrics about commercialized religion and failed American foreign policies. I prefer the simplicity of Funeral’s meditations about relationships and mortality. This group of young Canadian indies has created some of the most strangely jubilant anthems of our generation. Who can hear “Neighborhood #1” or “Wake Up” without letting that exuberant rhythm overtake you?

#2: Radiohead, Kid A / In Rainbows
Favorite Track(s): “Everything in its Right Place” ; “All I Need”
Radiohead is the quintessential band for the new millennium. This troupe of creative Brits, led by alternative icon Thom Yourke, wrap all of our 21st century hopes and fears into one big musical package, tying together emotional rock genres of the past with cold and creepy digital technologies of the future. The band’s two greatest records, Kid A and In Rainbows, represent two sides of the same musical coin. Kid A reflects the fear secretly lurking in the back of many modern heads. Will our scientific capabilities and our reliance on new technologies lead to a cold conformity? Will we gain a digital world and lose our souls in the process? In Rainbows, on the other hand, explores what it means to be human amidst all of postmodernity’s terrifying potential for dehumanizing destruction. Has any musical artist of the past decade written lyrics as clear and emotionally direct as those found in songs like “All I Need” and “House of Cards”? The fact that the financially successful In Rainbows was released using an innovative web-based price structure (pay what you want, or pay nothing at all), seems wildly appropriate for this risk-taking band. No matter what you personally paid for In Rainbows, it was probably worth a lot more. Someday, I suspect that Radiohead will be studied in much the same way we study the Beatles today. They capture something about our current cultural moment that future generations will want to comprehend. Did I mention, by the way, that their music rocks?

#1: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Favorite Track: “Poor Places”
This Chicago-based band says more about where we have been the past ten years and where we are going now than any other musical artist, in my opinion. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, truly succeeds in expressing several contradictory impulses simultaneously. While the record was recorded before the tragedies of September 2001, its lyrics seem eerily prescient to the events that would follow. “I would like to salute all the ashes of American flags / And all the falling leaves filling up shopping bags” ; “It’s a war on war / You have to lose / You have to learn how to die / If you want to stay alive” ; “Tall buildings shake … skyscrapers scraping together …” ; “Speaking of tomorrow … how will it ever come?” The cover, depicting Chicago’s famed Marina City towers, even reminded people of a certain set of towers in another major American city. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about war, death, and the complexities of patriotism, all relevant topics in the troubled days following the terrorist attacks. More importantly, though, it’s about our inability as human beings to connect with one another in meaningful ways. The record’s title is taken from a series of number stations, mysterious shortwave radio signals of unknown origins. Portions of an audio recording of the mysterious signals are placed at the end of the record’s climactic track “Poor Places,” a song about the disconnect many of us have with those around us (“there’s bourbon on the breath of the singer you love so much / he takes all his words from the books that you don’t read anyway …”). The record’s honest exploration of how isolated many people in the modern world feel was particularly resonant at a time when we were reminded how dangerous the world can truly be. Wilco has released three other exceptional records this decade, 2004’s A Ghost is Born, which took the bold experimentation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot even further, 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, a quiet, subtle record exploring the joys of life amidst the chaos that surrounds us, and 2009’s Wilco (The Album), an exuberant musical summary of the paths the band has traveled up to this point in their distinguished career. Still, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot remains the band’s unambiguous masterpiece, a challenging, gut-wrenching record that only gets better with time.

Movie Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Directed by Wes Anderson)

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with director Wes Anderson. On one hand, he possesses an uncanny visual sense, an admirable indie sensibility, and a deft touch with observing the intricate quirks of human behavior. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever felt a moment of genuine pathos in a Wes Anderson movie. The hipper-than-thou director often falls into the “quirky for quirky’s sake” camp of filmmaking. Anderson’s interest (some might say obsession) with odd personalities and consistent color schemes endears him deeply to his twenty- and thirty-something hipster devotees. It’s no surprise that Anderson is prominently featured on Stuff White People Like, the website devoted to all things yuppyish. Yet, I am never quite sure how I am supposed to feel about the characters I see on the screen. Films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are a joy to look at. Anderson’s stubborn persistence on placing all dialogue, characters and plots in big heavy quotation marks, though, makes his films occasionally tedious to sit through. I suppose when it comes to postmodern irony I’ve always appreciated the L.A. gangsters and Kung Fu stylists of Quentin Tarantino than the rich New Yorkers and precocious prep-schoolers of Wes Anderson.

I would say that Fantastic Mr. Fox is quite typical of a “Wes Anderson film.” The characters are just as quirky as those in The Darjeeling Limited, albeit in animated form. The color schemes are still coordinated to the point of constipation. Bill Murray even makes an appearance. But, Anderson’s latest cinematic effort is arguably his most effective film to date. I experienced the same coldness and lack of emotional depth I have come to expect from films in Anderson’s oeuvre. However, the young director has finally reached a point where his visual style is so creative and consistent that it trumps all problems with the plot, characters, and dialogue.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is based (very) loosely on the children’s book by beloved author Roald Dahl. George Clooney skillfully voices a fox who has made his money in the past as a chicken thief. His wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) disapproves of the danger such a profession brings to the household, and insists that Clooney find another line of work. The other talented celebrity vocal talents include Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, and Roman Coppola.

Anderson’s movie was made using a fresh looking stop-motion animation technique. The characters and settings were crafted out of clay and then manipulated in front of the camera by hand one frame at a time. This approach seems so innovative because it is indeed so old. King Kong, the influential action film of the 1930s, was made in a similar manner. Fantastic Mr. Fox’s atypical animation technique would only be an interesting production detail if it weren’t so successful. Obviously, animation techniques have come a long way since King Kong. The foxes in Anderson’s film don’t look exactly like real foxes, but they are sure detailed in the unusual form they have been given. By looking to the animated past for inspiration, Anderson maintains his reputation as one of modern cinema’s premiere visual stylists.

It is also interesting to note that Anderson reportedly directed much of this film sitting at his laptop in France. He was sent dailies and gave the animators instructions on what needed to be modified, added, or subtracted. However, he was not physically present with the visual artists for much of the film’s creation. In a way, Anderson has proven himself the ultimate 21st-century director. He has taken the excellent strategies from the past and combined them with decidedly contemporary ways of working. Fantastic Mr. Fox, then, represents not just a delightful little picture, but a bold statement about the future of the cinematic arts.

As blown away as I was with the film’s visual sensibility, it pains me to say that Mr. Fox suffers from the same emotional vapidity plaguing earlier Anderson efforts. I was amused by the characters (especially Clooney’s lead fox), but did not particularly care about them in any meaningful way. I enjoyed the music, the jokes, and the witty banter, but did not walk away with a sense of the film’s purpose. Maybe that’s okay, though. Anderson’s films have arguably never been about the deep moral questions of the time or exploring complicated themes. Maybe they are all artifice—but what an artifice! If you are going to see only one Wes Anderson movie in your lifetime, Fantastic Mr. Fox is as good as any.