Noiseless Chatter Archive

According to CNN : “Others who stood calmly while Obama placed the medal around their necks included singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, wearing dark glasses indoors and never smiling.” Sounds about right.

As they say, everybody’s a critic. As they should say immediately afterward, “Not everybody’s good at it, but there you go.” Criticism is difficult to perform intelligently. I should know; I’m a particularly shitty critic myself. But every so often some anonymous stranger on the internet says something that — against all odds — turns out to be extremely insightful. From there, a great series of ongoing criticism can be born, and I wanted to take some time to share with you four of my absolute favorites. This is not just a list of links…these are sincerely fantastic critical explorations that I endorse wholeheartedly. 1) Fred Clark’s Dissections of the Left Behind series. For the past nine years (incredible but true) Fred Clark of Slacktivist has been analyzing page by agonizing page the entirety of the Left Behind series. For those who are unfamiliar with the series, here it is in a nutshell: God loves me, but not you. Fred, being a religious man himself, is app...

Just a few me-related things that went up while I was away in Wes Anderson land. Click the video and read along! – Emily Suess interviewed me regarding my experience with iUniverse Publishing . It’s not a topic I discuss often, but I was more than happy to work with her on this. Includes a small story about the night I met Jeffrey Eugenides…and stay tuned, because I might have some real publishing-related stuff to reveal soon. – Location3 Media has published some great writeups about service members in our families . They included the piece I wrote about my grandfather. Happy Memorial Day. – Our friend Dave Black wrote about this blog twice. Check out his posts: “Does This Seem Fake?” and Fox Pops . – The Mean (But Accurate) Folks at Dead Homer Society included a link to one of our posts in their Reading Digest: Not Worth Reading Edition . A ringing endorsement if there ever was one! More on-site content to come. I promise.

Well, it’s come and gone. It was a lot of fun and also a lot of work, but Wes Anderson Month is over. When I first announced this project , I pretty much expected to fail at some point and not have time to write everything I hoped to write. Shocking the hell out of me, I actually delivered on every one of my promised features, and even had the chance to post a few more. We had… – Friday Musical Interludes of “Here Comes My Baby” by Cat Stevens ( Rushmore ), “30 Century Man” by Scott Walker ( The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou ), “Les Champs-Élysées” by Joe Dassin ( The Darjeeling Limited ), “Let Her Dance” by The Bobby Fuller Four ( Fantastic Mr. Fox ), and “Zorro is Back” by Oliver Onions ( Bottle Rocket ). – A Fun Deconstruction of the Moonrise Kingdom trailer . – An Admittedly Biased look back at Wes Anderson’s films to date. – A Revised Version of my 10 Most Affecting Wes Anderson Moments article. – A Direct Response to reader David Black, who wondered whether...

And so Wes Anderson month draws to a close, as Moonrise Kingdom lingers hesitantly upon the horizon for another couple of days, and we conclude our month-long reflection on that which has come before. This, however, is not meant to be a particularly thought provoking piece. It’s not what you will remember — if you remember anything at all — and it’s not going to make any grand and conclusive statement. It’s just a final thought before we move forward, before Wes Anderson officially has another release under his belt, and before Moonrise Kingdom takes its rightful place beside his other films, so that we can wait expectantly again for rumors of the next. It’s a piece, or, perhaps, a tribute, dedicated to the strong relationship between one man and his voice. Because that, without question, is Anderson’s greatest strength, and it’s what his biggest fans see when they react so strongly to his work. It’s also what his most vehement detractors see, though they might not re...

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is a strange film. It’s about family, it’s about celebrity, it’s about revenge, and it’s — arguably primarily — about the relentless intrusion of reality into a life carefully cultivated. It’s many things throughout the course of its runtime, and it’s never less than two distinct things at once. It is, I would argue, one of Anderson’s densest films, and it’s also my personal favorite, making it a perfect candidate for my first installment of Anatomy of a Scene. Originally I wanted to do the Maddox Hill Cemetery scene from The Royal Tenenbaums — and there’s no reason I can’t do that later — but for the time being I think it got a fair enough bit of attention in my 10 Most Affecting Wes Anderson Moments feature. Instead I’m turning to the Loquasto International Film Festival scene from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It’s a very early sequence in the film that really shows Anderson — and Mothersbaugh, and Murray — at their indirect...

Pipe dreams, dad. I’m a barber’s son. When it came time for me to decide which film to spotlight for Wes Anderson month, I found it to be a pretty difficult decision. I could easily have turned to personal favorites The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and rattled for a few thousand words about why I think they’re great. Or I could have done a piece about why The Darjeeling Limited feels like Anderson catching himself off guard, with mixed — though ultimately excellent — results. And, of course, I could have written a piece about either Bottle Rocket or Fantastic Mr. Fox , giving myself an opportunity to explore critically my misgivings. But all of that would have been almost too easy, especially when, all month long, Rushmore has been calling out to me, and attempting to instill itself in my mind as the perfect ambassador of Anderson’s form and methods. Eventually, I caved to its charm and confidence, and accepted what it told me wholesale...

Noiseless Chatter advisory: Please give a warm welcome to our first guest author! Dave, of Dave Wrote This , wrote this. He offered to write a defense of Fantastic Mr. Fox and I took him up on that immediately, because that was pretty much going to be the only Anderson film that wasn’t getting much attention during Wes Anderson Month. So thanks, Dave…and I hope everybody enjoys reading it. Spelling his and British. For some reason Phil has a willful blind spot in the shape of Fantastic Mr. Fox . His spoiler review of Moonrise Kingdom (so far) reads: “It’s better than Fantastic Mr. Fox . Because come on.” Phil has set himself up for potential (and possibly well deserved) disappointment. I think Fantastic Mr. Fox has suffered unjustly at his hands. I’m hoping to redress the balance here. “Alright, let’s start planning. Who knows shorthand?” Mr. Fox Roald Dahl was apparently not a fan of the film adaptations of his books. He felt that the 1971 film version of C harlie And...

As in the case of the Reader Mail feature from Monday , Compare & Contrast is something I’d like to do periodically on this blog, and I have a good number of things I’d like to eventually write about in this fashion. But now, since it’s Wes Anderson month, and since my girlfriend and I just rewatched Bottle Rocket , I thought this might be a great time to introduce it. After all, for the first time, I think I’ve figured out just why that film’s handling of the central romantic relationship rubs me the wrong way. It also made me think about a pretty similar corollary in The Darjeeling Limited , which I think handles the same material far more impressively, and retroactively sheds some light on what Bottle Rocket did wrong. The Situation In both cases a well-enough-off American man seduces a young woman of differing cultural heritage. In both cases the men are guests at their places of employment, and the women are employed to keep them comfortable. In Bottle Rocket...