Thoughts on The French Dispatch
I saw an infuriating tweet last week that I can't find anymore, which said (and I'm obviously paraphrasing, since I can no longer find this tweet): "Hating on Wes Anderson is completely over. If you hate Wes Anderson, good news: you won. Every American film now looks exactly the same." It's a worthy sentiment in defence of a fine cinema stylist - but bogus, since it wasn't Anderson-haters who won the battle for cinema, but Anderson-ignorers; everybody else lost. That we now find ourselves in a landscape where many films are visually monotonous is attributable mostly to the Disney monopoly and in part to the rise of Netflix, which has contributed to squeezing out a good few auteurs, and creating a recognisable 'film-as-content' aesthetic, where photography, decoration, blocking, design don't detract from an easily managed storyline that you can half-watch while texting. But this perception of Anderson as representing the last stand of a certain ty