Calling all campers!

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the movie newsletter that knows that ohana does indeed mean family.

The Announcement of a Great Auteur

While we as a culture are now firmly aware of Wes Anderson and his tweed style, that wasn't the case for the first half of his career.

Starting with his first feature, 1996’s Bottle Rocket, you could see the makings of a stylish filmmaker who definitely knows where to place the camera. He would follow it up with the masterful Rushmore in 1999. These two films would push him into up and coming stardom amongst critics and Hollywood at large.

In 2000 The Hollywood Reporter asked a group of critics who they believed the next Martin Scorsese was. They got various answers, but the one that stands out is from Marty himself who said it was Anderson.

But even with such an endorsement Anderson couldn't capture commercial success until The Royal Tenenbaums made $71million on a $20million dollar budget. Unfortunately, his next two films after that, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, are flops at the box office.

Anderson needed a win.

So what does he do? He makes the switch to animation.

While making The Life Aquatic he connected with Henry Sellick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, and they started to work on Fantastic Mr. Fox together.

Sellick would leave the project to go off and make the incomparable Coraline but encouraged Anderson to continue without him. And while making Fantastic Mr. Fox some switch was turned on in Anderson's brain and he would never look back.

Moonrise Kingdom is the fruit of that labor. It feels like him taking the lessons he learned from the failures of The Life Aquatic and the success of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Part of the failure of The Life Aquatic wasn't just its battle to connect with audiences, its budget was also greatly inflated.

The movie made $25 million but had a budget of $50 million! This is due to the fact that he built multiple massive sets.

On Fantastic Mr. Fox he learned the lesson of scale. From that point forward he would lean heavily on forced perspective and models rather than full sets, which plays very well to his style, and when you watch today's movie you really get a sense of creativity and ingenuity from the film.

It is also the trajectory he would continue on to this day. When you watch Asteroid City you feel so much more of Moonrise Kingdom than you do Darjeeling Limited.

Watching Moonrise Kingdom is like watching Michael Jordan make the game winning jump shot in 1982 against Georgetown; not quite fully formed yet, but you do finally start to feel the juice pumping as you know you're watching the formation of one of the greats.

Wes Anderson and Dad’s

Today’s Scene