Inspired by the recent AmEx spot, critic Armond White asks why it takes filmmakers like Wes Anderson and the other so-called American Eccentrics so long to make a movie.
It seems that the Eccentrics' own egotistical indolence has resulted in self-imposed limits to their skills—at the very least it deprives the world of more of their unique cultural prognostications. If they are ever to truly change film culture, their maneuvers have to increase. When Anderson casually pays for extra production expenses in the AmEx ad, he pokes mischief at the '80s archetype of a hungry filmmaker using credit cards to see a film to completion. (The ad opens with typical Anderson piquancy: Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman onset in a new guise shouts, "François!" at the sight of an auto accident—a Day for Night in-joke as well as a mournful cry for Truffaut, who died in 1985.) But it's not really the way Anderson works—he pretends to be making a gimmicky action movie such as he never really has. My Life, My Card is insistently money-conscious, but its charm comes from envisioning a paradise of art-making, where all problems are immediately solved and where instinct flies with nature. Indeed, while riding a floating crane, Anderson is attacked by a flock of Hitchcock's birds. It bemuses him. (You have to be a real cinephile—perhaps own a certain Truffaut-authored interview book in your library—to appreciate such delicious free association.)
It's a fun read, and White gets all the way to the ninth graf before invoking Steven Spielberg, which must be some kind of personal record.
Speaking of ads, I'll admit it, Sofia Coppola had me at the snap of Marie Antoinette's fan. Christ, what's happening to me?
