In high school, I was assigned to write a two-page essay for my Spanish final written exam by my high school Spanish teacher Miss. Something-That-Started-With-I-Believe-a-G. The prompt was: What Is Your Favorite Thing In The World? I, like most well-adjusted seventeen-year-old boys, chose my Criterion Collection DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums. In order not to shortchange the wondrousness of the film, I wrote the entire essay beforehand, translated it word-by-word into Spanish, and then memorized the entire thing word-by-word in Spanish into my brain. I have since forgotten the contents of that essay. I have since lost my Criterion Collection DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums, and retain not a lick of Espanol.
Then I alight upon the embedded commercial below, and I’m suddenly flooded with phrases like “Anderson’s mise en scene is, in fact, not scene, nor scenes, pero mundos” and “the misconception of minimalism is that what is not said constitutes an infinitude, that minimalism is the artist exhibiting a concise reverence for the ineptitude of artistic representation, but what maximalism-in Anderson’s case visual maximalism-suggests is that by attempting to reach that infinitude, that unsayable, everything within, not without, can become an infinitude. Y ellos hacen. Si?”
Wes Anderson Movie Power Rankings (All Ordinal Faults are Intentional and Representative of Relative Quality)
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
3. The Darjeeling Limited
4. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
5. Rushmore
6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
8. Bottle Rocket
baby pictures of famous dictators 