Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’ve always been shy when it comes to writing about Wes Anderson, because he’s a filmmaker I rarely connect with.
When I watch one of his movies, I can’t help but see his talent (the visual wizardry, the debonair lapidary cleverness), but I feel like I’m experiencing something that was made on a different planet from the one I live on.
I have felt that way from his very first feature, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), and I really felt it at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 when I saw “Rushmore” — because everyone there did a backflip of ecstasy, already hailing Anderson as the filmmaker of his generation, and I didn’t get it.
I mean, I kind of saw what people were talking about: that “Rushmore” was like “The Graduate” for the new millennium, that the Jason Schwartzman hero had a formidable Holden Caulfield-gone-meta-deadpan attitude that was equal parts devious and desperate, that the Bill Murray character seemed the apotheosis of Bill Murray, and other things.
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