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The French Dispatch

Posted on February 4, 2022February 16, 2022 by Village Vidiot

“The French Dispatch,” February 4, 2022 (2021), DVD.  We mostly enjoyed this odd Wes Anderson confection that posits the New Yorker as an anachronistic, c.1960s, offshoot of a rural newspaper in Kansas.  It features fun work by Bill Murray, Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton, Adrian Brody, Francis McDormand, Timothee Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, and Owen Wilson (not my favorite) and many others as journalists and their subjects making Ennui-sur-Blase (the Paris in question) intelligible to their American audience with lengthy feature articles about the place, the arts, the people, and their political and sexual lives, food and policing.  Some scenes, like some New Yorker articles, are overly long, but they are crafted essays that bring their idiosyncratic subjects to life as they experience, recount, and engage in the events they chronical.  The magazine covers are themselves great homages.  The dialogue is remarkably crisp, frequently absurdist in a surreal kind of way, if overly-stylized and precious, and the journalists as complicated as Sontag, Baldwin, et.al.  They are people of the word.  The film is that mix of Anderson-esque animation and acting by pros who clearly treasure working with Anderson as auteur.

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