![]() I don't know what sort of cream they've put on you down at the morgue, but I want some."Īs with the best of the Marx Brothers ( A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup), this inspired nonsense, including the deadpan farce of Gustave and Zero being repeatedly asked for their papers by authorities of an increasingly sinister stripe, is great satire. Among the highlights is this drop-dead droll monologue delivered by Gustave to the lady in her open casket. Gustave and Zero spend a great deal of the film barely escaping the clutches of a vicious family, headed up by Brody, who are trying to deprive Gustave of his rightful share of an inheritance left him by a recently deceased lady of means. You should take a long look at his ugly mug that morning. "What happened, my dear Zero, is I beat the loving shit out of a sniveling little runt called Pinky Bandinski. Suffice it to say the pleasures of GBH mostly arise from exchanges bordering on a new brand of camp between Zero and Monsieur Gustave. Peopled by Anderson's usual repertory company â€" Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman â€" the plot, based on a story by Anderson and co-writer Hugo Guinness, is too Byzantine and downright silly to render in great detail. As you may recall, Some Like It Hot also climaxes with its "ladies" fleeing hoodlums in a ramshackle hotel. Monsieur Gustave and his lovey lobby boy spend a great deal of the film's 100 minutes fleeing danger together with a manic energy not often observed since Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis' drag duo in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. I confess that my appreciation for this platonic romantic intergenerational male "couple" stems in part from my momentarily mistaking the term "lobby boy" for "lovey boy." The latter would be much too-on-the-nose for a filmmaker who generally keeps his possible homo-shadings deeply buried in subtext. ![]() ![]() ![]() This is especially true for his latest effort, The Grand Budapest Hotel, inspired by the writings of Eastern European novelist Stefan Zweig, a melancholy comic fairy tale set during the perilous time preceding World War II.Īlthough the film features a host of characters too numerous to name, its principal delight centers on the avuncular relationship that develops between the hotel's fabled concierge, Monsieur Gustave (an extraordinary Ralph Fiennes), and an apprentice bellboy, Zero (winsome newcomer Toay Revolori). "Keep your hands off my lobby boy!" One of the great pleasures of seeing a new Wes Anderson film for the first time is one's appreciation of the Houston-born, singularly witty filmmaker's wildly original use of the English language. ![]()
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