Wes Anderson Ranked: Part One - Travelogues

by Cláudio Alves

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME starts streaming on Peacock next Friday, July 25.

Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme already? Wes Anderson's 12th feature film went straight from its Cannes Competition premiere to a worldwide theatrical release, before making its way to digital. The film arrives ready to delight those who've kept faithful to the director's vision and enrage the many who already loathe his style. It's the kind of project that's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the auteur, perpetuating the same strategies he's been developing from the very start. But it's also the sort of thing that inspires a retrospective look at the Texan's filmography, tracing how one goes from Bottle Rocket to these latter confections. There's nobody like him working today. Not on such a scale, at least. Not in Hollywood, where such formalism is a common sacrificial lamb at the altar of conventional appeal.

But, because we love list-making at The Film Experience, this retrospective shall take the form of a personal ranking, divided into three parts (similar to the Hayao Miyazaki one, though less extensive). Hopefully, you'll be on board as I try to explain what each of these pictures means to me and how I've come to fall in love with the cinema of Wes Anderson…

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ADG, AMPS, and the BSC close the 'Guilds Week'

by Cláudio Alves

The guilds are coming together in support for CONCLAVE.

To talk about awards in the face of such a catastrophe as the LA fires feels fundamentally wrong. And yet, we need to acknowledge them to explain why this past week has been so odd for those following the Oscar race. Amid the ongoing calamity, various Hollywood guilds have delayed their announcements and extended voting periods. This includes the Academy, but for this post's purpose, the PGA, WGA, and ASC are the organizations we're specifically referring to. Not all guilds followed suit, of course. The Art Directors Guild and the Association of Motion Picture Sound have shared their slate of honorees for the season. Also, since they're not based in California, the British Society of Cinematographers was unaffected. Let's consider their nominees…

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Beauty Break: Carol Spier & Cronenberg

by Cláudio Alves

As far as I'm concerned, EXISTENZ has Oscar-worthy production design.

Over the years, David Cronenberg has unleashed unimaginable visions onto the big screen, stretching the limits of body horror along the way. In the week the underrated eXistenZ celebrates its 25th anniversary, I was reminded of one name that should be nearly as recognized as that of the Canadian director. After all, Cronenbergian wouldn't be the same without the contributions of Carol Spier, his hard-working production designer whose mind has birthed such sights as Videodrome's flesh-like walls and the ruined tomorrow in Crimes of the Future. This year, the duo's new collaboration, The Shrouds, will premiere at Cannes in the official competition. Maybe Spier could even take the festival's Technical Grand Prize. It'd be a nice change of pace since, despite her genius, the artist has rarely been recognized by awards voters.

With all this in mind, let's recall some of Carol Spier's greatest creations for Cronenberg's nightmare cinema. Here are ten highlights from their shared filmography and where to watch them…

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Sarah Greenwood: From Narnia to Barbieland

by Cláudio Alves

Gerwig and Greenwood discuss BARBIE in a behind-the-scenes video. | © Warner Bros.Last Sunday, Sarah Greenwood officially became the most nominated production designer without an Oscar, breaking her tie with Nathan Crowley for the "Diane Warren" distinction. This year, she was nominated for Barbie, another triumph among many in a career spanning 1980s BBC miniseries to 21st-century Hollywood blockbusters.

Though many of her best works rely on a sense of material realism, the Greta Gerwig feature aimed for a sort of "authentic artificiality" where denying reality is a sort of reality into itself. For Greenwood, midcentury Palm Springs was a source of real-world inspiration to combine with Mattel's history, adding a sense of internal logic to Barbieland. Moreover, the aesthetic was sustained by old-school techniques like hand-painted backdrops and a practical fake sea, visible wires holding everything together in the loopy transitions between worlds. She used scale as a tool for wonderment, took cues from Gene Kelly musicals, and delivered a screen dream in fifty shades of fuchsia. Indeed, her team used so much pink paint that they caused an international shortage…

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Jack Fisk: From "Badlands" to "Flower Moon"

by Cláudio Alves

Jack Fisk as "Man in the Planet" in David Lynch's ERASERHEAD.

From Malick to PTA, going through De Palma and Lynch, Jack Fisk's contributions to American cinema are enough to take one's breath away. This year, he collaborated with Martin Scorsese for the first time and earned his third Oscar nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon. According to the designer, his director wanted his film to be "wide, big, like a western," and Fisk delivered.

Working primarily from historical documents, he dove deep into Osage country records to figure out the reality of the characters' lives, including which houses they once inhabited. He also dug through old buildings in search of period foundations and used original plans of buildings like the train station to recreate them as faithfully as possible. For the oil derricks, he recycled research he'd done for There Will Be Blood. In total, Fisk and his team built over forty interior sets, plus entire houses like Hale's ranch, and two blocks of Pawhuska restyled to represent the town of Fairfax across a decade of bloodshed. It's impossible to overstate the scale of his achievement. And yet, what would be other artists' crowning glory is just one among many such triumphs in Fisk's career…

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