Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Short Films on Netflix

Anderson's take is pretty riveting, mostly due to the characters narrating their own lives in the first person as they are occurring, and everyone speaking in a fast monotone. I would imagine a LOT of Anderson's film are like this but I think it helped the story a lot.

There is also something inherently amusing about the low-budget on-camera way Anderson uses special effects and scene transitions. It a bit endearing, which I'm sure is a compliment he's gotten a billion times before. But I don't watch a ton of his stuff. I liked this. 4 1/2 stars.

It's such a straightforward and tense story that you are waiting for a big twist or the bottom to drop out and it just peters out instead.

A huge disappointment. 1 star.

As far as this one goes, it's a bit middling. Like the previous two, it runs out of gas and the ending is beyond unsatisfying. But the rest of the short us riveting enough to make up for it a bit.

But I'll tell you the main weakness of this and the other shorts, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is a common weakness in most of Anderson's films. I mentioned the low budget shortcuts of Henry Sugar were endearing. They were less-so in The Swan, and in a story describing an insane a thing as a guy eating a live rat, or putting a ferret in his shirt to chase after a rat, I think it hurts things. It's sort of charming, but the main problem with the pantomime is it takes you entirely out of the story. You are aware you are watching fiction. I am not a person who believes you need to believe in the reality of a TV show or movie for it to have value. But the director doing such a jokey thing is essentially asking the audience themselves to DISBELIEVE it. That, I can't get on-board with. There is a difference to me between a crappy, ineffective special effect, and Anderson having the actors mime the major action set pieces through expressions and words. The crappy special effect I'll look past. Anderson playfully reminding me this is a work of fiction his filmmaking genius is better than is something I won't.

And he can't even make up his mind about it. He uses a model rat for a sequence, and even a CGI animated rat for a single shot.

On a very real level, this feels sort of cynical instead of merely subversive. It's the kind of thing I expect film critics to mistake for storytelling genius when it's lazy. Not lazy in the sense of low-budget. It's lazy in the sense that it mistakes a story being meta for a story being either interesting or psychologically complex. You want to explore complex psychological issues, explore them. Don't rub into my face what an artful auteur you happen to be and think that's the same thing.

Anderson seems obsessed with stage plays, and I'm sure that's what he's channeling and referring to. But these films AREN'T for the stage. They are for the screen, and there are different expectations for them. Anderson ignoring those expectations will probably win him a lot of admirers, particularly theater buffs. I won't be one of them. If the dude loves plays so much, why bother making movies at ALL?

Again, the only previous Anderson films I've seen are Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Isle Of Dogs. Each of those films (even the animated ones) felt more narratively traditional to me. Henry Sugar was a nice oddball story told in an oddball way. For ALL of these to be told that way makes them feel less special. And if a lot of Anderson's other films are like this I'm wondering if they each have diminishing returns as well.

Did not care for this. I'm letting my good review for Henry Sugar stand for now, but I'm pretty sure I'd lose my taste for it if I saw again. The magician didn't just reveal the secret of the trick. He performed it three more times after the reveal. I won't be as enchanted with it again. 3 stars.