an angel watches asteroid city (we watch movies too yknow ^_^)

saw asteroid city the other weekend. first off, i wanna say i've seen other wes anderson movies before (grand budapest and moonrise and mr. fox) and i do like his style but there was always a little something missing for me tbh. so i liked his other films (except for moonrise didnt rlly like that one) but not like very much.

asteroid city was different, totally. i'm a big theater nerd so it helped a lot that i was like omg .... plays. IMMEDIATELY interested. but i think the style of the theater lends itself incredibly well to his film style!! it was kind of the missing piece that made the uncanniness of his style in other films feel... canny. lol.

overall i had a very good time i would actually rate it pretty high like 8/10 or something. i think the way that he explored the themes was rlly.. nice in a strangely realistic way. the main thing i was rlly rlly pleased about was how he handled the grief? i literally cant watch like any movies bc i feel emotions so strongly that i feel like im the characters but for this one it mirrors very closely my journey with understanding death and the feelings i felt about it and i thought it was very very realistic. i think a lot of people did not enjoy the "boring " parts of it but imo a lot about real grief is detatchedness and silence and space. and i thought this movie really exemplified that without actually having the characters stop talking which was very interesting (like the little girls burying their mother or the burning the hand on the grill etc.)

i could talk a lot abt scenes i enjoyed ... i thought all of them were pretty solid although there were a couple i was like yeah this is sillytown . like the cant wake up if u dont fall asleep was sooo lynchian i was like dude why is this in here !! well i mean there were a couple things like that were i thought hm this is probably in here to be very much metaphorical and like so catstrupic i might never understand. but thats ok i do that in my art too.

i rlly liked the balcony scene... me n my mom n dad were talking abt what we thought the film represented n i think that its a critique on death and also randomness (which reminds me of starstruck odyssesy YIPPEE). like auggie's car breaks down and now he's in this town. random. alien comes. random. mom dying. random. him choosing the time to tell his kids. random ("there's never a good time to tell them"). him burning his hand on the grill. random.

and the actor who plays him is like wtf why is all this happening, why is he burning his hand on the grill. and the director says something like, you don't need to know, just keep playing the role, you're doing a great job. and i think that's what it's about. we don't know why that alien came and took that rock and gave it back. we don't know why his wife died. it wasn't fair it wasn't fated, it just happened. and we just need to play our role even if we don't know why, we just gotta keep going.

and sometimes things don't have to mean things and asteroid city goes back to the way it always was before and nothing comes of it. no one dies, no one's lives are particularly different. it's kind of comforting i think, to see characters in mourning go through this shared trauma and make it out ok.

the "boring"ness of the film is like. kind of the main point.

i also really enjoyed thinking of it thru the lens of actors and meaning in plays i think it made a lot of good points about the divide between character and actor and also what it means to write/ run a show and how plays are sort of a living organism etc. another fun lens is love, i think. because there's a lot of love that's underneath everything and the way the characters interact (like auggie and the grandfather) is very non-conforming to typical relationships and almost a little nonsequitur but its fun to find the meaning hidden underneath.

anyway, it felt more like an art film than a wes anderson movie and i did throughly enjoy it although it would have been more fun to watch at home i think ^_^