Monday, October 22, 2007

The Darjeeling Limited

Late yesterday afternoon we went to see the film The Darjeeling Limited, a truly weird though entertaining film by director Wes Anderson. Before going, I had my doubts about whether I’d enjoy it since I’d really disliked Anderson’s earlier films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Darjeeling had a lot of the same actors playing in it that had been in the other Anderson films, including Owen Wilson, Bill Murray and Angelical Huston. The theme even struck me as similar –one more attempt keep a melancholic tone while dealing humorously with and becoming free of one’s psychological and familial baggage. (In this film, the brothers do that literally toward the end of the film.) While I can’t say I loved TDL, I did enjoy it more than the earlier movies, partly because it seemed like Anderson had done a bit less navel-gazing in this piece—or maybe it’s just because I enjoyed seeing the Indian scenery enough that it balanced out a lot of the juvenile pepper-spray and poisonous snake jokes.

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