Somewhat against my better judgment, I trekked off behind Mrs. Buce to the Plookaville Multiplex this afternoon for a screening of Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel. I was probably being too fussy. Ir's a good-natured entertainment with lots of comic side effects. But I'll sign on with others and say I just don't get this hat tip to Stephan Zweig. It's not that the movie is not derivative. No: it's a virtual tropical rain forest of homages: Laurel and Hardy, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, Holmes and Moriarty, Alfred Hitchcock, I'd say even a little of the early Disney: Pinocchio for sure, maybe a little Fantasia and I think I even sniff a little Lady and the Tramp. If there is a hotel in the background, I suppose it would be the Hotel Savoy of Joseph Roth. If on a mountain top, then Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Or if he is just trying to make a buck on the hotel theme, then I suppose it would be The Best Exotic Marigold. But Zweig, oy. My guess is that he's never so much as read him. And it doesn't have much of nothing to do with Budapest, either.
2 comments:
Buce, what do you think of Delong's
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/04/telling-the-real-history-of-twentieth-century-east-central-europe-through-black-screwball-comedy-cozy-catastrophe-farcical-tr.html
Heh thanks. Actually I deliberately forbore to read DeLong, knowing I would be seeing the movie-and then forgot all about it. Let's just say that DeLong is always blinded by his generosity and good nature.
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