![]() ![]() ![]() You’ll do plenty of stargazing yourself during “Asteroid City,” and not just of the celestial variety. He pulls into Asteroid City in a rickety station wagon with three adorably witchy daughters (Ella, Gracie and Willan Faris) and a brainy teenage son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who’s receiving a prize at the town’s annual Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets convention. Schwartzman, bearded and moody, is a war photographer named Augie Steenbeck - a surname he shares with the old flatbed editing machines of Hollywood yore, in keeping with this movie’s obsessive retrophilia. are actors playing actors (in black-and-white), but they are also actors playing actors playing characters (in color).įor simplicity’s sake, let’s leave aside the behind-the-scenes stuff and treat the play as the thing, which the movie for the most part does. And then there’s the cast, which is where things get especially meta-tortured: Schwartzman, Johansson, Hanks et al. Early on, we meet some of the creative forces behind this production, including a Tennessee Williams-ish playwright (Edward Norton) and an Elia Kazan-esque director (Adrien Brody). It’s an archly overarching framing device delineated by boxily framed black-and-white images and given prominent positioning throughout Anderson’s two-act screenplay (drawn from an idea conceived with his regular collaborator Roman Coppola). (My first go-round, at last month’s Cannes Film Festival, tended frustratingly toward the latter a second viewing proved eye-opening, if a few pans short of a 180-degree reversal.) “Asteroid City,” you see, is not just a movie we’re watching but a “hypothetical play,” in the words of a genial host-narrator (Bryan Cranston), that’s being staged and produced for 1950s television. The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth. But there’s something captivating about that early stillness: Asteroid City, we see, is not just a town but a carefully constructed set, and not just a carefully constructed set but the scaffolding for a typically elaborate formal and narrative conceit. Not that you’ll mind when Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright and other familiar and newly minted members of Anderson’s company turn up, bringing with them a swirl of persnickety, precisely choreographed human activity. It is also, at this early stage, a museum happily devoid of visitors. Welcome to Asteroid City, a gorgeous piece of scenery even by Anderson’s standards and an open-air museum of antiquarian delights, with its 40-cent milkshakes, vintage vending machines and pastel-hued automobiles. That last one is a symbol: of unrealized promise, yes, but also of the-sky’s-the-limit possibility. Instead, the camera nimbly rotates nearly 360 degrees, pausing mid-pan to register the glories of Adam Stockhausen’s Wild Wild Wes production design: a diner, a motel, a filling station, a highway ramp to nowhere. ![]() Our first glimpse of it is deeply transporting: No sounds break the silence, and no actors (or tumbleweeds) disrupt the vast spaces of Robert Yeoman’s impeccably framed widescreen compositions. “Buses are contracted out to a local provider, which was consistent with this trip, and we are now in communication with the appropriate parties regarding this matter.“Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s half-irritating, half-intoxicating desert bloom of a movie, unfolds mostly in 1955 in a small Southwest town - a postcard-perfect oasis surrounded by cactuses, red rocks and vast horizons. “The important thing is that all of our personnel arrived in Milwaukee safely,” Warecki said. Pirates senior vice president of communications Brian Warecki said in a statement that “we are deeply concerned” about what took place. Police said the driver was arrested after they observed “multiple signs of impairment.” The driver isn’t a Pirates employee but was contracted to drive the team to Milwaukee after the completion of their series with the Chicago Cubs. Troopers said they observed more erratic driving and eventually stopped the bus on the right shoulder of Interstate 94 in Chicago. Illinois State Police said the driver was traveling away from officers seeking to escort the bus on its trip to Milwaukee late Thursday night. MILWAUKEE (AP) - A bus driver was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence while transporting the Pittsburgh Pirates from Chicago to Milwaukee for their weekend series with the Brewers. ![]()
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