5 Wes Andersen Films That Real Fans Have To See
As a dumb white bitch, I love Wes Anderson. There’s just something about his ability to take us into a vintage clothing store and fill it with precocious children, compartmentalized action, and Bill Murray. I consider myself a die-hard Wesbian and I’ve seen all of his films, so naturally I am super excited about his upcoming sure-to-be-a masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The movie is going to be great no matter what because I don’t have the ability to form my own opinions and I’m sure it’s going to look good and be quirky. I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here, I know you all feel the same way, and I’m usually hard pressed to find a white person who doesn’t think Wes Andersen is a genius.
Surprisingly though, I often meet people who have not heard of some of his films. Did you know that he’s actually directed several films that are not available for sale, listed on IMDb, or mentioned anywhere other than in this article? It’s true. Here’s 5 Wes Andersen films that any real fan should see:
The Nimbus Empire
An idiosyncratic butler constructs a hot air balloon out of old Bazooka Joe wrappers and sets off for Paris. Along the way, he meets several other balloon pilots and they invent a new font that simplifies the process of sky writing. When they get to Paris, their reputation precedes them. The whole world is enamored with their new font, but they cannot decide on who owns the rights to it. There’s a lot of quirky infighting and ultimately none of them claim ownership of the font. In the last shot, we see the butler and his friends wearing the gum wrappers as clothes as they have a child-like tea party on top of the Eiffel tower.
Lessons For Gautier
A young girl proctors elocution lessons for gerbils behind her boarding school for left handed girls. When her lessons are discovered by a local accordion player, he enlists her help in overcoming his speech impediment. She trains him the same way she trains the gerbils–by using a series of treats in their tube maze. He rides the subway around looking for packages she has hidden for him, and eventually the packages are shown to contain love letters that he thinks she has written for him. We find out that the letters are actually love letters that her father had sent her mother before he disappeared during the war. The two wed and they take her last name, on account of him being unable to pronounce his own.
The Golden Portrait
A young boy with an absentee father pics up a silver-nitrate camera and begins taking daguerreotypes of his classmates. He meets the love of his life, a girl with Bell’s palsy who cannot move her face, and therefore, takes perfect daguerreotypes. The two pinky-swear to run away together until the boy’s father returns. The girl is taken away by the father who tries to sell her to the circus. The kids disguise themselves as a pantomime horse to escape, and the father is arrested by some sort of anachronistic police man wearing a pith helmet. The circus owner, an orphan himself, at first is an antagonist, but when he discovers the boy is a photographer, he has the boy photograph him in exchange for his most prized possession–a golden statue of an amputee clown. The children sell the statue and live together on some tiny boat or some shit.
The Himalayan Retreat
A wife and husband have their children walk out on them after the kids go to the store to fetch a pack of candy cigarettes. The adults slowly revert to childlike behavior as the children go on a sea adventure with a Sherpa or like a monk or someone of a vague ethnicity that doesn’t speak for the entire film. Eventually the children return and they both have beards and the parents are wearing Raggedy Anne doll clothing. The final scene is the family re-enacting the Beatles’ Abbey Road picture but they’re all smoking those candy cigarettes.
Stupid Bullshit In Ecru And Ochre
A rambler house is filled with green shag carpeting and earth toned wallpaper. Owen Wilson smokes unfiltered cigarettes while wearing a tennis headband as he argues with Jason Schwartzman about the pedestrian nature of ellipsis in prose. The camera tracks to another room where a small boy is creating a model airplane out of popsicle sticks. The shot is held for thirty seconds and then the boy says fuck. The camera tracks back. It’s Bill Murray in a coonskin cap, standing in front of a bunch of record players, staring into the camera for an hour and a half. At the end he says, “that’s it! Peanut butter in a tube!” The film ends. The white people in the crowd clap politely and go home and fuck with the lights off.