‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’: Fall, Masculinity and Family

A landscape dominated by rich oranges, yellows and browns has made its annual return, and my fixation on Wes Anderon’s Fantastic Mr. Fox has come with it once again. In the past four years, I have likely watched the stop-motion masterpiece over a dozen times, having never grown tired of the gorgeous frames or the dry humor delivered flawlessly by the star-studded cast of voice actors (the ensemble includes George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Willem Dafoe). In honor of the 15th anniversary of the film’s release, I rewatched Fantastic Mr. Fox again, focusing on its brilliant portrayal of existentialism, masculinity and family. The film opens with a wide shot of the title character, Mr. Fox, waiting on a small hill. Warm oranges dominate his character as well as the surrounding countryside.  He listens to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” on the portable radio strapped to his hip.

The Coens Take Hollywood: Hail, Caesar!

The abundance of non-sequiturs and throwaway scenes in Hail, Caesar! is not unusual as these are the trademark characteristics of the Coen brothers’ work. As A.O. Scott put it, a Coen brothers movie is “a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship.” While this is true, you must understand before going to Hail, Caesar! that you are basically paying to watch the Coens lovingly recreate all the different styles of Hollywood product from the 1950s — westerns, noirs, swimsuit musicals and melodramas. Their new film is merely a vehicle for them to outright mimic all the films they have paid homage to previously — the Busby Berkeley dance number from The Big Lebowski, the non-self conscious roving landscapes of True Grit, the musical numbers from O Brother, Where Art Thou?