... and all I have to tell you about is a silly phenomenon regarding its end credits on Disney+.
Actually, I will get into Rushmore a bit. But I'm starting with the credits.
As the movie ended on Sunday night, I noticed, not for the first time, that Disney+ does not let you get back into the credits once it minimizes them. Disney+ isn't the only service to minimize the credits of the movie you're watching, of course -- I think they all do it at this point -- but it's the only one I've noticed that physically does not provide the option to maximize them again.
In what seemed like a particularly galling movie, Disney+ decided that if I liked Rushmore, I might want to watch Life With Mikey. That's right, a random lesser Michael J. Fox movie from 1993. I've never seen it. Maybe they're right.
But the point is, after maybe 15 seconds of the credits of Wes Anderson's film, they popped down into the lower right corner and ceded the majority of the screen to an ad for this movie, which, however good it may be, is probably not actually a correct fit for Rushmore. But that's not the point either.
The point is, my AppleTV remote would only allow me to toggle between two choices, one of which was to see details for Life With Mikey and one of which was to actually play Life With Mikey. I can't use a button, because then the remote just takes me out of the situation altogether and back to the previous menu.
This, of course, is not the fault of the AppleTV remote. It's Disney that presents that remote with the possible options.
This is not only minimizing the credits in a literal sense. It's minimizing their importance. It's minimizing the work of all those artists who made that movie.
In our fast-paced, "give me the next thing" society, I think the option to skip ahead should exist for anyone who wants to avail themselves of it. It's the equivalent of choosing the moment you want to walk out of the movie theater. No one's talking about prying your eyes open, Alex DeLarge-style, and forcing you to take in the names of the second unit assistant director and the craft services company.
But when you literally have no way to get back in to watch them full screen? That's something else.
When I first noticed this happening, sometime late last year, I really wanted to see something in the credits -- a song, I think it was. So I tried to exit the movie, start back over and forward it to the end. The same thing happened, and I was equally unable to get back into it.
I'm not sure why it's so difficult to get these things right.
Only a few weeks ago I had a similar problem with the credits of Killers of the Flower Moon on AppleTV+. Had I made the right moves quickly enough, I think I would have been able to get those credits back. But in this case, Apple was quick to push me onward to a trailer for Ted Lasso -- two seasons of which I've already seen, thank you very much. So much for the idea that the streaming service is supposed to know me, what my preferences are -- and what I've already seen.
As for Rushmore, when Anderson's Asteroid City made its way into my top ten in 2023, it reminded me that this was the highest an Anderson film had finished in my rankings since Rushmore finished #4 in 1998. You know how you have a list of movies you're embarrassed to say you've never seen? Rushmore tops my list of movies I'm embarrassed to say I've seen only once -- especially considering that high finish more than 25 years ago.
The chance to correct this had been well within my grasp for ages, and I finally decided to grasp it. Had it not been available on any streaming service, I probably wouldn't have purchased a rental for a second straight night after Dual, which I wrote about yesterday. But at least Disney+ complied in that regard.
I've considered Rushmore my default favorite Anderson movie for those entire 25 years. Others have challenged it -- I have the most fondness for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I've seen three times, none of which were in the year it was released so I didn't rank it -- but I've always considered Rushmore to be in its own tier, based on that one indelible viewing that for some reason I did not see it fit to repeat.
Now that I've finally repeated it, I still love the same things about Rushmore that I loved in 1998, though I'd say the intensity of those feelings is a little muted by having seen all the Anderson movies that have come after, and not feeling quite as surprised by the aesthetic choices as I did then.
It was interesting to note the origins of ideas he would return to later, which I'd say were not really present in his debut feature, Bottle Rocket, which also made my top ten of its year. One of these relates specifically to Steve Zissou, as it is a quote from Jacques Cousteau written into the margins of a library book that first leads Max Fischer to find Miss Cross. Then there are the things that are not particular to Anderson but that he employs a lot, like the fact that both of the characters from the previous sentence have a loved one who has died whom they miss terribly.
I was also surprised at how many moments I remembered from the movie, even though some of the small details may have shifted in my memory. I think the kind of scene that allowed Rushmore, and indeed Anderson's whole perspective, to resonate with me is that one where a depressed and chain-smoking Bill Murray as Herman Blume is just randomly throwing golf balls into his swimming pool as he watches his wife flirt with another man. When a kid gets too close to him, he changes the angle of flight of one of the golf balls so it's like a mini attack on this kid -- though it's not an aggressive attack, as the ball follows the same harmless parabolic path toward the kid as it did toward the swimming pool.
Another thing I remember thinking about Rushmore at the time was that although Jason Schwartzman brings a particular energy to Max and I can't imagine anyone else playing him, I did wonder whether he was really talented enough to have this size role in the movie, or whether nepotism played a part in his casting, given that he's part of the Coppola family. Today, I see no nepotism, only Max Fischer played exactly as Anderson wanted him to be played.
If I were ranking Anderson's films again -- a project I did nearly ten years ago, timed to the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel -- would I still rank Rushmore #1? *
It's hard to say, and I'd probably need a good excuse to actually do the project again, beyond Anderson having made three more movies since then. But let's at least say that this viewing wouldn't cause Rushmore to be ejected from that spot.
A final thought about Anderson, about the interesting love-hate relationship I have with him. I have easily liked more of Anderson's movies than I haven't liked, which is especially the case given that my revisit of The Royal Tenenbaums tipped that movie from a mild dislike and even a mild disdain to a very strong like. Yet because he revisits the same well, aesthetically, over and over again, I think of myself as wary of him as an artist, and his failures -- as I see them -- take on a much larger role in my perception of him than his successes.
For example, after loathing The French Dispatch (is that too strong a word?), I felt like I might be ready to give up on him altogether -- to the extent that any person who calls himself a film critic could ever give up on an artist of Anderson's stature. Asteroid City and the shorts he made in 2023 changed the trajectory of my feelings toward him, of course, but those feelings were strong, on the backs of only two movies that really made me feel this way, the other being The Darjeeling Limited. Although I liked The Royal Tenenbaums significantly better than either of those movies, that made three until my last Tenenbaums viewing turned me all around on that subject.
Whenever an artist constantly verges on self-parody, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the man to finally be out of ideas, or to be out of slightly different ways of exploring the same idea. But Anderson's 2023 reminded me he's still got it, and the second film he ever made did nothing to dissuade me from that notion.
* NOTE - Only several hours after posting this did I look back at my previous Anderson rankings and note that not only was Rushmore not #1, it wasn't even #2. Bottle Rocket and Steve Zissou both finished ahead of it. I guess I will just leave the error as is.
No comments:
Post a Comment