Bottle Rocket (DVD)

Bottle Rocket is the debut feature film from Wes Anderson, about a group of men enduring an existential crisis, and deciding to work as a team to pull off a number of robberies. It's adapted from Anderson's own previous short of the same title. Interestingly, Martin Scorsese of all people named it among his favourite films of the 1990s. Anderson went on to direct many acclaimed films, notably Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and most recently, The Darjeeling Limited. In Bottle Rocket, he establishes many of his later tropes as an auteur - his films are all imbued with a certain sense of quirkiness, as well as an offbeat, idiosyncratic sense of humour. Moreover, ...  Read the complete review

Making films about idiots can't be so very difficult. Why else would we have had so many of these films jamming up the multiplexes in the last decade or so? The problem only comes when a filmmaker wants to make a film about idiots that is itself not idiotic. Doing that must be a whole lot more difficult, because such films are a lot thinner on the ground. Yet in Bottle Rocket director Wes Anderson managed to do it just fine, aided and abetted, as he was, by his co-writer and leading man, Owen Wilson. In the early 90s Anderson made a short comedy film based on a script of sorts that he and Wilson had written. The film was called Bottle Rocket and it featured ...  Read the complete review