Anderson begins... (Bottle Rocket (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Bottle Rocket (DVD)
Date:	29/06/09 (3 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting debut

Disadvantages: Cheap and cheerful

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, they often star the Wilson brothers (Luke and Owen) who, most clearly Owen, shot to fame with a slew of comedies in the years following Bottle Rocket's release.

Bottle Rocket is evidently a very low budget film, yet Anderson shows no signs that he's a newbie behind the camera. This is a well directed film that cements several of his stylistic tropes for the future, such as frequent use of slow motion both to emphasise emotion and also to highten the comic or ironic meaning of a scene.

It is by all means a very minor film, and certainly not an amazing one either, but for a first feature shot on a relatively small budget, it's an impressive feat, and required that Anderson step up his writing to compensate for the lack of stylistic embellishment here that his later films would allow. It's a subtle, funny film with endearing characters and zany situations. The show is invariably stolen by Owen Wilson's Dignan, a cool, collected, shrewd thief that is able to seemingly find a way out of any given situation, a promise that remains up until the film's zany climax.

Summary: A good start for Wes Anderson