"The French Dispatch" by Wes Anderson (2021)

The best thing about this movie was my excitement before I saw it. Walked to a cinema twice (first time all the tickets were sold out) on the strength of "The Grand Budapest Hotel"  and that summer when I binged on all movies by Wes Anderson with the greatest pleasure. Now I don't know what happened, did I changed or he changed or he is simply too much Wes Anderson but I know in the first 10 minutes this movie is a big mistake. The guy was always peculiar and to be honest, not even so original - I have seen all of  this in "Amélie" (2001) which was truly unique and ground-breaking as sort of mother of all cartoonish movies that came afterwards. But in this particular movie, its like Anderson thought "Hm, how can I possible squeeze all my favourite actors and their families and neighbours in one movie? Ah yes, I will create a omnibus and create space for 6 499 characters! How clever of me!" 

Dear reader, I hated it. In fact, I hated it so much that I even considered leaving the cinema and the only reason why I did not (several people from the audience were not as polite as me) was because I somehow got it wrong that there will be a Dalida song in the soundtrack - I mixed it up with James Bond (her song was in that movie). I knew immediately that this will not be for me because there was too much introduction talk and voiceovers with such a manic tempo that I found it annoying and difficult to follow. Three unrelated stories are here just to show off dazzlingly glowing list of Hollywood celebrities who each have exactly one minute before somebody else elbows them aside. Kind of modern-day Robert Altman but in a very, very fast pace that gives audience no space to breath or understand what is going on. Like extremely caffeinated Wes Anderson. I even thought that maybe this is a kind of movie to be enjoyed with help of some substances, maybe than everything would finally make sense? This is so far the most self-indulgent Anderson movie I have seen - it is everything we know from him but blown out of proportions, in some grotesque, Gargantuan way - almost like he parodied himself.

Which brings us to the question: for whom was this LSD fantasy actually made? For his cult followers? They would watch it anyway. But the new audiences - and even some older, like me - will be put off with such extreme, almost nauseating opulence of details. Where previously a viewer might have delighted in some clever detail or ornamentation, now the screen is so cluttered with them that its actually hard to focus on a story and I actually doubt is there a story at all. All this characters are just cartoons and at the end movie actually genuinely becomes a cartoon - seriously, this all brought me to such a bad mood - I could have stayed at home and spared myself a tedious afternoon - it put me off going to cinema at all, since there is so much to enjoy online.