(In one of the many "A-ha" moments of trivia sprinkled throughout: the magazine was originally called Picnic. The fictionalized New Yorker is called The French Dispatch, published out of a little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, although it started in Liberty, Kansas, where editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Rosamond Bernier, James Baldwin-all of whom were given enormous leeway in terms of subject matter and process, but edited within an inch of their lives to align their prose with the aggressive New Yorker house style. In "The French Dispatch," the object of Anderson's obsession ("object" is a key word) is The New Yorker, specifically The New Yorker in the time of finicky founder/editor Harold Ross, and his daunting roster of writers- James Thurber, A.J. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world. The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. Watching Anderson follow his obsession to the outer limits (it's hard to imagine how much further he could go) is fascinating. "The French Dispatch" lacks some of the more endearing qualities of his earlier features-the prep school shenanigans of " Rushmore," the intimate family dynamic of " The Royal Tenenbaums" and " The Darjeeling Limited," or the kid-centered " Moonrise Kingdom." By contrast, "The French Dispatch" holds the audience at a remove, and is a stronger film for it. Made up of a dizzying array of whirring intersecting teeny tiny parts, "The French Dispatch" ticks forward relentlessly, never stopping to breathe, barely pausing for reflection. A clock is an apt metaphor for Anderson's style, present in all of his movies, but to an extreme degree here. It's like taking apart a clock to see how it works, and in so doing you no longer know what time it is. In a 2019 interview with Charente Libre, Wes Anderson said that his new movie, "The French Dispatch" was "not easy to explain." He's right, it's not, and any explanation would deconstruct it in a way to make it sound even more incomprehensible.
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