I agree with you that every “Indie” film now, seems to be a Wes Anderson rip-off. I came to this realization after I saw Juno (although a decent film), that film was the missing link that allowed me to connect the Rip-Off dots.
Rip-off may be a bit harsh. maybe what happened was, Wes Anderson has brought the indie genre to the forefront in recent years (scoring special spots on MTV and getting Academy Award nominations), and has made the indie film completely accessible to a huge audience. So, i think that indie directors might be, more or less, recreating his recipe for an accessible indie rather than ripping off his style…?
Perhaps it would help to talk specifically about Anderson’s style and what films and filmmakers you see as imitating it? Are you referring to Anderson as a director (his visual style) or Anderson as a writer (co-writer, actually, with Owen Wilson, Noah Baumbach, and Roman Coppola)?
Eh, I still think the Tarantino imitators are the worst.
I hate to tell you all this, but Wes himself was accused of being a Richard Linklater imitator when he first came onto the scene.
Thanks for that reminder, Christopher. I was thinking as I started reading this thread that almost every artist starts by imitating the work of others he admires. The thing to pay attention to, then, is which Wes Anderson imitators grow beyond that and develop their own voices.
I think the problem is really the fact people attempt to imitate whatever style it is that seems to be catching on at the given period in time. Right now there’s this whole slew of “indie” filmmakers trying to make these simple yet profound comedies that fail as a result of their self indulgence.
Wes Anderson breathed new life into his genre, but his imitators seem to drowning it once again.
And yes, I do agree, Tarantino imitators are the worst.
Anyone want to name some Anderson and Tarantino imitators because I can’t think of any. I’m sure I just don’t watch them and there are plenty.
Rip-offs (I make no claims about their quality): Rocket Science, Igby Goes Down, I Heart Huckabees, Garden State, Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, the latest Robert Patton-Spruill film looks like a total life Aquatic Crib.
>>I think the problem is really the fact people attempt to imitate whatever style it is that seems to be catching on at the given period in time.<<
That’s tru enough, but I think there may also be some filmmakers who see a Wes Anderson film & think, “Now THAT’S what I want my films to be like!”
And Anderson’s films are not only simple but profound (mostly because they manage not to make too much obvious – something most writers & directors just cannot bring themselves to do), but also perched oh-so-perfectly on the dividing line between drama and absurdity.
But, anyway, would you rather have them copying Judd Apatow?
Some would argue that with his last few movies Wes Anderson himself has become the biggest Wes Anderson imitator around.
I Heart Huckabees? In what way is that “ripping off” Anderson? Having you seen David O. Russell’s first two features—Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996)? These films established the style of Huckabees (Russell’s style), and since the films were made before or concurrent with Anderson’s Bottle Rocket (a short in 1994 expanded into a feature in 1996), it’s tough to argue that Russell is “ripping off” Anderson.
I don’t think it is, because he had gone from different style, that of Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster and then made a film with Anderson’s color scheme, musical sensibility, a lot of cribbed camera angles, and his lead actor from Rushmore. Flirting with Disaster made narrative sense in a way that Huckabees did not. I think Huckabees has little in common with Russell’s earlier features, other than an audacious visual sense (I was actually pretty bummed out when I saw Huckabees expecting something akin to Flirting and/or Kings). Again, just my opinion, but that Huckabees came out after Tenenbaums and Rushmore accounts for many of the film’s stylistic choices.
@ Richard Deming: “Some would argue that with his last few movies Wes Anderson himself has become the biggest Wes Anderson imitator around.”
Nah. Anderson has built a world and is still exploring it. It doesn’t always go the way you think it will.
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale suffered from Wes Anderson imitation. Baumbach learned under Anderson, so it’s understandable to see where he’s coming from, but it seems he didn’t realize that their two concerns are very different. The Squid and the Whale is essentially an attempt at Wes Anderson handheld, and yet it needed to be something very different, in my opinion. Well, that, and Baumbach playing around with daddy problems was really annoying. It didn’t need to have the look of a Wes Anderson film at all.
—PolarisDiB
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Nah. Anderson has built a world and is still exploring it. It doesn’t always go the way you think it will.
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale suffered from Wes Anderson imitation. Baumbach learned under Anderson, so it’s understandable to see where he’s coming from, but it seems he didn’t realize that their two concerns are very different. The Squid and the Whale is essentially an attempt at Wes Anderson handheld, and yet it needed to be something very different, in my opinion. Well, that, and Baumbach playing around with daddy problems was really annoying. It didn’t need to have the look of a Wes Anderson film at all.
—PolarisDiB
<>
Nah. Anderson has built a world and is still exploring it. It doesn’t always go the way you think it will.
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale suffered from Wes Anderson imitation. Baumbach learned under Anderson, so it’s understandable to see where he’s coming from, but it seems he didn’t realize that their two concerns are very different. The Squid and the Whale is essentially an attempt at Wes Anderson handheld, and yet it needed to be something very different, in my opinion. Well, that, and Baumbach playing around with daddy problems was really annoying. It didn’t need to have the look of a Wes Anderson film at all.
—PolarisDiB
I’ve always thought Wes Anderson was imitating Hal Ashby and Mike Nichols.
Right, Kimberly. He’s a brilliant (at times) synthesist, but few of the things that are being attributed to Anderson are original to him.
Scout,
In the abstract, I don’t see any great resemblance between Huckabees and Wes Anderson’s work beyond superficialities. Do you have specific shots in mind?
Polaris,
What do you mean “Baumbach learned under Anderson?” Baumbach made his first feature prior to Anderson making his, and regarding their collaboration on Life Aquatic, one could argue that that film is more Baumbach’s than Anderson’s.
“Imitating” is not the same as “copying”: it is not necessarily a negative word.
The Italian painter of the Renaissance Raffaello Sanzio imitated Leonardo Da Vinci. Stanley Kubrick imitated Orson Welles. Martin Scorsese imitated Alfred Hitchcock. Tarantino imitated a whole generation of B-movie film-makers…. Would you condemn these “imitators”?
The worldly-known English philosopher John Lock once re-used a famous Thomas of Aquinus’ sentence: “Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu” (= “everything you know comes from your senses”). So, it is absolutely natural to develop new ideas using the old ones. Every artist necessarily has a source of inspiration, so, please, do not blame just anyone!
:)
“Imitating” is not the same as “copying”: it is not necessarily a negative word.
The Italian painter of the Renaissance Raffaello Sanzio imitated Leonardo Da Vinci. Stanley Kubrick imitated Orson Welles. Martin Scorsese imitated Alfred Hitchcock. Tarantino imitated a whole generation of B-movie film-makers…. Would you condemn these “imitators”?
The worldly-known English philosopher John Lock once re-used a famous Thomas of Aquinus’ sentence: “Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu” (= “everything you know comes from your senses”). So, it is absolutely natural to develop new ideas using the old ones. Every artist necessarily has a source of inspiration, so, please, do not blame just anyone!
:)
The ending in the elevator comes to mind immediately; the use of violence punctuated by the appearance of the many characters and the two men leveling with each other in between seems like a lesson learned between Rushmore and Tenenbaums (The “Quick One” montage; Eli and Richie at the Wedding). There are dozens of times that I could point things out like “oh, look there, it’s a 2-D straight-on shot, see!” but that would be grasping and I don’t think that’d help. To me its in the composition of the whole piece. It just feels very informed by Rushmore and Tenebaums. Maybe it’s just that after viewing Russell’s freak out videos I can’t take him seriously as a director anymore, but that has no bearing on this argument.
Umberto
To imitate is to reproduce, to resemble. John Locke was not reproducing anyones work, you stated yourself that he used the old to come up with something new which would not be imitating. Same goes for al the directors you listed, all of them created something new out of their inspiration. So I believe you have gotten the definition of imitate mixed up with inspired by.
“Igby Goes Down” is a neglected masterpeice. I don’t see it relating to anything Wes Anderson does at all.
David O. Russell is closest to Wes Anderson in “I Heart Huckabees.” But Wes is a reasonable (albeit wildly idiosyncratic) fellow. Russell is totally cukoo for cocoa puffs.
Tarantino is an interesting Hollywood character but not a filmmaker of consequence.
Yves,
I really meant what I have written: nobody is 100% original. Martin Scorsese did use the “Vertigo zoom” in Goodfellas. Quentin Tarantino’s infinite “references” are just a work of collage from other directors. But we consider them original and we love/like/dislike/hate them. This is absolutely normal.
The German philosopher Leibniz re-wrote Locke’s sentence in this way, to delete every possibility of misinterpretation: “Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. NISI INTELLECTVM IPSE” (= “everything you know comes from your senses, but what you know on your own”).
Another great empirist philosopher, David Hume, said that we are like dwarfs who stand on the giants’ shoulders. This picture fits this situation: just a small part of a work (i.e.: always less than 50%) is due to our originality.
David O. Russell is closest to Wes Anderson in “I Heart Huckabees.”
Yeah, I see the dots, but they’re not connected.
Wes Anderson is a collage artist.
Umberto
Yeah, that makes sense. But i guess what I feel like some directors are doing now is attempting to copy Anderson’s style and I can’t necessarily say what it is. A director has more to the film then what is written and shot. Like if Scorsese and Anderson were each to make the same movie with the exact same shots and writing and they were basically making each film identical shot for shot I’m sure anyone who knows much about directors would be able to say which one is Anderson’s and which is Scorsese’s. So I feel like a lot of directors films seem to imitating, or i guess stealing is a much more fit word, his style not just his shots or structure. If that makes any sense.
Yves,
Perhaps it might help here to sketch out what, broadly speaking are the elements of Anderson’s style:
-still camera
-wide angle lenses
-90 degree camera angles, frontal, “family portrait” framing, (planimetric composition)
-frequent close-ups, quick pans, and slow motion
-primary colors
Regarding the Scorsese and Anderson shot-for-shot theoretical, bear in mind that, beyond the reductive convenience of auteurist theory, film is still a collaborative medium, so though in theory it may be the director who has the final say, he’s still get input from actors, cinematographers, producers, etc, so it isn’t really soley the director’s film. Would Scorsese get the same input from Owen Wilson? Probably not. Same goes for Robert D. Yeoman and all of Anderson frequent collaborators. Sure the films would be different, but it’s not just the directors to which the differences would be attributable.
Matt
I realize this and I’m not saying that the Director is god in the film. Although I do realize how it came out that way. What I’m trying to say is that when a filmmaker makes a film they usually put something into the film that makes it distinct but this distinct thing that I’m talking about is not like the camera shots it something that only that certain director/writer/producer, really just an auteur filmmaker, can do. So I feel like these “indie” directors take the shots and many other aspects of the film but can’t grasp whatever it is that each director does. So in doing that they merely create a film that looks like Anderson but is missing something altogether. But it is impossible for me to say what that something is. The reason I use Anderson as an example is because he is so involved in his films and they really are his films. But yeah, the Scorsese and Anderson was a bad example, just having trouble saying exactly what it is I’m thinking. So sorry if this makes no sense.
Hans Lucas
Wes Anderson has the ability to have his own style and create an alternative world but what about the entire “indie” world who continuously imitate his films? So basically are directors who imitate (not inspired by but imitate) others, are they the worse kind of directors?
Oh and sorry if this is already a topic I checked and couldn’t find one like this but I may be wrong.