Hacker Cinema
The Royal Tenenbaums
2001 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Wes Anderson
Royal Tenenbaum and his wife Etheline had three children and then they separated. All three children are extraordinary --- all geniuses. Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster. Most of this was generally considered to be their father's fault. "The Royal Tenenbaums" is the story of the family's sudden, unexpected reunion one recent winter.
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13 comments on Hacker News
They’ve been a bit everywhere for decades I think. Like I think in movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums of Wes Anderson.
I think I heard it more or less since childhood.
Absolutely agree. My favorites,in order of how often I have watched them:
Fantastic Mr. Fox Rushmore Royal Tenenbaums Life Aquatic
The rest, I don't really care for, nothing new, just flash, no substance, and have stopped watching his new movies.
For better or for worse, Anderson is very much an auteur [0], like Godard or Woody Allen. Almost certainly in a self-conscious way.
Complaining that Anderson movies feel like Anderson movies seems almost to miss the point: do we look at Picasso's works and complain about the consistent style he developed? The self-imposed constraints of his own style give him a framework to build his art from (it's often said that constraints foster creativity after all) and a particular craft to master.
Conversely, the form might always be an Anderson movie, but the function of each film can be quite different. By sticking with and mastering a particular aesthetic he frees himself to explore things besides aesthetic wildly. What does The Royal Tenenbaums have in common with, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel, besides Futura?
That said, I do feel like Asteroid City in particular was a stretch for him: there's nothing quite like "you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep" anywhere else in his filmography. It felt like along with the more extreme artifice came a more extreme intensity of feeling: to me it's a film that really came from a very anguished and grieving place. I haven't read the article or seen the new film yet, but based on the headline it sounds like this might be the overall direction his work is heading.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur
>His films are the same thing repeated in different circumstances with different characters.
I am not sure what you mean, Asteroid City with its complex structure utilizing metafiction to explore things mostly removed from the characters and the story does not have much in common with The Royal Tenenbaums other than aesthetic with its fairly simple and direct use of character to explore the individual and family. Do you want him to make a superhero or action movie or something?
"The Conversation" is a masterpiece of the golden age of 70s film. "The French Connection" would be on my list too, for similar reasons. Popeye Doyle is a classic 70s protagonist.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned "The Birdcage" yet. Fantastic ensemble cast, and Hackman plays his part to perfection.
"Heist" and "Royal Tenenbaums" would finish out my list.
The Royal Tenenbaums
"Asshole dad reconciles with his estranged children."
Probably my favourite Wes Anderson film with an extremely talented cast. Gene Hackman does a great job of playing a well-meaning buy very flawed father figure.
It's been a long time, but I recall the Royal Tenenbaums just confusing me when I was younger (maybe too young) as I couldn't figure out what the point was. I liked the early Marvel movies as they were fun, but I just can't watch them or the shows on Disney+ anymore as I feel like I've hit my saturation point.
I don't trust anyone to review a film, but I still read/watch reviews. Over the years I've learned to read between the lines a bit and I usually have a gut feeling for how a reviewer and the film in question 'match up'.
People that 'hate' art movies are usually wrong. People that 'love' popcorn movies are too. Art movies are nuanced and delicate, so hating it with a 1 star review is too broad of a brush to paint your opinion with. If you don't like art and connecting with humanity, don't watch art movies (peasant). Similarly, popcorn movies are trash (<3) and love is too strong a word. Have fun, be entertained, but if you love The Avengers with all 5 stars you are paper thin.
I speak strongly with a smile and fully accept that film is a subjective medium, open to interpretation, and you can go ahead and hate The Royal Tenenbaums if you want, and love The Avengers if you want, but I will take your review with a large grain of salt and you deserve to not to be taken too seriously.
In the Finnish subs for The Royal Tenenbaums DVD, a character who says in English “There’s a dent in the car. There’s one here, too” gets translated as “There’s a dentist in that car. There is a dentist, too.”
A few years after I saw this, I entered the film translation business myself. Generally for anything Hollywood or otherwise big-budget, you can watch a copy of the whole film yourself to understand the context, and you can bill the client for the time spent doing that. Therefore, I tend to suspect that such cases of mistranslation are laziness or a company with an incompetent workflow.
> It is steeped in symbolism, deep metaphysics and calm, meditative, photography. All attributes that have been essentially banned from the fast food production/consumption chain that has conditioned audiences.
Whoa... this is a bold claim. I can think of western films that use techniques like this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Thin Red Line, Breathless, anything by Bergman, and The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, and many more that employ some of those traits. Additionally, implicit in the suggestion that not having those things somehow makes it "fast food production" (and thus of low quality), is rather unfair to the many western and non-western artists who have honed they're storytelling craft in a variety of styles. I love Tarkovsky and Solaris remains one of my favorite films, but I also like suspense films like Alien or action movies like Enter the Dragon, and many others which are frenetic, scary, fun or exciting.
I just watched The Royal Tenenbaums again. (It's available for free right now on Amazon Prime!)
This sounds like the fairy tale version of that. Probably doesn't make for great cinema. But I imagine a lot of people here would have loved to have grown up in a family like that.
I think I would have. Then again I asked to be excused from the honors program in elementary school because it conflicted with PE. (Begged to get back in once I hit junior high and got my first taste of an ordinary junior high English class.)
Royal Tenanbaums trailer just because I love this movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caMgokYWboU
Grammar, huh. Fighting words!
"GitHub Pages" is the name of a product, therefore it's singular. (One giveaway is the capital 'P'. If "pages" had been a generic plural, it would not have been capitalized.) The New York Times publishes articles every day, The Royal Tenenbaums is a Wes Anderson movie, and GitHub Pages, according to this article, is sometimes slow.
As for the claim "loses you 35% of your visitors", it is (a) dubious, (b) linkbait, and (c) violates the HN guideline against putting arbitrary numbers in titles. Happy to change it to something better if you or anyone suggest it—but editing that bit out was not a borderline call.
Did you like _The Royal Tenenbaums_? NPR's pop culture critic says that movies is basically F&Z filmed.
(_Tenenbaums_ is among my least favorite Wes Anderson movies).