"I think he is very lonely. Lonelier than he lets on. Maybe lonelier than he even realizes."

I don't think I've ever seen a movie so hilariously blunt and honest as The Royal Tenenbaums. I admittedly didn't like this movie when I first watched it. I am generally not a fan of Wes Anderson's quirky style which is why Bottle Rocket is my favorite for some weird reason. But Tenenbaums is a VERY close second. This one seems to get better every time I watch it, and it's usually a film I fall back on for a "feel good" movie.

Despite it being a "feel good" film it still has some moments of profound loneliness and melancholy sadness. The hilarity…

Often times certain films hold a special place in my heart, as I am sure the same can be said of almost everyone else. My memory of The Royal Tenenbaums involves a group of friends driving one hour (both ways) to Baltimore to catch it at the Charles Theater. At the time, that was the only way to see Wes Anderson’s newest film, since growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, one did not have the opportunity to see independent or foreign films. Seeing The Royal Tenenbaums at the Charles is one of my favorite movie memories and also one of my favorite memories from high school. Looking back, I still find it funny that we were unable to…

Wes Anderson's films are known primarily as Wes Anderson films, which is not very surprising seeing as he has developed his very own style, consisting of symmetrical colorful photography/art direction infused with sweet sounding pop songs, a combination that it takes mere seconds to recognize as distinctly andersonsonian. When looking back it's clear though that it was Anderson and Owen Wilson as a pair that had something really special going in the late 90s and early 00s. It was their collaboration that made the three early Anderson directed movies such outstanding creations. The two films that followed after Wilson had left and Anderson continued on with Noah Baumbach and later Roman Coppola as co-writers, were similar tragic comedies but lacked…

I've always been a fan of Wes Anderson ever since randomly borrowing a copy of The Life Aquatic from a friend but oddly enough I didn't really watch any of the rest of his filmography until last year. I'm not quite done with him yet but I'll be stunned if Fantastic Mr. Fox, the last one I have yet to see, turns out to be better than what is now my favourite work of his. The Royal Tenenbaums is probably his most critically acclaimed film and frankly it's not hard to see why, even if it deals with the critic's favourite subject of a dysfunctional family. I'll be hard-pressed to find a family more dysfunctional than the Tenenbaums and were…

The masses harped with a well-deserved glee over Rushmore, but to the table, I submit that The Royal Tenenbaums, a surprisingly emotional, utterly hilarious love letter to New York, is, in fact, a matured, absolutely pristine creation worthy to follow in the footsteps of that justly revered mini-masterpiece. Anderson appears to be having the time of his life. The neatly color-coded, eighties-inferred New York he lets his characters play in whilst he frames everything with an obsessive compulsive symmetry is worth the price of admission alone. That I was able to laugh out loud in the same ironic, quirky way I was able to laugh at his other films made the whole affair smell just that much sweeter. There isn't…