![]() But periodically we'll see - in black-and-white footage - what's going on behind the scenes. ![]() We're informed at the outset that Asteroid City is actually a 1950s play that's being produced for television, and that production is basically the movie we're watching. Here's where I should mention the extremely intricate framing device that Anderson has devised. ![]() Later, Asteroid City receives a surprise visitor - let's call it a close encounter of the whimsical kind - that will force everyone in town to confront their fears of the unknown.īut that's not even the strangest thing happening in this movie. Mushroom clouds erupt in the distance, where atomic bomb tests are being conducted. Eventually, strange things start to happen. As usual, there's also some inconvenient romance: Woodrow develops a crush on Dinah, just as Augie begins flirting with Midge, a tough-minded kindred spirit who's experienced her share of loss. That would give him a chance to solve some of the storytelling problems he created for himself.Music Interviews How Wes Anderson Soundtracks His MoviesĬhild geniuses and cross-generational conflicts are a staple of Anderson movies like Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums and especially Rushmore, the film in which Schwartzman made his acting debut. It's easy to imagine the actor directing a movie of "Masterpiece" (he could play Johnson, too). For instance, "Masterpiece" is obsessed with typewriters, which are mentioned more than 30 times, a detail that makes sense if you remember Hanks wrote a book of short stories inspired by his own vintage typewriter collection. That stuff is entertaining, guided by Hanks' verbally dexterous humor, knowledge of film and idiosyncrasies. (The fictitious "Knightshade" is meant to be a side entry in a series of superhero movies like the cinematic universe of Marvel, which is dubbed Dynamo here, and it's being made for a Netflix-like company called Hawkeye.) And Hanks shows how clever people solve those problems. Johnson's "Knightshade" faces the kinds of setbacks many movies do: An actor misbehaves, another actor disappears, unexpected costs mount. The short version is: "There are problems and you solve them." Movie directors are always saying their job is to answer questions all day but "Masterpiece" shows what that means. That, readers, is why skimming was invented.īecause the rest of "Masterpiece" will have tons of appeal for anyone who wishes that they could visit a movie set but has never snagged one of those special lanyards that tells them they belong.įrom the meetings in which resourceful director Bill Johnson and his faithful team envision the movie to its premiere at a huge theater in Manhattan that seems modeled on the Ziegfeld (see what I mean about an extraneous detail slowing down the written word?), "Masterpiece" lays out, day by day, how movies get made. In "Masterpiece," Hanks includes all of that back-story stuff - he's constantly introducing minor characters, only to dive back into their childhoods - and most of it feels extraneous. But that "not in the script" is important. Keeping those details in their heads helps them create characters, even though audiences never know the details because they're not in the script. Actors want to know everything about the people they play: what happened to them as kids, what scares them, when they've felt lonely, what their favorite Christmas present was. But the ceremony went off without a hitch on Sunday night. The trouble is that Hanks is guided by an actor's instincts, not a writer's. No problem There was plenty of uncertainty in the run-up to this year’s Tony Awards, which at one point seemed unlikely to happen at all because of the ongoing Hollywood writer’s strike. Sikoryak) will provide inspiration for "Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall," the "major motion picture" whose making is chronicled in the remaining 300 pages of the book. He writes a comic book based on his uncle and that comic (reproduced in "Masterpiece," with illustrations by R. There is a reason Hanks devotes so much space to the young California man. ![]() Not much happens, so the long second chapter in "Masterpiece" may make you think, "Why am I reading this?" and "Where's the 'motion picture' stuff?" Dispatch/Argus sports writers Daniel Makarewicz and Marc Nesseler play high school hoops 'Fact or Fiction' in this weeks edition of the Dispatch/Argus Press. The Oscar winner's debut novel opens with a prologue followed by 80 pages about uneventful life in a Northern California town where a young man meets his drifter uncle, a hero in World War II. Imagine if "Forrest Gump" began with 30 minutes about shrimp fishing and you'll see the first issue with Tom Hanks' "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece."
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