First movie of 2024!! And what a fun one it was. I'm always charmed by Wes Anderson movies; I just love the color and shot framing and dialogue, and the actors always deliver excellent performances. Jason Schwartzman was great, Scarlet Johanssen was great, Jake Ryan was great; everyone was fuckin great. I didn't know anything about Asteroid City before watching it except that it was new, and it was such a treat. I'm not certain, but it looked like the visual effects were mostly practical, which I just adore. That little roadrunner dancing in the credits is the best, and the alien?? The fucking ALIEN??? I absolutely LOST IT at the alien. I love him. He is everything. His little pose for the photo was like, so perfectly timed that it just took me out.
Something about this movie just made me so happy. I don't know if it was the vibes, the structure of the story, the story itself, or what, but I spent so much of the runtime just. Smiling to myself. I think it was just exactly what I wanted when I decided to watch a Wes Anderson film. It's so quintessentially HIM, which I've seen a couple reviews mention as a bad thing, but that's what I watched it FOR. The stilted dialogue, stiff characters, rigid camera work and strict composition. I wanted a pretty, silly, fun movie and that's exactly what this is! Why would it need to be anything more? (I am fully aware that the last review I wrote was just me complaining that a movie was very Michael Bay, which I do see the hypcrisy there, but I don't like Bay's style of filmmaking and I like Anderson's so shut it.) Whatever, point is I had fun. My dad liked it too, and my mom gave up trying to "get it" about halfway through, so I would consider it a peer-reviewed good movie. Sorry mom.