Grand Budapest Hotel
Director: Wes Anderson Year: 2014 Wonderfully colorful and whimsical, loaded with cracking dialogue and ridiculous characters, The Grand Budapest Hotel has perched itself as an excellent alternative to the field of much darker candidates in this years crowded Best Picture race. This is a story about the power of stories and the importance of listening for them. For, as we are told early on by Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), great storytellers do not, in fact, labor over the creation of their stories incessantly, they simply wait for people to spill them. And cult hero/Director Wes Anderson delightfully spills this one all over us. Costume, set design, and cinematography are all under Anderson’s watchful and brilliant guidance here, with delightful twists, turns and surprises in every frame. If it were style for the sake of itself, which, admittedly, I have felt about some of Anderson’s earlier work, it would be distracting. But everything adds up here. Every actor, and it is...