I remembered this as the slightest of Wes Anderson’s live-action scripts with Roman Coppola, most notable for the extreme precision of the film’s Andersonian clockwork diorama world and evocativeness of music and visuals.

Like the main characters, this film has a charm and a sincerity that are both beguiling even while it settles into a diffuseness that feels a little frustrating.

This short’s conciseness and energy work better to convey the themes than the feature.

In an essay for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, Isabel Folger writes that “Moonrise Kingdom shows that with the right people in your life, you won’t feel misunderstood.

The Titan submersible incident prompted a response by James Cameron highlighting his approach to underwater exploration. I’m struck by the contrast between Wes Anderson’s almost childlike reverence for undersea explorers in the outdated model of Jacques Costeau, expressed in THE LIFE AQUATIC and RUSHMORE, and Cameron’s much more masculine-coded urge to conquer the depths harnessing advanced technology for his pursuit.

Found footage of a Czech soap where the real story hides behind clever edits eliding dark truths.

At the end of the film, the Newborn is violently sucked through a tiny hole into Earth’s upper atmosphere. This film feels like trying to suck the Alien franchise through a much-diminished perspective to become a generic and misogynistic blockbuster.

SLIVER wants to be about voyeurism, surveillance, and power. But gesturing towards themes while not saying anything substantive about them is not enough for thematic resonance.

ASTEROID CITY serves as something of an artistic statement for this period of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking, overtly discussing existential themes around meaning and, in particular, finding meaning through art that emphasise Anderson’s complicating of modernism and postmodernism.

Like ALIEN ON STAGE and A BUNCH OF AMATEURS, RAIDERS! is a charming insight into amateur filmmaking that reveals the importance of creative outlets for ordinary people outside the big-budget industrial systems of mainstream filmmaking.