The Darjeeling Limited

I just watched The Darjeeling Limited.

I have a few thoughts which I’d like to share with you.

1. Everyone associated with the Coppolas should be banned from making movies, except for Francis Ford. I include in this list motherfucking Nicholas Cage and mother fucking Jason Shcwartzman, and add the corollary that Sophia and Roman should be tossed off a cliff into the mouth of a lion which is on fire.

2. Wes Anderson can suck me. Yes, I enjoyed The Royal Tenenbaums, but the effective (because unique) quirkiness of one movie does not parlay well into a career-long self-absorbed genre. Wes, you are the reason I hate film people. The special features made me want to pistol-whip you and everyone on your crew.

3. When you see Bill Murray, run. If you do not run, you are either about to a.   Be involved in a really dull, ‘quirky’ film project, or b. Watch a really dull, ‘quirky’ film project. I mean it; get up off of the couch and run.

4. Y’know, how people talk about their baggage? Like, emotional baggage? Well, in possibly the most heavy-handed visual cue/s in all of cinema, Anderson has the three brothers lugging around a lot of coordinated luggage for the entire film. At the end [Spoiler alert, like the movie hasn't already ruined itself], the three brothers dump their luggage as they catch a train.  It killed me when they did it (in slow-mo, no less).

There was other heavy-handed symbolism, but I have thankfully already punched myself in the head a number of times in order to kill the brains cells storing that information, so I cannot share it with you.

Count your lucky stars.

5. Sometimes, prescription drug abuse can be played for humour. But I guess you have to write some of that humour into the script? Because all I saw were some weak half-jokes and a lot of time wasting.

6. Oh Owen Wilson, and Adrian Brody; I kinda like you guys. Why d’you gotta hang around with dickheads? Non-Coppolas also pay, I hear.

7. How many more of these precious movies about poor little lost rich kids can we take? Shouldn’t there be like, an uprising? Can we do something?

8. Lemme guess how this happened: one of the writers took a trip through India, thought “Man, this would make a great movie!” and then roped two buddies into writing it with him. The problems with that were that a. Nothing of real note had happened on the trip, and b. They were all buddies, so nobody said “Hey, that thing you just wrote is really lame. Let’s do a better job so we’re not all embarrassed at how bad this movie is.”

In conclusion, I would like to give this movie 9 forks. It wasn’t as bad as Marie Antoinette, but it was certainly trying really hard and I always reward hard work.

The only saving grace is the cinematography; there were some really beautiful shots. It was hard to notice them, what with the painful script and the awkward storytelling.

[If you're newish, the rating system I use is a ten-fork rating system representing he number of times that, while watching the movie, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye. A 10 fork movie is really bad (Marie Antoinette), and a 0 fork movie is really good (maybe Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).]