We saw Rian Johnson’s “Brick” follow-up, “The Brothers Bloom,” a madcap European caper flick, at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and while we’re big fans of the filmmaker’s auspicious debut, we could not really hang with the spectacle of overwrought whimsy in the picture, though we’ll admit, near the end of the picture the film had kind of won us over when its conceits and ticks calmed down a bit (but the damage was already done, frankly).
We weren’t the only ones. The keen Jeffrey Wells called it for exactly what it is and was less forgiving than we were. “I lasted a little less than an hour,” he wrote in September calling the film a “sumptuous but impossibly silly and logic-free” gag. “I was reeling from the preciousness, the overdone continental cutesiness, the feeling of being simultaneously mauled, tickled, fucked with and drugged by the impossibly faux-Wes Anderson style of the damn thing.”
This line is rather choice: “Rian obviously wants to be Wes, but this movie makes ‘The Life Aquatic’ look like Yasujiro Ozu’s ‘Floating Weeds.’ “
The Ultra Culture blog openly criticized the film with a post called “5 Questions For The Brothers Bloom” (don’t bother it’s been taken down there’s problems with this site it seems) and Johnson actually responded to the criticism on his Tumblr blog if you want to sort of get a vague idea of what the censuring points were.
Anywho, this a longwinded way of saying, “The Brothers Bloom” has itself a new trailer, which we find a little underwhelming considering how much of a spectacle one could sell it as to the twee-enthusiast crowd, but maybe that’s what they’re exactly trying to dial down. It also reveals something we didn’t know and that’s that music-supervisor Brian Reitzell (Sofia Coppola’s go-to soundtrack guy and a respected musician who inventively composed the score for the surprisingly decent horror/vampire film “30 Days of Night“). Reitzell will also always have the estimable distinction of coaxing My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields out of hermitude to compose some original music for “Lost In Translation” and contributed one great original song to that soundtrack as well. He also music supe’d and co-wrote some music with Spoon’s Britt Daniels for the Will Ferrell film, “Stranger Than Fiction.”
Johnson’s brother Nathan composed the score of whimsy and Reitzell presumably was instrumental in picking tracks by Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens in the film. We can’t remember the rest of the songs, but we do recall it being a pretty choice selection of tracks (however, how they’re used is another story, there’s way too many music montages and one “activities montage” so desperate to be Wes Anderson all it needed was the Futura Bold font to be a total aping). Hopefully we can get that listing of songs from the film soon; they flew by too quickly in the final credits.
Part of the synopsis of the film reads, “Welcome to the world of The Brothers Bloom, where deception is an art and nothing is as it seems. The brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) have perfected the art of swindling fortunes through years of fraternal teamwork. Now they’ve decided to take on one last spectacular job—luring a beautiful and eccentric heiress (Rachel Weisz) into an elaborate plot that takes them around the world.” Here’s more.
“The Brothers Bloom” opens May 15 in limited release. We still hold out hope for Johnson’s next picture. Here’s that new trailer.
