The long and winding road

"I think certain criticisms that I've heard about myself repeatedly start to linger. The things that I think about are whether or not I'm telling the same kind of family stories and whether these movies are so meticulously art-directed or organized that people can't get into the story... I feel like with Darjeeling Limited, I got a lot of people saying I was repeating certain things. But for me, I was doing a movie in India about these three brothers and those things are different. I mean, it's in India. It's a completely different movie." — Wes Anderson, L.A.Weekly

I was with him until the last point. I do feel a little sorry for the super stylists like Scorsese and Anderson who have the hopes of a waiting world pinned to their breast, when all they can really do is make more Martin Scorsese or Wes Anderson movies. Filmmakers make and remake the same movie, to our initial delight and, later on, annoyance. It must be very frustrating for them. One minute we love them, the next we've turned on them. Have they got worse? They've certainly got more familiar. Maybe The Darjeeling Limited would have charmed everyone if it was first off the boat. But simply setting a movie in India isn't enough I'm afraid. It's just a setting. That makes it "the Indian one." It's not disguise enough. Personally I think Anderson needs to quite the globe-trotting and come home. His mother agrees.