What did you see this weekend? We'll skip the charts this week but let it be known that The Rock had another #1 opening weekend ($34 million for Rampage), horror hit A Quiet Place closed in on $100 million, and Isle of Dogs went wide in its 4th weekend and has a cumulative gross of $18 million. That means it's going to be about as succcessful as Fantastic Mr Fox and The Life Aquatic (i.e. his second tier successes) with his tier 1 biggest hits by a large margin being Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Moonrise Kingdom.
I've been a bit sad that the inventive delights and storytelling nuances of Isle of Dogs aren't being discussed as thoroughly as the film's take on Japan...
While some of the conversations about cultural appropriation have merit, one complaint I'm not jibing with revolves around the American exchange student Tracy (voiced perfectly by Greta Gerwig) as an example of the "white savior" trope. I have been annoyed by that trope enough times in the past to know that I can see it when it's there (in fact for years I was annoyed that other people couldn't see this common trope) but I never once got the sense that Wes Anderson views Tracy as the hero/protagonist or even as someone who we're meant to not find annoying. In some ways she can be read as a joke about loud entitled know-it-all Americans. The "savior," if we have to go to that loaded term, is clearly Atari (voiced by Koyu Rankin), the Japanese boy who travels to the titular garbage dump to save his dog and inspires others to rise up. If you're open to different viewpoints and nuanced takes on the movie, Japanese journalist Moeko Fujii's piece in the New Yorker is an absolute must-read. I love this particular point that she fully explores in her essay:
As I walked out of the theatre, Anderson’s decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers struck me as a carefully considered artistic choice. “Isle of Dogs” is profoundly interested in the humor and fallibility of translation. This is established early, by the title card: “The humans in this film speak only in their native tongue (occasionally translated by bilingual interpreter, foreign exchange student, and electronic device). The dogs’ barks are translated into English.” From the start, Anderson points to the various and suspect ways in which translation occurs. Official Interpreter Nelson, voiced by Frances McDormand, works for the government, but her reliability is thrown into doubt when she starts inserting her own comments—“Holy Moses!”;“Boy, what a night!”—while on the job. In one scene, she’s casually replaced by a little boy. The simul-talk devices, meanwhile, are shown to be operated by shadowy men in white starched shirts. This is the beating heart of the film: there is no such thing as “true” translation. Everything is interpreted. Translation is malleable and implicated, always, by systems of power.
The whole article is fascinating and made me want to see the movie again immediately with new understandings of several of the Japanese elements that I didn't get as an American watching it.