Movie Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel (and TMNT Trailer)

It’s time for a review of Grand Budapest Hotel… warning, this film had a fair amount of Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, F. Murray Abraham, Adrian Brody, Jude Law, and Edward Norton… but most importantly is Willem Dafoe. If that doesn’t convince you to see it, then probably just stick to reading the review.

Rather than see Noah this weekend like I really wanted, I ended up seeing Grand Budapest Hotel. Admittedly, not my first choice, but it certainly wasn’t a bad one and if you like films that deliver on quick humor, but aren’t entirely designed or aimed at being funny all the time, you might very well enjoy this film. It’s by no means perfect, and, in fact, I would argue there are a few problems that keep it from really sticking with me as a favorite. But it’s good and it’s my first film of 2014, so I guess that’s something. Again, unfortunate since there are at least two other movies from this year that were on my radar, one of which I don’t think I’ll be able to catch now (Sorry, Lego Movie).

What is Grand Budapest Hotel? It’s a story about how the hotel in question came to belong to a man named Zero Moustafa. You follow his adventure from being a small, almost worthless lobby boy to being the owner of the estate. And while he’s present for most of the story, the real star is the concierge he shares his story with, who happened to be his mentor, Mr. M Gustave. He’s a very strict man who holds the Grand Budapest in such high esteem and expects everyone under his employment to live up to his seemingly ridiculous standards.

I won’t get into the details of the story too far because that ruins a lot of the best jokes and set ups, which is partly why I hate reviewing comedy. But the story goes from being a simple story of Moustafa’s time in training at the hotel to getting absurdly complex with the death of a well-known client, the stealing of a valuable piece of art, Gustave going to prison, and all this during a time of war, which gets more important the longer the film goes on, but nothing that becomes a central premise to the film itself. Even with all this going on, it’s very much a character piece to tell the story of this brilliant and extremely dedicated concierge, who goes so far above and beyond his line of duty you’d almost think he’s insane. 

And while I listed a good number of familiar names, the bulk of them play very small roles and aren’t in the film for nearly the amount of time I would have preferred, but almost all of them give a good line or are part of an amusing gag that at least help to make up for that. Jeff Goldblum plays an accountant/lawyer who has some fun with a dead cat. Willem Dafoe makes for a surprisingly menacing thug, and Bill Murray kicks off a nice, but predictable, gag in the third act to help the heroes get to where they need to go to avoid the cops.

But aside from that, most of your time is spent with the less famous duo playing Gustave and Moustafa, and I have no problem with that. If anything, it’s casting like this that could pull people into less popular films to look for the names and faces they like and remember. Though, I would think that for some films to pull this off successfully, it’d be wise to give them a bigger role than one that amounts to a three minute joke (again, that depends on the film). Overall, the story and actors are fun and while not outright hysterical, they’re good for a chuckle and an amusing story that clocks in at about 100 minutes. 

Yeah, this is short, but what else do you want? I’m not spoiling any jokes and that’s basically all that’s left to talk about. And since the enjoyment of humor is way more subjective than just a simple “good or bad” reaction to an overall film, I’d say that’s a topic I’m free to avoid if I choose. But I have a lot of empty space here… so… um…

I guess we can weasel in some discussion about the recent TMNT trailer if you’d like? I know the relation here is nothing more than “these things are both movies” but I don’t have anything else on hand to really throw out at the moment. But let’s have some fun with this and see where it goes.

If you haven’t seen the trailer, it’s above here. Now I’ve noticed a lot of hate for it already, and while I feel you are more than justified to dislike the trailer, I’m on the mindset of finding it “acceptable, but not enough to give me a full idea of what this movie will be like.” The amount of time we saw the turtles in the trailer is maybe a whopping 15-20 seconds nearing the end of the trailer. The majority of it was about people talking or mysterious looking shots that are obviously meant as filler for the trailer. And since a TMNT movie is going to be reviewed HEAVILY on how good the turtles look, act, and the amount of screentime they get, it’s really hard to make any judgment one what is likely going to be at least a 2 hour movie with only 20 seconds of worthwhile footage to go over.

From what I DID see, the designs for the turtles are about what we expected based on the promotional poster leaked roughly a month ago. Overall, I still stand by my decision to like the redesigns, though I do agree that the idea of giving them noses and more human-like mouths is somewhat bizarre, but nothing world-shattering. I mean, these are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after all, not like them being done in a way that’s slightly off will end the world. Hell, the early Transformers designs (and some of the current ones) looked/look terrible, but did that kill the popularity of the lovable robots in disguise? Did we stop getting good films at all? Did you personally lose anything more than maybe a few hours of time that could have been better spent re-watching Jurassic Park or better yourself in some small way? I didn’t think so. Thus, as far as I’m concerned, these minor design flaws aren’t going to kill the TMNT movie for me in any major way. 

Plus, I’m also considering the fact we probably don’t have a lot of finished footage yet. Again, we didn’t see much in that trailer. It’s safe to say they’re still working on the effects for a lot of shots, and that we likely won’t see a more polished trailer for a few months still. Even the early Amazing Spiderman trailers looked like garbage because they footage hadn’t been touched up yet (though the ending result was a spectacular failure, but that’s beside the point). That point being we really don’t have much to go on yet to make any fair assessment (unlike Amazing Spiderman 2, which can’t help but show us more reasons why not to see it. Looking at you, Green Goblin).

What I will say is that I have found two things that don’t sit well with me. One of which I already knew about and is my main reason for being skeptical, Megan Fox. I have yet to see her in anything that makes me like her. And, no, having a boner isn’t the same as liking her. Beyond that, I really don’t find her attractive. Something about her face doesn’t quite jive with me, and I immediately stop liking her. I get why other people might like her, but I’m just not into that like my 14 year old self might have been. So the return of no-talent Megan Fox already has me as a fence sitter until I see something concretely good. But what else? 

The trailer mentions the whole “wanting to create heroes” concept. You know, another generic make-heroes-in-a-lab origin story that we got with the Amazing Spiderman reboot. I get the turtles are from the 80’s era of comics, heroes, cartoons, and so on where generic tropes like this were made and popularized, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle for that. I mean, if we’re going to do generic origin stories for characters we already know, why bother doing an origin story at all when we could just do a story with them as established characters since we all know origin stories are typically the weakest in a trilogy anyway (except maybe in the Dark Knight Trilogy… or the Raimi Spiderman Trilogy). But what I mean is that the origin stories are all the same basic idea and take a while for the action to really start and the story to get good.

Closing thoughts on TMNT, I’m still on the fence. I’m not a diehard fan of the turtles, and certainly am not a bigger fan of them than of, say, the Transformers. But I like them enough to at least have interest in what happens to the property on film. I don’t think Bay is right to make this movie, but perhaps he’ll have improved his craft since the original Transformers trilogy. I’m willing to be optimistic about something I don’t care as much about. Especially since I’m basically reserving all my bitterness and “low expectations” for Amazing Spiderman 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and basically anything Warner Bros. is doing for this slowly failing Justice League film project. Have to try to be positive somewhere, right?