Wes Anderson and his A-list mates back to best in oddball comedy Asteroid City

A-listers such as Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks fall over themselves to work with director Wes Anderson – and his latest comedy Asteroid City shows why.

Scarlett Johansson in director Wes Anderson's Asteroid City. Picture: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features

Asteroid City (M)

Director: Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Steve Carell, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton.

Rating: ****1/2

Yellow sand, blue sky and many colourful ideas

There is one piece of important information you need to know when contemplating whether to take a slow, rubbernecking drive through Asteroid City, or take a complete detour instead.

Asteroid City is a Wes Anderson movie.

If you have seen any of this American filmmaker’s hyper-stylised previous works – of which The Grand Budapest Hotel remains the most highly regarded – then you will already know what you are in for.

There will be eye-popping visuals, judiciously framed and composed to the most minute detail.

There will be deadpan humour and soulful storytelling, both working together to build worlds as absurd as they are alluring.

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in writer/director Wes Anderson's new comedy Asteroid City. Picture: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features

There will also be an impeccable cast to die for: any and every actor in the game wants to be in a Wes Anderson movie.

At this point, it should also be stressed that Asteroid City is not merely a good Wes Anderson movie. It is a great one.

(If you were bored into submission by Anderson’s last enigmatically pretentious effort The French Dispatch, this news is cause for both relief and celebration.)

There is a nested plotting structure to Asteroid City that defies easy explanation. In the interests of keeping any potential confusion to a minimum, let’s just focus on the sublime combo of time and place within which the majority of the movie unfolds.

The year is 1955 and we find ourselves transported to a small town upon a stretch of desert where the US states of Nevada, California and Arizona intersect.

The microscopic hamlet of Asteroid City is usually just a trailer park and a diner. However, this year it is hosting the Annual Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet Convention.

Teenage inventors, academics and astrologers have gathered for a festival celebrating all the things that young nerds know and love. Their parents have reluctantly come along too, largely to sip martinis, smoke cigarettes and complain about the heat.

As is invariably the case with a Wes Anderson movie, there are many strange and eccentric characters to be discovered, followed and farewelled here.

(Some of them are played to perfection by the likes of familiar faces such as Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell and Tilda Swinton. Others are played in an equally striking manner by relative unknowns.)

There is also a handful of strange and eccentric events that will occur while this random bunch of social misfits are briefly living, competing and contemplating at such close quarters.

One event in particular – best described as a surprise visitor no one on the screen or in the audience could possibly have expected – just might be the funniest, freakiest and most memorable idea Anderson has ever come up with.

Asteroid City is in cinemas now

THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH (M)

***

General release

Jason Statham in a scene from the movie The Meg 2.

2018’s The Meg was a complete hoot for those viewers who appreciated the high levels of lowly-researched logic propelling its premise. That was the movie where a 2-million-year-old shark was thawed from its deep-frozen state just in time to attend an all-the-tourists-you-can-eat buffet at a modern-day tourist resort. This mega-shark was roughly the size of the Empire State Building, moved through the water like an outback road train, and displayed all the dining manners of someone who hadn’t had a decent meal in, oh, 2 million years.

Now there is a sequel. It is just as big, dumb and deliriously free of all commonsense as its predecessor, and just as much guilty-pleasure fun.

This time around, there are multiple Megs on the loose, with all of these prehistoric predators no longer content to be chilling out on the planet’s deepest ocean floors. These fightin’, bitin’ marine mean-machines are joined by some new ancient species (including an octopus the size of a cricket ground) to feast on holiday-makers of all shapes, sizes and swimsuit types.

As before, mankind’s only hope of not being munched upon is a flinty, squinty Jason Statham, determined to repel this terrifying threat with his full repertoire of disdainful scowls and painful one-liners.

THE TROUBLE WITH KANYE (M)

****

Now streaming on Binge and Foxtel

Journalist Mobeen Azhar (right) in the documentary The Trouble With Kanye.

This stunning documentary executes a deep and damning dive into the calamitous career meltdown of Kanye West (now legally known as Ye).

For well over a decade, Ye was pop culture’s ultimate multi-tasking Midas. Everything the African-American wunderkind touched inside the intersecting multiverses of music, fashion and brand management turned to gold. Then came an abrupt reversal of fortune around 2018, after which Ye went from hip-hop messiah to global pariah – largely because of the truly horrifying anti-Jewish doctrines that permeated his output, but also due to an inexplicably close bond struck with some of the worst white supremacist operatives on the American far right.

This BBC production goes about its investigation modestly yet clearly, going to appreciable lengths to establish what role Ye’s fluctuating mental health status has played in his downfall.

Originally published as Wes Anderson and his A-list mates back to best in oddball comedy Asteroid City