No, he ain't a creature of God's Earth, but he's a creature of somewhere.

Asteroid City – 4/5

I feel this movie is about something interesting. I always find Wes Anderson's framing off-putting — a constant reminder that there's a director making choices behind the scenes, a hand of god, a controlling element. But this movie is very deliberately about the framing — about the control and lack of control in how we choose to frame things. A postcard shows you the most idyllic view of a scene, an unreal collage of colors. A photograph only shows you what the photographer wants you to see, devoid of context. A play and a TV show and a movie all handle framing a story in different ways, bound by the medium and bound by runtime and attention spans and bound by the controlling eye. All the ways an artist tries to control how a story is told – and what they choose to include in the picture. The key thing for me was the thing that was "cut" — Augie giving a reason for burning his hand ("I wanted there to be a reason my heart was beating so fast"). An artist debates within themselves what needs to be text versus context versus what is under the text; what they hand to an audience and what they leave for the audience to figure out for themselves. The play would have been better with the line, cuz it's a good line, but also may have been worse for trying to spell it out. Who knows? The postcard framing style throughout the movie always pans left or right or up or down to show all the other things happening that more fully tell the story of a moment, but which also make stories more complex. And so all the little behind-the-scenes elements add to this, the actors in love or at odds or confused by what's going on all add to what exists within and beyond the postcard / play / TV show / movie frame. All these little asteroids orbiting a thing. And we as viewers try to analyze a movie and say "does this connect?" or "this could have been tighter" but there's a whole cosmos of things happening that make a thing what it is, all with the power and ability and threat to create unplanned mountain ranges or else destroy it entirely. All beyond their control, and all beyond our ability to see them. So, ultimately — the story's framing is about what an artist chooses to show, and how despite their best attempts to control the narrative, they're not completely in charge... and how we can never truly fully understand their intentions without ourselves being them; without ourselves having been there. "You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."