Filmography: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001); The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004); The Darjeeling Limited (2007); Fantastic Mr. Fox (2010); Moonrise Kingdom (2012); The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) Wes Anderson tends to be a very divisive filmmaker, as those with a gag reflex to anything the slightest bit twee or "hipster" love to rag on his weaknesses. They claim his obsessively symmetrical art direction to be a fastidious neuroticism. They claim the deadpan reactions of his emotionally unstable characters to be an unrealistic artifice used for cheap comedic purposes. Finally, they claim Mr. Anderson continually makes the same film over and over again. At the risk of being a tad hyperbolic, these people are wrong, and probably have no souls. Certainly, some of the immediately preceding directors would be easier to build consensus around as The Greatest Director of the New Millennium, but Anderson earns the top spot because more than any other director, Anderson's work is filled with unadulterated love. No director other than Wes Anderson could take inspiration from classic Hollywood films like The Grand Hotel and You Can't Take It with You and make something that is not a simple homage, but rather a film that uses elements of these classics to tell stories befitting contemporary times. Particularly, what Anderson borrows from classic Hollywood that few contemporary directors express anymore is an unabashed humanism. For all his urban chic sophistication, no auteur has taken up the mantle of Frank Capra's passionate pleas for existence more than Wes Anderson, albeit in a post modern context. It is this love of life and the characters in it, despite their imperfections and flaws, that puts a smile on the face of Anderson's fans, and for this reason, Wes Anderson tops the list as the best director of the new millennium.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
