born free

Fluxblog on The Darjeeling Limited:

You can’t buy the lifestyle Anderson is selling – you have to be born into it. You can try to talk your way into it, like Max Fischer or Eli Cash, but it won’t work out. You can work hard, make a lot of money, and enter a higher tax bracket like Herman Blume or Royal Tenenbaum, but your drive and working class roots will always set you apart from those whose ambitions have been stalled by the inertia of excessive comfort.

I liked Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer a hell of a lot more than I liked Jason Schwartzman in Hotel Chevalier, where he’s moping around in a multi-thousand dollar a night Parisian hotel suite for an indeterminate amount of time before Natalie Portman shows up to have sex with him and stare longingly at the view off his balcony. Nice work if you can get it.