It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast, it to a classic film the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here again with Scott Tobias and Tasha Robinson.

Genevieve Kosky, our usual co-host, is not with us this week, but we promise she is alive and well and not in a temporal container somewhere near a desert motel.

Last week we talked about Charlie Kaufman's unclassifiable 2008 directorial debut, Synecichy, New York,

in which a playwright attempts to recreate his life on a massive stage and opens the door to chaos.

Asteroid City is a different sort of self-aware film about making art from a director of exacting control. But that doesn't mean the

chaos isn't there. Wes Anderson is the most formerly rigid director working today, a filmmaker of

precisely timed shots and immaculately balanced compositions. But that's a response to chaos, not a

rejection of it. Or as vulture critic Bill Gooberiri puts it in his review of Asteroid City,

quote, Anderson's obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify,

and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain. End quote.

The closest thing to an Anderson surrogate found in his films might be Chas Tenenbaum,

Ben Stiller's character in the Royal Tenembaums, whose obsession with safety and careful planning stems from the knowledge of how quickly life can spin out of control. Asteroid City is a film about a bunch of eccentric characters encountering an alien, but it's also a film about loss. If Asteroid City has a central character, it's Augie Steenbeck, played by Anderson regular Jason

Schwartzman, a father who's using his family's cross-country trip to Asteroid City as an occasion

to finally tell his four children that their mother has died.

In the film's most moving moment, Schwartzman, as the actor playing Augie in the play,

within the TV special that serves as the film's framing device, it makes sense when you watch the movie, wanders away seeking answers to why his character

burns his hand, but also to more broader issues of death and grief and the cosmic silence

that greets us whenever we ask such questions and what we do to make up for that silence.

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