Almost as "brilliant" as a Kanye West video

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2014)

The trailer in the extra features section really sets the tone, letting you know you are in for an extraordinarily pretentious and self-indulgent mess. Most people will hate this, but even if you are drawn to the descriptors avant-garde and quirky you may still be disappointed. The Grand Budapest Hotel embarks on what is supposed to be a surreal, violent, grotesque, mythopoeic, symbol-laden, allegorical journey to spiritual enlightenment. Even taken as a series of allegorical parables, the experiment is a failure. The imagery is rarely interesting, and the symbolism manages to be at once heavy-handed and empty of real meaning. Ideas are essentially thrown at the proverbial wall in the hope that some will stick, like a novice writer who overuses Bartletts and Rogets in an attempt to show off.
Wes appears to lack original ideas and so makes superficial use of symbols he doesn't truly understand in a series of cinematic Malapropisms. The film is poorly acted, amateurish, incoherent dreck which tries to convince the viewer that it is something more. Various reviewers have described it as masturbatory, which is accurate.
The truly great surrealist artists reject conventions as a choice, but are capable of folowing them: Breton could render a realistic portrait of quality. Many who style themselves as surrealists are people who produce chaotic and shoddy works because they aren't capable of anything else. Don't feel like you have to like this to impress your friends. Its crap. And if you must watch one surrealist western centered on religious themes to make your checklist complete, queue up Greaser's Palace or El Topo instead. They are superior on many levels.