Wes 4 eva

Tonight the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse brings a festival of awesomeness to my Wednesday nights, because they're playing Wes Anderson's whole oeuvre. On Wednesday nights. Which if there were ever a night of the week which needed a dose of hipness, that is surely it. Wednesday night is like the supermarket-brand laundry detergent that doesn't get the stains out and makes your sheets smell like someone else's.

First up: Bottle Rocket, which is unmistakably Wesian but also the least Wes-Anderson-movie movie.

There is nothing inside the Bottle Rocket box except characters who cut blood out of your heart because their grip on being people is not yours except that it is. All of them. Even the ones who are onscreen only a second, and the ones who screw over the ones who are pursuing the good, or the selfish ones or the ones who are trying so hard to be in love or to be someone or just to not be dead.

The clothes are perfect and the hair is perfect and the shot-framing is perfect and the interiors and gardens and cars and matching boilersuits and location shooting is perfect, because it is Wes.

But it's about a huge, expansive, heart-breaking mess populated by losers and the lost. The Royal Tannenbaums is about has-beens and wasted talent, but Bottle Rocket is about nobodies in no place trying to make a plan to be someone, somewhere, with brightly coloured scraps of wool and surgical tape.

I love it like only someone who believes three different colours of post-it note improves their control of their life can.