Twee Magazine

Owen and Luke Wilson in the "Bottle Rocket" short film.

It's impossible to discuss twee without discussing Wes Anderson, who never makes a move that doesn't invite commentary from all nearby, and that commentary is always "oh, how twee." In fact, IFC once ranked all of Anderson's films in order of twee-ness, placing 2012's "Moonrise Kingdom" at the top, declaring "this movie makes Garden State look like Chinatown."

Anderson has an understandably ambivalent relationship with the word. "Well, it's not annoying," he told the Huffington Post. "It's just, you know, my real honest response is just ... nothing. It's just white noise to me. It's lost all its sting over the years." And it's understandable that the word might once have stung, as it has so often been used to dismiss his films as being style without substance, whimsy without content.

Whatever Anderson feels about the word twee, if, in the future, cultural historians see it as a movement -- and they will -- he will be one of the bigwigs. And so we'll be looking at his complete filmography here on Twee Magazine, starting with the short film "Bottle Rocket," made in 1994 and later remade and expanded to a feature length film which would serve as Anderson's debut.

The "Bottle Rocket" short is episodic, showing a few snippets from the lives of two aspiring but incompetent criminals, played by brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. Anderson had met Owen at a playwrighting class at UT Austin, had cast him in a play he had written, and later the two would be roommates. According to the story, the windows in the apartment would not close, the landlord was not helpful, and so they staged a break-in to apply pressure on the landlord to make their place secure.

The two were tickled enough to write a script -- either full-length or not, depending on who you ask -- about someone burglarizing their own house, which is the first scene in the short and is repeated in the feature film. This was Anderson's first true collaboration with Owen Wilson, who created for himself a character that is as unconventional as his name: Dignan.

Everything Wilson would later be known for is in this role: The spaciness, the neurotic and adenoidal outbursts, the strange charisma. His brother Luke, playing opposite, seems impossibly young, and offers the same sort of beleaguered everyman quality he would bring to later Anderson films. Luke Wilson hasn't been in an Anderson film since "The Royal Tennebaums" in 2001, and it's not clear why, as Wilson continues to use Owen. I can find no evidence of a falling out, and it may just be that the sort of character Luke excels at -- privileged but pained, fratty but lost -- just doesn't have a place in the Anderson universe anymore.

The "Bottle Rocket" short suggests another sort of filmmaker that Wes Anderson might have turned into. His choice of music is less eclectic, drawing mostly from cool jazz standards. Anderson shot the film in high contrast black and white, and there's a hyperactive and pop culture-savvy quality to it that Anderson almost immediately dropped. The film is self-consciously hip, and makes use of a marvelous actor named Robert Musgrave, who seems right for this sort of film.

Musgrave has a hangdog quality and suspicious eyes. He's not a career criminal, precisely, but he's the sort of character you might find in a film about career criminals -- too smart to be caught up in stupid choices, but too unlucky to avoid it, and doomed as a result. He just sort of hangs around the Wilson brothers in this film, regaling them with tales of an illicit pot garden but otherwise treating the brothers -- Owen in particular -- with wariness. His role would be expanded in the feature film, but in this one he seems like a character who dropped in from an early Jim Jarmusch movie.

But if there are points when Anderson seems to be aping the deliberate coolness of other independent filmmakers, there is a lot of the DNA of later Anderson films in this one, and those are the sorts of things that would be expanded upon in the feature film. The Wilson brothers don't just seem youthful in this film, they often seem childlike, making plans the way children might and then arguing over them while playing pinball. When Luke Wilson breaks into his own home, it's a fastidious place with bold wallpaper, and the bedrooms are still that of children, with their toys and school trophies and ribbons carefully displayed.

Additionally, on a soundtrack dominated by Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane, there is "Happiness Is" by Vince Guaraldi from the composer's "Charlie Brown Suite." The world of the Wilsons in "Bottle Rocket" is not far removed from the world of boys, and this is detail that would be highlighted in the feature-length version of the film, which would contrast Luke's troubled movement toward maturity with Owen's childlike fantasies of the world of criminals.

More on that when I review the "Bottle Rocket" film. The short version is available online; watch it below: