I watched Asteroid City and Red, White, & Wasted last weekend. They’re quite different, but they share some characteristics. Or, at least I thought they shared some characteristics.

Asteroid City is a film made by Wes Anderson, the famously quirky creator of gems like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. He’s totally unique, his movies look like no one filmmaker’s. Not only did no one else make them, no one else could possibly have made them As a matter of fact, he’s a pretty big exception.

Every genre, begins with a true innovation (inasmuch as anything is true innovation), and is immediately followed by a B group that drives roads recently paved, then C, D, E, & F groups, that simply copy a commercial blueprint. When this happens, the genre is “Dead,” and we all mourn the A’s and move on. Take grunge music, for example. Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, and others were the A set, cutting paths into landscape where none exist. Then, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, et al, came along, who were sometimes great, followed by a few averages, then by absolute trash like Puddle of Mudd and Ugly Kid Joe, who looked the part and sometimes sounded the part but lacked the soul of the A’s and B’s, for whom the music wasn’t a moneymaking enterprise, and was dna.

Wes Anderson has no B’s. No one even tries to be as idiosyncratic as he is.

I liked Asteroid City very much, but I love weird things. I love cultures, people and ideas that are different from my own. This is an odd movie. I don’t pretend to know what it means, or really even exactly what happened, but my understanding isn’t always necessary to an experience.

Now, Red, White & Wasted is a documentary that, on the surface, seems up my alley. I appreciate weirdos doing their weird things, freaks who are freaks – in other words, people being just who they are, who are different and embrace that other-ness. They’re weirdos, just like you and certainly like me and probably all of our favorite people. The caveat to my love of these films is that the filmmakers cannot judge the subjects. If the people behind the camera are making fun of the people in front of it, it’s mean, smug and condescending, and I can’t stand mean, smug, and condescending. Different people aren’t lesser people, obviously, they’re just different. Wes Anderson knows this.

ANNND, the documentary has to have an arc; a beginning and an end. That’s the genius of documentary filmmakers, they find the narratives in our real life clusters. Maybe Red, White, & Wasted didn’t laugh at it’s people, but they didn’t celebrate them, didn’t appreciate them, and didn’t show any sort of movement. Now, it’s entirely possible there was no movement among all of the gross -isms and the horrific degradation of human beings, especially the women. But I have trouble believing that. There is always movement, always understanding. (Ok, maybe not always.)

So, Asteroid City was beautiful and weird, and it didn’t matter too much that I didn’t perfectly understand what in the world was going on. That sounds just like life, and I sure love that, so maybe that explains my perspective.

Red, White & Wasted, on the other hand, was weird and ugly, and I knew very well what was happening. I just love people too much to like it.