Starring: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, Sophia Lillis
OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆
Story:
Romantic comedy written and directed by Wes Anderson. Asteroid City (2023) is set in a fictional American desert town circa1955, where the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention, organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition, is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.
Our Favorite Quotes:
'In my loneliness, or perhaps because of it, I've learned not to judge people, to take people as I find them, not as others find them, and most of all, to give complete and unquestioning faith to the people I love.' - Stanley Zak Share on X
Best Quotes
Host: Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.
Host: Our story begins, of course, with an ink ribbon. Conrad Earp, playwright, native of upper Wyoming, well-known for his romantic poetic tapestries of life west of the Rocky Mountains.
Host: There is little amusement to be had, however, in watching a man type. Skip ahead, then, past the lonely, agonized months of composing, revising, polishing, editing, rewriting, cutting, pasting, pacing, doodling, and solitary drinking, and join our company as they take the stage for their first read-through rehearsal.
Conrad Earp: Note to chief electrician, the light of the desert sun is neither warm nor cool, but always clean. And, above all, unforgiving.
'“Time heals all wounds.” No. Maybe it can be a Band-Aid.' - Augie Steenbeck (Asteroid City) Share on X
Stanley Zak: [over phone] You’re not here?
Augie Steenbeck: We’re not there. The car exploded. Come get the girls.
Stanley Zak: The car exploded?
Augie Steenbeck: Parts of the car exploded itself, yes. Come get the girls.
Stanley Zak: I’m not their chauffeur. I’m their grandfather. Where are you?
Augie Steenbeck: Asteroid City. Farm Route Six, mile 75.
Augie Steenbeck: The time is never right.
Stanley Zak: The time is always wrong.
Billy: Dear Heavenly Father, we thank thee kindly for a terrific bus ride. I ate three boxes of Cracker Jacks, got a dog whistle, and a miniature map of the original thirteen colonies. Also, we saw a coyote get run over by a fourteen-wheeler and left him flat as a pancake.
Midge Campbell: My word. It’s hot.
Dinah: It’s the desert. What’d you expect?
Midge Campbell: I don’t know if I expected one thing or another, but I’m wilting like a cut petunia.
Dinah: Humans don’t wilt.
'If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born.' - General Gibson (Asteroid City) Share on X
Motel Manager: You’re in cabin seven. Well, tent seven. Here’s the key, but there’s no door. Just a flap. Tent flap.
Motel Manager: I upgraded the electrical system Tuesday morning. Better lighting, power for the ice machine, and a wall-mounted bug zapper. Unfortunately, a mistake got made, and cabin seven burned to the ground. It’s a tent now.
Montana: This bucket of nuts just stole my quarter.
Woodrow: You’re saying our mother died three weeks ago?
Augie Steenbeck: Yes.
Andromeda: When is she coming back?
Woodrow: She’s not coming back. Let’s say she’s in heaven. Which doesn’t exist for me, of course, but you’re Episcopalian.
'We're not going to abandon my daughter at a motel in the middle of the desert buried next to the communal showers.' - Stanley Zak (Asteroid City) Share on X
Woodrow: [referring to his mother] Is she in there?
Augie Steenbeck: Yeah. She’s in the Tupperware. Cremated.
Augie Steenbeck: When my father died, my mother told me, “He’s in the stars.” I told her, “The closest star, other than that one, is four and half light-years away with a surface temperature over five thousand degrees centigrade. He’s not in the stars,” I said. “He’s in the ground.” She thought it would comfort me. She was an atheist. The other thing she’d say, which is incorrect, “Time heals all wounds.” No. Maybe it can be a Band-Aid.
Augie Steenbeck: Your concept of time is completely distorted though. I don’t think any of you except Woodrow even understands what fifteen minutes means.
Pandora: Fifteen minutes is sixty-two hundred hours.
Augie Steenbeck: Exactly. That’s not your fault.
Host: The character of Augie Steenbeck in the imaginary tale of our production was to become famously and indelibly connected to the actor who created the role, a former carpenter discovered in a bit part by the play’s director, Schubert Green.
Host: The occasion of the first meeting between playwright and player is now, in our fanciful telling, a matter of theatrical lore and legend.
'Sometimes I think I feel more at home outside the Earth's atmosphere.' - Dinah (Asteroid City) Share on X
Augie Steenbeck: It’s a fact, we’re not alone. The alien stole the asteroid. Long thought to be a lunar splinter fragmented from the lesser moon of the hypothetical planet Magnavox-27, now considered a rogue pygmy cometette, according to the encyclopedia. Obviously, she would’ve said something to him. I’m certain of it. Your mother, I mean. She would’ve gotten him to tell us the secrets of the universe, or yelled at him, or made him laugh. She would’ve had a hypothesis.
Augie Steenbeck: I think your sisters might be aliens too, by the way.
Midge Campbell: You took a picture of me.
Augie Steenbeck: Uh-huh.
Midge Campbell: Why?
Augie Steenbeck: I’m a photographer.
Midge Campbell: You didn’t ask permission.
Augie Steenbeck: I never ask permission.
Midge Campbell: Why not?
Augie Steenbeck: Because I work in trenches, battlefields, and combat zones.
Midge Campbell: What are you going to do with it? That picture.
Augie Steenbeck: Well, if it’s any good, I guess I’ll try to sell it to a magazine, now that you mention it. “Midge Campbell eating a waffle.”
Midge Campbell: Make me a print first, to approve.
'I think you're pretty smart, but I think you're pretty dumb.' - Shelly (Asteroid City) Share on X
General Gibson: Each year, we celebrate Asteroid Day, commemorating September 23, 3007 BC, when the Arid Plains Meteorite made Earth impact.
General Gibson: Now, I’ll start by presenting the commemorative medals. But first, I’ll do my speech first, which you’ll also receive in a folio edition as a souvenir.
General Gibson: Chapter One. I walked to school eighteen miles each morning, milked the goats, plucked the chickens, played hooky, caught fireflies, went skinny-dipping in the watering hole, said my prayers every night and got whipped with a maple switch twice a week. That was life.
General Gibson: Chapter Three. Another war. Arms and legs blown off like popcorn, eyeballs gouged out, figuratively and literally. The men put on shows under the palm fronds dressed as women in hula skirts. That was life.
General Gibson: In the meantime, somebody else’s story. A man thinks up a number, divides it by a trillion, plugs it into the square root of the circumference of the Earth multiplied by the speed of a splitting atom, and voilà, progress.
'I'm in no hurry. I like the desert. I like aliens.' - Stanley Zak (Asteroid City) Share on X
General Gibson: Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets, we watch transfixed as you enter into uncharted territories of the brains and spirit. If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born. That’s my speech.
Shelly: I synthesized an extraterrestrial element. It’s going to be added to the periodic table next year.
Woodrow: What do those pulses indicate?
Dr. Hickenlooper: What? Oh, the beeps and blips? We don’t know. Indecipherable radio emissions from outer space. Probably a red herring.
'Your curiosity is your most important asset. Trust it. Trust your curiosity.' - Dr. Hickenlooper (Asteroid City) Share on X
J.J. Kellogg: Less than zero point, zero, zero, zero, zero percent chance exists of extraterrestrial life in the entire universe. It’s a scientific fact. Other than space bugs and microscopic worms.
Roger Cho: I assertively disagree.
Sandy Borden: So do I. It’s not a scientific fact.
Roger Cho: It’s not even a number.
Clifford: I call it “Triple Orbit and Return without Burning Up in the Atmosphere”.
Dinah: Are you shy?
Woodrow: I’m a late bloomer. So I’ve been told by my parents.
'You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep.' - Augie Steenbeck (Asteroid City) Share on X
Dinah: [referring to his mother] When did you lose her?
Woodrow: Officially, this morning, but I think I already knew.
Woodrow: I love gravity. It might be my favorite law of physics at the moment.
Host: Players of the stage, a tribe of troubadours and nonconformists. They lead unconventional, sometimes dangerous lives which nourish and elevate their artistic aspirations and illuminate the human condition.
Midge Campbell: [reading Schubert’s note] “If she sasses you, sass her back. Tell her she’s a borderline neurotic with an Achilles heel complex.”
Midge Campbell: [reading Schubert’s note] “Tell her she relies on her beauty like a wobbly crutch. It’s her deepest weakness. Tell her she’s got the potential for genuine greatness, but I say with absolute certainty she will never achieve it.”
Woodrow: [reading Schubert’s note] “Yes, I may be a manipulative snake, as you once characterized me behind my back. You see, I do have my sources. But I love you like a sister, other than that one time in the bathroom the day we met, which has never been repeated, as we both know.”
Woodrow: [reading from the note] “We open tomorrow night, with or without you. Without, our entire devoted company will suffer complete disaster and tragic calamity, as will a brilliant, fragile genius named Conrad Earp. With, you will enjoy the triumph of your career, which does not matter in the least. All that matters is every second of life onstage and our friendship. Your servant, your director, and, if I may, your devoted mentor, Schubert Green.”
J.J. Kellogg: I strongly question whether your daughter’s Silly Putty resembles anything from outer space.
Sandy Borden: It’s not Silly Putty. It’s called S’morestozium.
J.J. Kellogg: Your son’s project may very well have killed us all today, by the way.
Sandy Borden: Coming from the family that brought us the electromagnetic death ray.
J.J. Kellogg: It’s a weapon. Of course it’s lethal.
Sandy Borden: So you admit it.
J.J. Kellogg: Not to mention Brainiac’s flag. I mean, is he trying to provoke World War Three or something?
Roger Cho: The jet propulsion belt is imminently safe. I’d allow an eight year-old boy to operate it. In fact, I did. Ricky’s cousin Chip, and he broke the solo flight altitude record.
Motel Manager: They’re strange, aren’t they? Your children. Compared to normal people.
J.J. Kellogg: Yes.
Roger Cho: That’s correct.
Sandy Borden: It’s true.
Midge Campbell: I do a nude scene. You want to see it?
Augie Steenbeck: Huh? Did I say yes?
Midge Campbell: You didn’t say anything.
Augie Steenbeck: Well, I meant yes. But my mouth didn’t speak.
Midge Campbell: I don’t know if I like beards, by the way.
Augie Steenbeck: Oh.
Midge Campbell: I prefer to play abused, tragic alcoholics, and one day, I’ll probably be discovered lifeless in an overflowing bathtub with an empty bottle of sleeping pills spilled all over the floor. But the sad thing is I’m actually a very gifted comedienne.
Midge Campbell: Are you married?
Augie Steenbeck: I’m a widower, but don’t tell my kids.
Montana: Well, now, I ain’t calling you a liar to your face, but that sounds to me like some kind of toadswindle.
Stanley Zak: [referring to his daughter’s ashes] I’ll tell you what, let’s leave her alone in the ground until tomorrow morning. Then we’ll exhume the Tupperware, bring her with us in the Cadillac, and bury her again this weekend in the backyard next to the seventh hole at Rancho Palms, where I live in a beautiful house with a swimming pool. Agreed? Let’s hope a coyote doesn’t dig her up in the meantime. Nothing we can do about it anyway.
Dr. Hickenlooper: Remember, if you look directly at the ellipses rather than through your refracting box, not only will you not actually see the effect, but you will burn the dots straight into your retina, probably permanently. I know that for a fact, because they’re still burned into mine from when I was elven going on twelve. That’s when I realized I wanted to be an astronomer, which is another story.
Augie Steenbeck: The alien stole the asteroid.
Host: Schubert Green, born Shylock Grzworvszowski. Director, immigrant. Known for his limitless energy, his voracious enthusiasms, a well-known actress described him sexually as an animal, specifically a rabbit, and his long, deep and intimate relationship with success.
Polly: Why don’t you just go home?
Schubert Green: I don’t think I should be alone in a building with real windows.
General Gibson: “Four, secure the site, cease the dissemination of information, collect and transport the totality of evidence to a hermetically enclosed, deep-underground secret storage facility and publicly deny all aspects of the event, including its existence, for a period of no less than a hundred years, defined as thirty-six thousand five hundred days.” End of directive.
Aide-de-Camp: What do we tell them?
General Gibson: Who?
Aide-de-Camp: The Junior Stargazers, the Space Cadets, the moms and dads. Midge Campbell.
All: Midge Campbell.
General Gibson: Tell them it didn’t happen? No. Obviously, we’ll have to formulate a suitable cover story.
Shelly: That’s an alien doing jumping jacks. That’s an alien in a top hat.
Detective #1: Let’s take it from the top.
Ricky: I told you fifty times, the alien picked up the asteroid.
Detective #1: Alleged alien.
Ricky: I know what I saw! An extraterrestrial being.
Detective #2: It’s called a meteorite.
Detective #1: This is a microfiche of your school newspaper. Your byline accompanies an article criticizing the principal’s disciplinary methods. Who were your sources?
Ricky: I was in the sixth grade.
Detective #1: Just answer the question.
Ricky: And I will not name names!
June: I expect that some of our information about outer space may no longer be completely accurate. But, anyway, there are still only nine planets in the solar system, as far as we know. Billy?
Billy: Except now there’s a alien.
Dwight: At first, I thought the alien was kind of sneaky, but now I think he was probably nervous to go to Earth. He’s never been here before, I bet you.
Billy: Then why’d he steal our asteroid then, if he’s such a gentleman?
Montana: See, I don’t look on a feller alien all suspicious-like. No, he ain’t American. No, he ain’t a creature of God’s green Earth. But he’s a creature of somewheres, and so are we. Now, let’s show the old feller some hospitality, and if he turns out to be a dirty dog, which I reckon he ain’t, well, that’ll be a job for the United States armed forces, and they ain’t never lost a war yet. Thanky-do.
Woodrow: My mother couldn’t remember which was which, so she made up her own constellations. That one’s the Coat Hanger. That one’s the Leaky Faucet. Over there’s Fried Egg with Spatula.
Woodrow: Is she interested in astronomy, your mother?
Dinah: Not exactly. She’s interested in stardom. I don’t mean that as a criticism, by the way. It’s her job to be famous. Anyway, I’m sick of her face, but I love her voice.
Dinah: Sometimes I think I feel more at home outside the Earth’s atmosphere.
Woodrow: Oh, wow. Me too.
Midge Campbell: I wish I felt guilty at least, but I don’t experience that emotion, if I understand it correctly. I’ve played it, of course.
Augie Steenbeck: So you’re saying you never feel guilty in real life?
Midge Campbell: Not to my knowledge.
Midge Campbell: I mean, I think I know now what I realize we are.
Augie Steenbeck: Okay.
Midge Campbell: Two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of their pain because we don’t want to. That’s our connection.
Motel Manager: You see that wonderful crackly patch right out there, between the dead cactuses and the dried-up river bed?
J.J. Kellogg: I think so.
Motel Manager: That’s your parcel.
J.J. Kellogg: How much of it do I own?
Motel Manager: Well, it’s actually an interesting financial mechanism. You don’t technically own anything outright. You own stock in the town in the form of a loan with a fifty year maturity rate. Then, at the end, the loan is forgiven.
J.J. Kellogg: Why do you always have to dare something?
Clifford: I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid, otherwise, nobody will notice my existence in the universe.
Sandy Borden: [to Midge] We met before. I’m the mother of that Cookie Trooper who idolizes you.
Sandy Borden: You were very good in the one about the tramp in the brothel who gets amnesia, and becomes a pediatrician. You were very authentic.
Midge Campbell: Thank you. That’s actually maybe my favorite character I’ve ever played.
Sandy Borden: I don’t know why nobody else liked it.
Midge Campbell: Oh. Yes. Me neither. Thank you. Some people liked it.
Sandy Borden: Oh. I’m sure. I did.
Woodrow: The world will never be the same. What happens next? Nobody knows. Will he visit us again? Will he speak to us? What will he say? Why did he steal our asteroid? Was it ours in the first place? Does he like us? Nobody knows.
Woodrow: What’s out there? Something. The meaning of life. Maybe there is one.
Stanley Zak: I hope you’re still Episcopalian.
Stanley Zak: In my loneliness, or perhaps because of it, I’ve learned not to judge people, to take people as I find them, not as others find them, and most of all, to give complete and unquestioning faith to the people I love. I don’t know if that includes you, but it included my daughter, and your four children, so you’re welcome to stay with me for as long as you wish, whether I like it or not. Which I don’t, by the way.
Augie Steenbeck: Stop helping us. We’re in grief.
Stanley Zak: Me too.
Woodrow: Are you planning to abandon us?
Augie Steenbeck: I was, as a temporary measure.
Stanley Zak: What?
Augie Steenbeck: But I decided against it.
Woodrow: I knew it. I sensed it.
Stanley Zak: I didn’t. I’m not the wet nurse. I’m their grandfather.
Augie Steenbeck: I would’ve hired a babysitter in addition to you.
Augie Steenbeck: I’m not planning to abandon you anymore, even as a temporary measure, which is all it ever would’ve been.
Woodrow: I forgive you for considering it.
Conrad Earp: I’d like to make a scene where all my characters are each gently, privately seduced into the deepest, dreamiest slumber of their lives as a result of their shared experience of a bewildering and bedazzling celestial mystery.
Saltzburg Keitel: A sleeping scene.
Conrad Earp: A scene of sleep.
Saltzburg Keitel: Who here has ever actually fallen asleep onstage during a live performance in front of a paying audience?
Schubert Green: Me. I spent the first three-quarters of Act Two of The Welterweight on a massage table with no lines till the last minute and a half. One night, I nodded off.
Aide-de-Camp: This just in, from the president.
General Gibson: He’s furious. Thanks a lot, Ricky.
Dwight: [referring to the alien] I wrote a song about him.
June: Oh. This may not be the time for a musical performance.
Midge Campbell: This isn’t the beginning of something, Augie.
Augie Steenbeck: Isn’t it?
Midge Campbell: Is it?
Augie Steenbeck: Probably not.
Midge Campbell: Unless maybe it is.
Augie Steenbeck: I don’t like the way that guy looked at us.
Midge Campbell: What guy?
Augie Steenbeck: The alien.
Midge Campbell: How did he look at us?
Augie Steenbeck: Like we’re doomed.
Midge Campbell: Maybe we are.
Stanley Zak: Maybe we should just walk out right now. I’m not sure they could stop us without killing somebody.
J.J. Kellogg: Interesting idea.
Stanley Zak: Are you married?
Sandy Borden: Of course.
Dr. Hickenlooper: Who’s responsible for stealing my radio telescope, my signal processing receiver, and my entire spectrographical monitoring network?
Woodrow: They’re trying to contact the alien.
Dr. Hickenlooper: Well, I appreciate that, but what about Dr. Hickenlooper? If you’re trying to contact the alien, include me.
Dr. Hickenlooper: It’s all worthwhile in your lifetime. This, I mean. Your curiosity is your most important asset. Trust it. Trust your curiosity.
General Gibson: What’s happening now?
Aide-de-Camp: I don’t know.
The Alien: I don’t play him as an alien, actually. I play him as a metaphor. That’s my interpretation.
Augie Steenbeck: Metaphor for what?
The Alien: I don’t know yet. We don’t pin it down.
Augie Steenbeck: Am I doing him right?
Schubert Green: Oh. Well, I told you before, there’s too much business, with the pipe, with the lighter, with the camera, with the eyebrow. But aside from that, on the whole, in answer to your question. You’re doing him just right. In fact, in my opinion, you didn’t just become Augie. He became you.
Augie Steenbeck: I still don’t understand the play.
Schubert Green: Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.
Augie Steenbeck: [referring to her scene as his wife] Why did they cut it?
Actress: Running time. Now I’m First Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen Consort in Fruit of a Withering Vine.
Stanley Zak: The plan was to shovel it up and take her with us. Like I said, we’ll exhume the Tupperware. We don’t have any burial rights to this plot here.
Augie Steenbeck: I would question whether it even is a plot.
Stanley Zak: It isn’t.
Cassiopeia: Don’t murder my mother’s ashes!
Stanley Zak: Dear Heavenly Father, we thank thee for the life of this magnificent woman, who was once just a little girl like these three witches in training.
Andromeda: Not in training.
Pandora: We are witches.
Cassiopeia: Part witch, part alien.
Stanley Zak: Like these three witches at one time.
Stanley Zak: Woodrow, any final farewell?
Woodrow: I don’t believe in God anymore.
Stanley Zak: Fair enough.
Stanley Zak: [referring to Midge leaving Augie her mailing address] I don’t object. She’s actually a very gifted comedienne.
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