Director Wes Anderson’s films are always odd, let us be clear on that. Many are like watching the Wizard of Oz after consuming a tad too much of that pain medicine you had left over when you sprained your back. If you go to see it and you think it too off-center and say to yourself, “Self: Why did my favorite movie reviewer like it when it was so weird? He should have warned me.”

The movie has been out for several weeks but it was playing exclusively where the better people live, not where we peasants dwell and toil — out here in the rude and barbarous provinces where we fail to sip our tea with pinkies up. But I digress.

This is a story about a hotel that was a grand retreat for the very rich (the Euro pinkies up class) between the two wars. The country in question shares a name with a Vodka. Nevertheless, it sure does seem like Hungary but with the Alps. (Actually is was filmed in Saxony, Germany.)

This is a comedy with a heavy dose of the absurd, silly even. The dialog is poetic and then obscene and then poetic … but the poetry is expressed in mockingly, reminiscent of a bygone time when people actually recited it and it did not attract the attention of mental health officials.

M. Gustav (Ralph Fiennes) is a smarmy, overly-perfumed, amoral cad. He is also the ever-so-charming, but imperious concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel. He is all of repulsive, annoying, and charismatic. One day, after he “services” and then bids goodbye to one of the hotel’s elderly guests (Tilda Swinton with makeup that is, by itself, a work of art) he meets a newly hired Hotel Boy (Tony Revoloni) named Zero.  After lashing out a few insults using a clever but flatly delivered “word play,” M. Gustave makes Zero his protégé. Much of the film is watching these two characters go through insane (I already used the word absurd) adventures that involve an invaluable, priceless painting, Boy with Apple.

Let me interrupt myself and tell you that this movie is something like a live-action version of an extended episode of Boris and Natasha and Bullwinkle and Rocky. (I know they already did that, but let’s not discuss it any further. Zip it and forget it.)

Let me share with you some of the actors who play weird, wacky, and silly for Mr. Anderson (and for us): F. Murray Abraham, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Tom Wilkinson, and Jason Schwartzman. Dollar for dollar, this movie ticket delivers top value on the acting talent.

As the film went from one loony sign to another, I began to admire the movie for its layers of homage to all great films and even TV shows. I was thinking of Jack Benny’s film “To Be or Not to Be.” (I loved that movie, and Wes Anderson had to be thinking about it and the work of the great Ernst Lubitsch when he wrote the script.) I think I see a bit of Grand Hotel (but with laughs) in this movie and the genius of Preston Sturges’ comedic films. Not to but a too fine a point on it, but I think this is a movie we would have seen in the 1930s (if sensors allowed profanity).

This is not the kind of nostalgic, touching sentimental movie that one would see on Masterpiece Theater. There is more Monty Python than Downton Abbey in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Granted, it might be a bit too odd for some tastes, but as a sucker for the 1930s goofy comedies (mostly forgotten and not actually watched — only vaguely remembered) I was absorbed into the hotel and I really look forward to the DVD so I can replay some parts and try to grasp all the gags, innuendos, and literary and cinematic tips of the hat.

The sets are beautiful, and each scene has a bizarre kind of avant-garde artistry to it not to mention the elbow in the ribs with a sardonic wink at all things visual. For example, when M. Gustave and Zero steal (or perhaps liberate) the painting Boy with Apple, they replace it with an erotic (if not obscene) sketch that I immediately recognized as a work by Egon Schiele (it was actually an ersatz Schiele but that isn’t the point). Later a character destroys the erotic drawing in anger. A Schiele sketch would pay for a respectable Florida beach side condominium. The smashing of this naughty drawing would likely please a proper church lady but art aficionados would go apoplectic at the sight of its destruction. This scene is just a few seconds … but it is a gag that is like so many others in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” There is a touching but funny scene, when the absurd becomes a bit serious, when tribute is given to Mr. Fiennes’ Schindler’s List.  Terror comes but with more than a dash of melancholy humor.

The more I think back upon the movie the more I like it — as inane as it may be — it is a tribute to a genre of film that I love.

Odd it is, I admit. In fact, the elderly lady who is a never-leaving guest in my “hotel” thought it was a tad too quirky for her; perhaps she is more in sync with the general public than I. But she doesn’t get to award the bow ties. She, like Zero, need to step back and learn from one who knows best. That is a job for M. Steve.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” receives four and a half out of five bow ties.