The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Although one person I was with at the pre-screen hated it, I absolutely loved it. I think it will just be one of those kinds of films (but hey, I also loved "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" which this reminded me of). Pure crazy fantastical stuff and I was completely taken with it.

It's a visually beautiful film with loads of odd little CG touches and subtle visual gags. The cutaway tour of the ship was a classic. Murray gives an amazing, energetic, yet deadpan performance and I also liked the richness of the smaller roles like "Klaus." The soundtrack was quirky and wonderful with unexpectedly hilarious Bowie covers and pounding, rocking tracks in the action scenes.

I think the gorgeous locations, sets and props nearly steal the show--kind of reminded me of "Brazil" in that way and I think it is destined to become a cult film in the same way "Brazil" has.

I can't wait to take some friends of mine and see what they think once it opens--this is one of those movies that's so different and off the wall that it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Although I realize it's getting mixed reviews, I'll stick my neck out and call it a masterpiece.

Being old enough to have grown up with Jacques Cousteau, I felt Anderson really captured the look and feel he was after with the the "movie within the movie" sequences and the yellow typographical stuff was spot-on.

If, like me, you're bored with the usual metroplex fare, this odd, unexpected movie is for you. What a blast! Wheeeeee!

I find this a hard movie to rate. Maybe a second viewing would make it easier. It's a odd film: one of these low-key black humor films which is a mixture of drama and comedy. What set this apart were a few other shocking scenes of violence, something not normally in this type of movie. For a comedy, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one, that violence doesn't seem to fit, but it makes the film all the more intriguing.

At times I was totally bored with this movie and at other times fascinated. I know one thing: this is a bizarre story! That automatically means it's a good vehicle for Bill Murray, who excels at wacky characters, event he low-key ones as he sometimes plays (i.e. Lost In Translation, The Royal Tenebaums, etc.). Speaker of the latter, this movie was written and directed by Wes Anderson, the same man who did "Tenenbaums." If you saw that, you have an idea of what you might get here, although I thought Royal Tenenbaums was far funnier.

At 118 minutes, this a bit long for what it offers. I'd like to have seen it 15 minutes shorter with a tighter script. But it does offer some good photography in addition to the strange story. This movie, as they say, is not for all tastes.

I revisited this about a decade on from when I first watched it. Wes Anderson movies typically feel a little less interesting to me when I revisit them (so he's like the opposite of David Lynch or the Coen Brothers in that regard), so maybe that's why I had reservations about going back to this. But I'm happy to say that The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou worked even more for me a second time, and I think it's right up there as one of Anderson's best.

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like he's been pushing it with the artificiality too much in his recent films, to the point where I can't really engage with them emotionally. From a technical perspective, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch are all phenomenally well put together, meticulously crafted, and easy to appreciate when it comes to style/visuals. However, they just don't do it for me when it comes to feeling the film, or engaging with the characters. There's just a little too much detachment and/or too many characters. Maybe the films are too well put together. The human element that's apparent in his older films often feels missing.

With most of his stuff made before 2014, there's obviously that Wes Anderson style, but there's just a little more warmth and humanity. They're the right level of detached, to the point where they're not even really emotionally detached at the end of the day. His earlier films can be tremendously moving, and I think The Life Aquatic is a good example of that; the reality is heightened and the characters a little extreme, but not to the point where you detach emotionally. There's plenty of zaniness and quirky humour (not all of it perfect, but most of it works), but there's a heart to the whole thing, and I feel a similar way about The Royal Tenenbaums and maybe even Rushmore.

Maybe I miss the old Wes - I kind of love the old Wes, and I still appreciate the hell out of the new one, but something's missing. I fear the upcoming Asteroid City will be more new Wes than old Wes; it's like he keeps doubling down on it after it worked admittedly well in Grand Budapest Hotel.

Oh well. At least we'll always have Steve Zissou (the last 10-15 minutes of this also stands as the best sequence in Anderson's career so far, especially due to the perfect use of Sigur Ros).

This Wes Anderson movie is very quirky but fans of Wes Anderson will not be disappointed. The movie is part a loving parody of Jacques Cousteau, part character study, with a lot of wit and understated acting. Beautifully shot, it is more complex and straightforward than some other Anderson movies, but still has a mesmerizing effect and grows on you upon repeated viewings. Justifiably a cult classic, it is perhaps not the best of Wes Anderson movies, but it is not the worst either, despite unjustly being panned by critics. If you have a functioning brain, give it a try.

I'm not generally a fan of Wes Anderson. He relies too heavily on the charm of detachment. Burton has this problem too, hidden under the humorous tone. The appeal is a generational thing and I guess I'm too old to simply find that enough.

But here, he does something different than what I have seen elsewhere from him. I think it is because the Owen influence is small here. The form is a movie about making a life which is a movie. Both the movie and the movie within have fantastic elements, but we do have a clear shift to brighter colors and crisper landscapes when within the inner world.

Its all based on synthetic notions of drama: love, purpose, worth. When you sneak up on things this way, you have to play a delicate game, one I think Wes usually flubs. You have to engage by setting a distance that is far enough from the norm that we as viewers can lean into it, and near enough to what we think of as real flesh that we want to.

Bill Murray doesn't understand this balance, because he's all about distance. Never mind, he's just an actor. So you select actors that try for the closeness. Dafoe and Blanchett get this. What they choose to do is simple: they form a real person and layer some cartoonish mannerisms on top. We see through the play and value the real underneath, where we cannot with Murray and Wilson.

Because the whole thing can blend together, we get a wonderful balance of this tension: engagement and studied apartness. I credit Anderson with maintaining this container. It works. And it works because he was smart. You can see that he understands this dynamic well enough to know that we will be impatient with his tricks for very long. So the movie changes tone as it moves along. It changes slowly with less emphasis on the personal abstraction and more on abstracting the physical: the ship, the rooms, beds, sub. It allows Cate to present her womb, which is quite a miracle.

If you read the trivia at IMDb, you find that many top actresses wanted this part. So it is pretty amazing that Cate's condition as a pregnant woman who knows how to turn herself inside out was able to have that condition become so central to the world we see.

This isn't quirky. This isn't comedy. This is extremely sensitive positioning of the audience to allow for deeper penetration. Its a triangulation of "Incident at Loch Ness" and "Cowards Bend the Knee ."

I felt blessed watching it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.