The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

[ono]

Now that's a review.  Dwarfed pretty much everything I've ever written.

Highlights:

It links Tenenbaums with, like, Die Hard.

Okay, so maybe GT will like this one.

Wes doing Fellini. It's his 8 ½, but it's completely HIS 8 ½.

Interesting.  I didn't dig 8 ½ as much as most of you here, but this is exciting.  Limbs are exciting.  Great directors going out on them can be exciting too.

I really liked your analogies to PTA and QT, though I feel Kibble was a misstep that's going to continue in the wrong direction until someone deflates his massive ego.  Sorry ... bygones.  Not the issue.

I REALLY had to pee.

REALLY had to pee

Something about reading this review made me really have to pee.  Excuse me.

...




...

Okay, I'm back.

Actually, I need to see it again before I form my opinion.

Given the context, that's the funniest thing I've read in a while.

[mutinyco]

Anybody who drives 9 hours to see a movie doesn't have a girlfriend.

[Ghostboy]

I LOVED this movie. This is one of the few instances in which Themodernage and I are in complete and utter agreement (at least until he [re]forms his opinion).  It's fucking amazing, but not in any shape way or form in the way that his previous films might have been amazing. This isn't his best movie in some ways, but in so many others it's light years ahead of anything else he's done. I was really unenchanted by the trailer, and was afraid he'd just be repeating himself...but that ain't the case. Must gather thoughts. Full review sometime in the future.

[Sleuth]

review meatwad

[meatwad]

review meatwad

i pretty much agree with modage about this being much different then his other films, much more loose, etc. I was really surprised actully, because when you watch the trailer, you kind of get a royal tenenbaums feel (with the dolly shots and what not) and it is not that at all. There are some odd editing choices, but that did not take me out of the film. I loved the music in this film, all the Bowie songs are great. There is one song, i don't think it's on the soundtrack, but really surprised me and put a huge smile on my face. If you have seen the movie, you prob know what i mean.

I went in expecting something, got something totally different, and still loved this movie.

[mutinyco]

It's hanging a 55% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 60% on MetaCritic. I stand by my opinion.

[NEON MERCURY]

damn, mod-age....that was a good read...... .......

i am glad you liked it.......there is nothing worse then to have your favorite director 's new film turn into a dud.........so a i am glad it livee up to your expectations.....

i think mutinyco is just kidding .he really likes it.........

[MacGuffin]

This bond goes deep
Bill Murray and Wes Anderson once again move against the mainstream comedic tide, this time finding synchronicity in the existential absurdities of "The Life Aquatic." Source: Los Angeles Times



Muses are most often thought of as comely, lithe and young. Throughout history, they've usually been depicted as female guides to inner wisdom that spark the imaginations of great men. But for director Wes Anderson, whose loopy reimagining of the filmmaking experience, "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," opens this week, the muse has recently taken the form of a middle-age man with faintly pockmarked skin, tufts of graying hair and sad, teardrop eyes — the comedian Bill Murray.

In fact, he's standing at the exact spot where the two first met eight or so years ago.

"That's the couch!" says Anderson, pointing to the divan in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, a lush expanse now covered with hipsters on the make.

"That's the couch!" deadpans Murray, who's in tow on this expedition.

The two have just spent an afternoon junketeering with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. It's the beginning of the pre-Oscar Christmas rush, where filmmakers and stars spin through special insider screenings in all the places where Hollywood tastemakers might congregate. Murray, who keeps a 1-800 number — which he never answers — for dealing with the business, isn't a common sight on the publicity circuit.

Yet here he is — affable and genially uninhibited, in a blue blazer, blue sweater and gray pants. He stops to smell a riotously gigantic bouquet of lilies and to rush over to check out the signature on a painting of monkeys to see if it belongs to a friend (it does). When it's time to sit down, he is almost courtly, pulling out the chair for a reporter and helping with her coat.

Although he's the same height as the 6-foot-1 Murray, Anderson seems half that size. He's thin like a stretched out rubber band, with a long nose, long hair and a close-fitting olive corduroy suit, Hush Puppies and a white, roll-necked sweater, which in another era would have been finished off with a cravat. At 35 he seems like a precocious kid wearing his dad's suit.

Drinks with the pair and one of the film's producers, Barry Mendel, has an amiable, off-kilter quality, a semi-ironic jaunt through an interview process that Anderson in fact lampoons with relish in "The Life Aquatic." As in a Wes Anderson film, the surreal quality is softened by warmth, born here by the real affection between wunderkind director and his world-weary yet jaunty star.

Anderson, after all, enticed Murray to spend six months in Italy, for less than his customary fee, to play Zissou, a narcissistic and broke oceanographer (Jacques Cousteau on a very bad day) who drags his band of misfits, his mistrustful brainy wife (Anjelica Huston), a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) and a Southern pilot who might be his long-lost son (Owen Wilson) on a quixotic search for the mythical jaguar shark that ate his best friend.

If there was any doubt that Murray would be game for "The Life Aquatic's" exercise in existential silliness, it was dispelled at that meeting on the couch, all those years ago, says Anderson.

The skinny director trills the lyric, "You know I'm back!" adding, "It's an Animals song he sang walking in circles a few minutes after we met." A waiter comes to take an order, and Anderson asks for flat water, as does Mendel.

"Who am I hanging with?" says Murray with mock outrage. "Let's get a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon for putting you through your misery." Murray combs through the list, and then takes up the Animals' song with twee panache, like a demented lounge singer. "You know I'm back. I'm back like Al Capone. I'm back like Sonny Liston."

Before the song interlude, Anderson spent months just trying to get Murray's attention, mostly by plying him with copies of "Bottle Rocket," his well-received but little-seen first effort.

"I had the largest collection of 'Bottle Rocket' tapes on the Eastern Seaboard," says Murray. "I still haven't seen it."

Finally, the "Rushmore" script showed up and he read it, and decided the guy could direct. He tracked Anderson down by telephone and they spent 45 minutes discussing Akira Kurosawa's film "Red Beard," whose shape reminded him of "Rushmore."

Murray gives an excited recap of the story of a country doctor (Toshirô Mifune) who happens to be a martial arts expert; he's most taken with the story's emotional reveals, which "go off like cherry blossoms" before the actual "feel good" ending, which he says "is completely obvious, but you're so overwhelmed by what just happened, it's almost like being told the truth."

The truth appears to be important to Murray, as does loyalty. There's also the concept of shame — of all the comics he came of age with, he's the only one who still commands the big screen. It's the unspoken current.

Ask Murray about his recent career reblossoming — with his adoption by two of the leading young filmmakers of this generation, Anderson and Sofia Coppola — and he deadpans, with flirtatious faux naiveté. "I'm an adult now. I'm not an ingénue anymore. I'm sort of like, who's the girl in 'The Last Picture Show?' "

"Cybill Shepherd?" offers Anderson.

Cybill Shepherd, Murray agrees.

"I'm not an ingénue anymore. I'm a leading lady. But it's interesting, I'm yet unseen as a leading lady." Pressed, he answers more seriously. "I know why they've asked me. It's because I haven't really embarrassed myself. I don't think I've ruined myself, and I don't think Wes has, either. I'm not overused. If you can do funny things, you can do serious things too. I can do whatever's required."

Movie is Murray-centric

Murray lent "Rushmore" an air of sad despair, along with his stardom, enabling the tale of 15-year-old precocious prep-schooler Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), in love with a schoolteacher, to be made. "I guess they blew the big money on my salary because a lot of the actors are from his grade school or his high school or whatever neighbors. You're always looking over your shoulder going 'Is there anyone in the union?' " he jokes, noting Anderson's penchant for stocking his films with nonactor friends in bit parts. Murray's comic performance as the lonely industrialist Herman Blume, who befriends Max and falls in love with the same teacher, earned him a raft of critics' awards and boosted Anderson's career.

Cousteau is a motif in that film as well. The book that first leads Max to his beloved teacher is about Cousteau, and he is inspired to get an aquarium built in her honor. It was on the set that Anderson told Murray, "I've got an oceanographer movie that we're going to do after this," says Anderson who with everyone else is drinking a superb $145 bottle of wine that Murray ordered.

"I didn't take it seriously because it just seemed so casual," says Murray. "I just decided he was trying to keep me calm during the shooting."

He insists that the reason he needed to be soothed was costar Seymour Cassel's penchant for intense conspiratorial conversations on eccentric subjects. "You want to laugh at him and it's not a good choice," says Murray.

Cassel returns for "The Life Aquatic" to appear in flashbacks as Murray's deceased friend. "By the time they got to making this movie together, they had rebonded, " Anderson says with a laugh.

"It's revisionist history," demurs Murray. "It turns out we were happily married for all those years, Liz."

Writers and critics are going to have a field day trying to come up with the appropriately insouciant adjective to describe "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou." Loopy. Zany. Wacky. Offbeat. It features one character who sings David Bowie songs throughout the movie — in Portuguese.

Anderson, who has worked with the precision of a short-story writer, has been unleashed structurally as well as financially with "The Life Aquatic."

He's made a picaresque opera, a Don Quixote-esque saga that costs in the neighborhood of $50 million, more than twice the price of his last film, "The Royal Tenenbaums," which earned $52 million at the domestic box office. For the Walt Disney Co., which financed the film, this is certainly a nervy move.

In the movie, Anderson again evinces his distinctive blend of solipsistic, pain-fueled humor, although the balance has tipped toward the comedic, with moments of wonder. In particular are the underwater sequences featuring such imagined sea creatures as the rattail envelope fish and 2-inch crayon pony fish, designed by Anderson, co-writer Noah Baumbach and stop-animation wizard Henry Selick (who directed "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas").

Anderson wrote the film with Baumbach ("Kicking and Screaming") instead of longtime partner Owen Wilson who, he explains, was off being a movie star.

Their first motivation was to write a part for Murray. "We picture [him] with a beard, and every now and then there might be something stolen from some moment of real life," says Anderson, who refers to a snippet when Zissou tells an overly ambitious autograph-seeker to scram.

"My inspiration is '8 1/2 ' and 'Day for Night,' movies about filmmakers," adds Anderson. "In the movie, as much as he is an oceanographer, he's a maestro."

For a final-cut director involved in the details of his films down to the typeface on the poster, Anderson isn't too keen on explaining the mysterious meaning of it all. Like a primitive native who fears a photograph will somehow steal his soul, Anderson is suspicious. "There's stuff that's thematic that's in there, and I don't want to explain it to myself even." But he touches on the highlights: improvising families out of workmates, the father-son/mentor relationship.

Whether it's out of politeness or accessibility, Murray winds up explicating for Anderson. He's seldom played a father before, although in real life he has six sons, and he certainly knows the tricky terrain that the hapless and selfish Zissou is trying to traverse in exploring when to be a friend and when to be a father. "That's true. That's a moment you have," Murray says. As in "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," the film is redolent with the romance of failure.

"Failure is more interesting than success," says Anderson. He stops himself. He is after all an extremely successful film director now. "I don't even want to say that. I'm more interested in failure. I don't know why."

Murray steps in for him. "You learn much more from failure than success. It's much more instructive."

"I think more about it," admits Anderson. "I kind of like the ending of 'The Bad News Bears.' They lose the game, but the kids are drinking beers on the baseball field anyway."

Anderson prefers to discuss the grind of making a movie. He tells of rehearsing the film during a motorboat ride, scouting locations off the coast of Italy. They stopped at a tiny island, Ponza, where they had to swim to shore to have lunch. Later, when they were preparing to go home, Anderson spotted Murray climbing onto the dock, bag in tow.

"I go, 'Wait a second. What are you doing?' He goes, 'I'm going to stay on the island.' He had 7:15 dive training the next morning. 'How are you going to get back?' He says, 'I'll see you tomorrow.' "

How did Murray while away the hours? He met a guy who owned a great restaurant. "I marched around most of the night, carried a drink with me. When it ran out, I bought another. Went down some dark stairways. You're not afraid of the dark in a place like that," he says. "When you go to a place that primitive, you hear the sounds of life underneath the windows."

Gathering what falls away

A few minutes later, the director, who's been monitoring the clock on his cellphone, leaves. The mood at the table somehow feels more intimate as the topic shifts, the way these conversations go, to the man who just left the room. Has success changed Anderson? "Everyone changes a little bit when they have success and celebrity," says Murray, sounding like a grizzled eyewitness to that perpetual battle between ego and gratification.

"He lives a funny lifestyle [apparently he is itinerant at the moment]. He's a gleaner. Gleaners were the people that were so poor that they would come to the fields after the fields were picked and they got to pick up what was left behind. This comes to mean someone who by watching takes what falls from the life of the culture and puts it into something. He knows a lot of famous people. He sees that there's a value in what they have lived."

"It's like Bogdanovich," adds Mendel, referring to the director of "The Last Picture Show," who as a young man interviewed the great directors including Hitchcock and Ford, and has been publishing the research and his insights for decades. "Similarly Wes has gone down that road. All the generation of people, who are 20, 30, 40 years older than him, he's been fascinated by from the start. Now if he calls them, they might just call him back. He's taken total advantage of that, and over time that's had a lot of influence on him. That's part of the genesis of a [film] like this one."

Has Murray's recent artistic success changed him? The actor seems genuinely pleased to be a part of Anderson's oeuvre, just as he was to be part of Coppola's success last year with "Lost in Translation." Though he didn't win the best actor Oscar, "I didn't care," he says.

"It was a relief not to win. I might have enjoyed winning. It might have been nice to have someone say, 'You're the greatest, baby.' But I was OK. I made a real conscientious choice that I was not going to lose myself over this. I would have been very disappointed if I had."

He admits he likes playing the room at awards ceremonies, and his speech would have been "different." After the Oscars, he appeared on "The Late Show With David Letterman," in his tux, rolling in a gutter. "I think it's going to be a regular thing," he joked. "Every 25 years I'm going to get nominated.

"Honestly, I think I was in the best film of the year," he says, over the last sips of wine. " 'The Lord of the Rings' — I may never see it, 'The Lord of the Rings 3.' I missed [parts] one and two. I may never get around to it. I loved my movie.

"That was the prize."

[tpfkabi]

I LOVED this movie. This is one of the few instances in which Themodernage and I are in complete and utter agreement (at least until he [re]forms his opinion).  It's fucking amazing, but not in any shape way or form in the way that his previous films might have been amazing. This isn't his best movie in some ways, but in so many others it's light years ahead of anything else he's done. I was really unenchanted by the trailer, and was afraid he'd just be repeating himself...but that ain't the case. Must gather thoughts. Full review sometime in the future.

are there top secret screenings in D-Town?

[mutinyco]

He goes to press screenings. Like me.

[tpfkabi]

He goes to press screenings. Like me.

well,
poo poo
on you two.

me want to see now.
arrrggggggghhh

[lamas]

Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs down.  what a burn.  Macguffin, do something useful and post the review.

[ono]

Ebert didn't like Rushmore either.  I love the guy, but he doesn't get Anderson, that's for sure.

[The Silver Bullet]

He goes to press screenings. Like me.

Out of interest, how do you get into press screenings. Are you press?

[A Matter Of Chance]

December 10, 2004
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU'


A Seagoing Showcase of Human Collectibles
By A. O. SCOTT





here may be filmmakers more idiosyncratic than Wes Anderson - Jean-Luc Godard is still alive and shooting, after all - but there is no one who can match Mr. Anderson's devotion to his own idiosyncrasy. In his last movie, "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001), the director and his writing partner, Owen Wilson, confected a parallel-universe Manhattan of moody tennis players, neurasthenic playwrights and rambling mansions, burying a touching story of child prodigies and prodigal parents in tchotchkes and bric-a-brac. At the time, some of us who had admired Mr. Anderson's first two films, "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore," complained that his delicate combination of whimsy and emotional purity was sliding into preciousness.


"The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," based on a script by Mr. Anderson and Noah Baumbach, goes even further, conjuring an imaginary world that encompasses wild ocean-faring technologies and fanciful species of computer-animated fish. Rather than tacking toward the shore of realism, Mr. Anderson blithely heads for the open sea of self-indulgent make-believe. As someone who was more annoyed than charmed by "Tenenbaums," I should have been completely exasperated with "The Life Aquatic," with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.


Some of this has to do with Bill Murray, who occupies nearly every frame of the picture, usually sighing and frowning right in the middle of the screen. Mr. Anderson favors static, head-on compositions stuffed with beguiling details, and Mr. Murray holds still for him, allowing the audience's eyes to peruse his carefully arranged surroundings.


The actor's quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism. Like Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Murray's Steve Zissou is a flawed, solipsistic patriarch, though his defining emotion is not intemperate anger but a vague, wistful tristesse. His doughy face fringed by a grizzled Ernest Hemingway beard and topped by a red watch cap, Mr. Murray turns tiny gestures and sly, off-beat line readings into a deadpan tour-de-force, at once utterly ridiculous and curiously touching.


Zissou is a famous ocean explorer whose undersea adventures have less to do with scientific research than with pop-culture branding. He makes movies, administers a vast fan club, and keeps his eye out for merchandising opportunities. When we first meet him, at the premiere of his latest "Life Aquatic" documentary, he is beset with troubles. His trusty sidekick (Seymour Cassel) has been eaten by a mysterious shark (on which Zissou vows Ahab-like revenge) and Eleanor, his wife and business partner (Anjelica Huston), seems to be gravitating back into the orbit of her ex-husband, Alastair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), Zissou's slick, reptilian arch-rival. Meanwhile, a nosy reporter (Cate Blanchett) talks her way onto Zissou's boat, joined by Ned Plimpton (Mr. Wilson), a guileless, pipe-smoking young man from Kentucky who may or may not be the captain's long-lost illegitimate son.


Having established a rather hectic set of narrative premises (and I have provided only a partial list), Mr. Anderson proceeds to treat them casually, dropping in swatches of action and feeling when they suit his atmospheric purposes. He is less a storyteller than an observer and an arranger of odd human specimens. "The Life Aquatic" is best compared to a lavishly illustrated, haphazardly plotted picture book - albeit one with frequent profanity and an occasional glimpse of a woman's breasts - the kind dreamy children don't so much read start to finish as browse and linger over, finding fuel for their own reveries.


There is, to be sure, a certain willful, show-off capriciousness in this approach to filmmaking, but there is also a great deal of generosity. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Baumbach have built a magpie's nest of borrowed and reconditioned cultural flotsam - from Jacques Cousteau to Tintin and beyond - but the purpose of their pastiche is less to show how cool they are than to revel in, and share, a childish delight in collecting and displaying strange and enchanting odds and ends. If you allow yourself to surrender to "The Life Aquatic," you may find that its slow, meandering pace and willful digressions are inseparable from its pleasures.


Not that it's all fun and games. The bright colors and crazy gizmos are washed over with a strange, free-floating pathos that occasionally attaches itself to the characters, but that seems in the end to be more an aspect of the film's ambience than of its dramatic situations. Zissou's world-weary melancholy, the utter seriousness with which he goes about being absurd, contains an element of inconsolable nostalgia. He is a child's fantasy of adulthood brought to life, and at the same time an embodiment of the longing for a return to childhood that colors so much of grown-up life.


In my ideal cinémathèque, "The Life Aquatic" would play on a permanent double bill with "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie." Mr. Anderson and Stephen Hillenburg, Mr. Squarepants's creator, share not only a taste for nautical nonsense, but also a willingness to carry the banner of unfettered imaginative silliness into battle against the tyranny of maturity.


They also both understand the sublimity that well-chosen pop music can impart even to throwaway moments. The seaborne contrivances of "The Life Aquatic" may make you a little queasy, but the soundtrack is impossible to argue with. It consists mainly of early David Bowie songs - "Queen Bitch," "Space Oddity," "Five Years" and the like - sung samba style, in lilting Brazilian Portuguese, by Seu Jorge. Like much else in the movie, these songs seem to come from another world: one which is small, crowded and, on its own skewed terms, oddly perfect.[/b]