The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is one of those people whose work I love so much it rouses concern in me that I just might be a hipster. What also rouses concern is how each time I watch it, The Life Aquatic becomes a better and better movie to me, and it's generally regarded as his weakest one yet.

But no film has had Bill Murray with as much time on screen completely topless, and this MUST count for something, shouldn't it?

Having been utterly and emotionally crushed by the fact that I can find NEITHER my Flight of the Conchords Season 1 dvd's NOR Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I resolved to watch this film, which was oddly placed upon my bookshelf. Given the way this film seems to want to act as a sort of play on screen rather than fully explore the elements unique to film moreso than other Anderson films, I find it, while overlooking that it was probably my indolent self putting it somewhere, droll and ironic. So it's no longer there, and it was played, further justifying my purchase. Thumbs up.

My girlfriend at the end: "It was ok." Oh yeah? Well you like Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal and he LOVED it! So yeah! That proves nothing!

The truth is she's absolutely right. I feel that Wes aims far and wide with this one, and with many stylishly sparse and tight long shots hopes to not only offer us an epic overseas adventure, but a deep exploration of the emotions spanning a breadth of characters. For Wes here, it's ambitious as hell, and while it's all guessing since I have not seen it, it looks like he narrowed his focus a little more for his followup The Darjeeling Limited. I don't blame him, because Zissou and Crew just didn't hit it out of the park. What they did accomplish, though, was at least a two-base run that's totally worth watching in my mind.

Again, this is maybe my third or fourth time watching it, and it's one that grows on me. Given that the reach is so wide, you really absorb little on the first viewing but a gist of the story and a breadth of humorous characters. Watch the journey again, and you may soften up to Steve Zissou, played by Bill Murray with the dolor that got him award talks in Lost in Translation, and his desperation for finding someone still rooting for him. Actually, to tell you the truth, he's probably the only character that I've grown attached to at all, but it's become a fun thing to watch his journey. Steve would hate to hear me say it, but I seriously like the film.

That doesn't change the fact that I walked out of the theater after my first viewing feeling a little underwhelmed compared to how I felt walking out of Royal Tenenbaums, which was equally dense and increasing in value on repeat viewings. So why is that? Well, Royal and Steve are two main characters with a lot in common. Both are old men with past glories and they're looking for reasons why they went away and also finding a way to regain them. Both have reached a point of desperation when we find them. What Steve has that Royal does not, though, is 1) thinner characters. Most characters are only seen through the lens of their interactions with Steve. The only real deviations are incredibly brief and both involve Ned. It gives a little depth to some other characters, but not a lot. Royal, on the other hand, gives a good amount of focus to troubles facing Royal's children completely out of his control. It's truly a broader ensemble piece and goes far in giving everyone a purpose beyond reflecting ONE character's troubles. 2) Thinner side plots. I wanted to care more about Willem DaFoe's Klaus, but it just never came up. He's just desperate for Steve's regards and it's never really explained why since he's essentially a right hand man. I keep comparing to Royal, and I don't know if that's completely fair, but in that one you have a sort-of-incestuous love affair, a drugged out friend, and some other stuff that doesn't completely tie together but it's there and interesting on some level. At the very least, again, it gives some flesh to his characters. Zissou's side crap is interesting too, but not as much so. 3) No big adventure to worry about. This may be the biggun' because this part was actually really cool in this movie. Completely unrealistic, we have Steve flip out on Filipino pirates to the Stooges' "Search and Destroy" and a very awkward yet awesome shootout/chase on their hideout island. It's funny and fun in an Indiana Jones kind of way, but stylistically anything but. It's actually pretty entertaining and is something new for Anderson. But it does pull away from time that could be spent developing characters. Thus everything is left feeling a little half-baked.

But fuck you all, sometimes the doughy bread is the good shit. It's soft and mushy, but there's some substance there. And style, which doesn't fit the bread analogy but Anderson's style is in top form here. From those strange jump cuts that feel abrupt but totally work somehow, to a full setpiece of all the ship's (the Belafonte) decks leading to very impressive long takes that make for almost a comic book feeling. My girlfriend didn't feel comfortable at all during these, though, so your mileage may of course vary. And it still amounts to something. Again, it's not as good as it could have been, but come on now. The ending does kind of get to me. I'm happy to see the redemption and I do feel it.

The added focus on action has other perks as well. Here we have Wes throwing in visuals of the deep sea. With CG and claymation he does, to an extent, capture the sense of wonder of his audience. This is new territory for him, and again the high aim means it doesn't get all the attention it deserves, but it does offer a level of aesthetic captivation that's worth noting. But it does even more. It actually proves itself to be a neat little symbol of Steve's own vitality, first being something taken for granted to something that completely halts the film. It all comes together at the end to remind Steve that, as he puts it, "this is an adventure." This viewing is the one where I finally begin to understand what the hell he might mean.

Maybe it's forced. Maybe it's the dedication of a Wes Anderson fanboy, but if I really am one, wouldn't I have seen Darjeeling Limited by now? Wouldn't I have been excited for it rather than concerned that he's rehashing themes he's revisited several times over at this point? And again, I didn't feel this way when I first watched it. For some reason I started caring more as I re-watched. Perhaps it's one of those things where you're better able to sort through the pieces, and the pieces just aren't as well organized this time around. So what I'm here telling you is this: there's some really pretty, very worthwhile pieces here. You can sift through them and make something special of it, but it is a little broken up and not as well put together as Wes's other gems. I still give it a recommendation.

Now, I've seen many a Seagal film.  And I've seen Under Siege before, which is very likely the best movie to come out of the Steven Seagal canon.  That alone doesn't say much considering his reputation for churning out complete shit, but still as an action flick this doesn't completely blow chunks.  Now, while this did not stop me from falling asleep on the film, I am still comfortable saying this.

I should also warn everyone that I am basing this review on my "sleep through" viewing, which was aired by TNT and means that almost all the violence and cussing was shoddily edited out completely.  My dubiously high mark of Steven Seagal's best work involved me filling in the bleeps and cuts with what I remember to be the actual unadultered film.

I'm not entirely sure where to start on reviewing this.  See, I think this is my first go at the shallower waters of cinema, and that's hollywood action flicks.  Ok, I'm hitting a stride now.  These movies require no level of intelligence, defy reality at all points, and, if done right, are a lot of fun for all said reasons.  If not, they can be a complete chore to get through.  

There is a key exception to the chore rule, though, and that is the age of the audience.  When I was in my early to mid teens and even probably a little before that, these movies were pretty much the finest examples of cinema to me.  I was a child whose first viewing of a Mortal Kombat arcade machine threw me into a frenetic fascination with all violent media.  Never once, mind you, being violent myself, I did find violence to be pretty much the greatest thing the world had ever known.  Many years later, something happened to me.  I went to watch films like XXX and Collateral Damage and thought they were pretty much the worst thing to come along (research post-writing shows these were both made in 2002, the year I graduated from high school).  All of a sudden I was, more and more, seeing these films as brawny smatters of retardation masking a complete lack of story or interesting characters with big explosions and guns.  When I revisit the movies I loved as a kid, I see that, for many of them, this is the case.  So in my growing up, for better or worse, my tastes changed dramatically.  Now, I'm guessing that I'm not alone.  There are others that went through a similar progression.  But not all, for I know people that still get excited about new movies starring Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the man I have in mind was indeed older than me.  All the same, I know I'm not alone. 

I WILL say this, though: Martin Riggs, John McClane, and to a lesser extent Casey Ryback here are far more entertaining characters than the action protagonists filmmakers are coming up with today.  Why do you not see more XXX sequels?  Not a whole lot of action film franchises springing up on the whole, are there?  They're just getting dumber and less valuable.  I daresay that these movies, while they're also brawny and stupid, still had something about them.  Riggs and Murtaugh of Lethal Weapon would joke around and bicker and argue and it was charming and funny.  The camera often even took us into their personal lives, over the films getting us familiar with Murtaugh's family and Riggs' start of being a complete suicidal mess to someone coming back to his good side with his partner's help.  It's the buddy cop movie blueprint and it still hasn't been topped.  People still try because it gives the audience a little something more to care about if done right.  John McClane of Die Hard had all kinds of personal problems, but then he gets stuck in pretty much the shittiest situation a cop can get in, and he has no star-studded past so he just inexplicably wants to do the right thing.  Incidentally, the right thing involves kicking more ass than any normal man could handle, and really character development doesn't go as far, but it's there, and it's enough where you start to think McClane is pretty funny.

And finally, after all this, we get to Under Siege and its protagonist Casey Ryback.  On the surface, it can be looked at as a sort of anti-Die Hard.  It throws away the personal woes, keeps the wit as best it can with a non-actor like Steven Seagal, and keeps a keen focus on badassery.  Where McClane had you concerned because quite he had some stupid ideas on getting out of certain situations, Ryback left no concern at all.  Being an ex-SEAL with tons of medals and shit, you weren't worried about him.  The journey is more about seeing how he's going to fuck with the bad guys and cheering him on as every single scheme works.  Only one character with more than a couple spoken lines gets killed on camera making you feel bad, and even he's off to the side enough where you don't care.  This is Ryback's show, SPOILER INCOMING he severs limbs on table saws, rips out Adam's Apples with his bare hands, and even pushes in poor Tommy Lee Jones' eye and then stabs him in the head with a cooking knife.  SPOILER DONE but while it is a spoiler, it should be no surprise that the good guys win.  Still, behind all this, it's just a Die Hard ripoff.  A contained space with something of particular value is hijacked by an unusually smart and subtly wealthy team of sociopaths and thieves and one man, the overlooked detail, fights on because he's the only hope for everyone.  

The truth is, you can look a this film as the transition point to the action genre that now thrives.  A super badass that is cool to watch, but hard to care about because he does everything right.  He's essentially not human.  This is why sequels don't work.  Look at Under Siege 2 and XXX: State of the Union.  And when I'm honest with myself, those greats are better than what we get now.  There are four Lethal Weapons and four Die Hards because we liked the characters.  That's gone, and I miss it.  They're no fucking French Connection or Chinatown, but they're fun, and their characters are likable.  Now the characters are disposable and the flash is getting too much focus, completely destroying its value.  Who cares about a big explosion killing all the bad guys if we never got a chance to hate them to begin with?  A big part of that is that they want to kill heroes we don't give a shit about.

But I'd bullshit you if I said I've outgrown it.  Those flashy action sequences can still get me going if done well.  That second X-Men movie kicked all kinds of ass, and I love ALL THREE Spidey flicks.  I guess the Superheroes get all the love nowadays?  I also want to praise Die Hard 4, but it's such a throwback with modern day effects that it pretty much epitomizes what action movies ought to be.  It cheated, though.  It had John McClane.  Trump card, y'know?  Still, I loved it.  Other stuff is just shit.  Jason Statham, who I loved in Snatch, is churning out cookie-cutter style over substance action movies that no one should care about.  So is Angelina Jolie.

I'm greatly blaming the Matrix for this, even though that first movie was pretty good.  I will stop there because that trilogy is a whole other mess.

Not all hope is lost, though.  As I mentioned, superhero movies can really nail it sometimes as they're dealing with characters that have had years of fleshing out.  But there's new blood I like.  The Jason Bourne movies are flat out awesome, even with the nauseating editing and cinematography in the latter 2.  They're still compelling stories and a very unique protagonist with his nice guy demeanor and surprising depth with his confusion.  More like that, and we're in great shape.  Plus, the trend seems to be agreeing with me, as I haven't seen as much press for these movies lately.  Unless it's Michael Bay making dogshit like Transformers.  Fuck you, Michael Bay.  Go blog about blu-ray and stop making movies.