The Ping Island song is indeed the little electronic melody. I also like “Let Me Tell You About My Boat.”
I loved every minute of this movie! The tone was kind of halfway between the playfulness of Rushmore and the soberness of The Royal Tenenbaums, and the “reality” of the world was even more fanciful than either. Loved the cast and the whole look of the movie.
My favorite bit was the shot of the whole boat in cross-section with a brief voice-over description by Murray of each room. And then later there’s a great shot when Ned is following Steve through the boat from room to room and there are no cuts, the camera simply follows them from the “open” side of the cross-section. This must be what prompted that critic’s “diorama” remarks, but I thought it was great.
My goodness, what a depressing movie. And it wasn’t the kind of depressing that made me feel good in a roundabout way, like The Royal Tenenbaums. This just really made me sad. I love the shot composition, and the way the boat was set up as not having that one side, and the palette of colors, and the titles written in Futura, and all the normal things I love about a Wes Anderson movie. But I’m not sure about this one. I’ll probably have to see it again before I make a decision on it.
Also, the curly-haired intern, the one who joins Team Zissou, looks a lot like my boyfriend. A lot. Especially the hair. It was almost a little distracting, heh.
I loved this movie. Not quite as much as Royal Tennenbaums, but more than Rushmore (haven’t seen Bottle Rocket).
As others have said, the movie is simply a delight to look at. Every scene is just so rich, with bright colors and interesting compositions. Plus neat touches like the fish in various scenes. Visually, I think it’s my favorite Anderson film. It even trumps Tennenbaums for me, which I loved for its visuals.
I’m also becoming kind of creeped out by how I’m being forced to totally reevaluate my opinion of Bill Murray thanks to Anderson movies (I liked Lost in Translation, but he didn’t quite win me over there the way he does here). I’m used to hating everything he does, but I’ve enjoyed him a great deal in this, Tennenbaums, and Rushmore.
However, some of the people in the theater when I saw it pretty much warrant their own pit thread. One utterly obnoxious woman clearly hated and didn’t understand the movie at all, but rather than leaving, decided to stay and talk (loudly, of course) about it the entire time. Another guy was just a moron and kept making unbelievably stupid remarks to his girlfriend (“Ohhhhhhh, no! He’s gonna shoot 'em now!” “Look at that!” “HAH! They’re going to leave the dog!!”). Now, I don’t normally advocate bludgeoning people with a crowbar repeatedly, but…
I thought it sucked. Here’s a quickie review I posted in LJ after watching it:
Frankly, I can’t think of a movie I was more disappointed with (Wait, yes I can - Garden State. In fact, I was much more disappointed with Garden State, because I had higher expectations for it based on the previews, and didn’t expect its third act to devolve into sappy Hollywood formula; whereas I’d already been let down by Wes Anderson and The Royal Tenenbaums). Talk about style over substance (or don’t - I really don’t care what your topics of conversation are) - it definitely looks good, right down to the they’re-supposed-to-look-fake CGI sea life, and Anderson’s obviously developed a signature style (I hate it when I use the same word in two consecutive sentences, but any other word would have sounded pretentious or false). The problem is, I’m finding I don’t much care for his particular style. It seems to me that if you read the screenplay you’d get something quite different from what you saw on film - but then again, maybe you wouldn’t. The main problem I had with it (and with The Royal Tenenbaums, to a lesser degree) was that there was absolutely no emotional connection with any of the characters. In fact, there were barely any actual characters: they seemed mostly to be caricatures or collections of quirks and tics - a crew member who begins every one of his scenes playing acoustic versions of Bowie songs (sung in Portuguese); a gung-ho German (who was German, as far as I can tell, primarily so Willem Dafoe could use a “funny” accent); Cate Blanchett as a reporter knocked up by her married editor, whose main form of personal expression seemed to be blowing gum bubbles; etc. etc. Even Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou, easily the most well-developed of the bunch (Owen Wilson and Angelica Huston’s characters were basically ciphers), seemed more like a composite of a writer’s idea of a failed sea explorer than a real sea explorer. I’ve seen many crappy movies where at least I could identify with the characters or feel something for them; here I never felt anything for anybody, so that even when a tragedy befell someone, I didn’t care (just as in Tenenbaums; when Luke Wilson slit his wrists, I didn’t think “Don’t do it!”, but “Man, that looks painful”.). And it appears that this is the way Wes Anderson wants it. Watching his films - even the ones I like - I get, more and more, the sense that he writes/directs like a man doing a clinical study of emotions rather than someone interested in expressing them or giving them weight. He seems very distanced from the inner lives of his subjects, and when events occur in the script that should have some kind of emotional payoff, instead all we feel is numb - and not from being overwhelmed, either. So, basically, dramatic things happen to these people, there is a structured plot, but ultimately you wonder what the point of it all was.
Ugh, this just reminded me how lots of people in the theater laughed when
the helicopter crashed into the ocean. What the hell was funny about that?
Nothing at all.
Anyway, I liked it very much. What I most admired was something that I had seen from Bill Murray in the past - someone who’s life is just not turning out to be what he wanted from it, and the banality of his real life is starting to get to him. I found myself wondering if he’d make it or not. And just like Lost in Translation, I was almost cheering when we see that he’s going to be OK.
I know opinions differ and all that, but I felt extremely connected to the characters…for precisely the reasons you weren’t. In real life, people have defenses and walls and facades. They don’t always show their feelings easily, and they don’t act the way a “drama” is often written. That’s what I liked about this movie. All the main characters were a complex moral mishmash who took some studying to figure out.
Exact same thing happened in the theater that I was in. There was another completely not funny but people laugh anyway scene in the movie, too, but I can’t recall what it was. Perhaps during the pirate attack.
I think it was the way that Bill Murray said the line - “This is going to hurt”, or something like that. I was one of those that laughed.
Saw it tonight. I never once laughed out loud, but instead found myself snickering uncontrollably all the way through. Anderson somehow creates these absurd worlds that are much more interesting than the real one, at least to me, and I coudn’t disagree more with those who say his characters are not emotionally engaging.
Anyway, absolutely loved everything about it. Goes into my collection the very second it comes out on DVD. That is all.
Excellent film, considerably better than The Royal Tennenbaums, but still not quite as good as Rushmore, IMO. Like others here, i really liked the whole aesthetic of the movie, and while i never really thought it was -laugh-out-loud funny, it had me constantly amused and intrigued. I thought Willem Dafoe was fantastic.
I was disappointed in The Life Aquatic. It was my most-anticipated movie of the year, but I never thought it gelled.
That’s really kind of unfair. Maybe the reason I’m saying that is because it was my most-anticipated movie of the year, and it didn’t live up to my personal in-brain hype. I went in expecting a five-star movie and got a solid three-star movie. It really is quite good. I liked (but didn’t love) all of the characters, the production design was fantastic, and the soundtrack was great. I dug the pirate attack / rescue the Bond Stooge subplot, except that I thought Steve should have untied the crew and they should have all fought the pirates together, since they made a big deal about them all carrying guns, and because that would have demonstrated Steve growing back into the role of a leader after practially abandoning it to dispair and self-loathing.
Here’s my Theory of Life (Aquatic): There were two things that went wrong with this picture.
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Owen Wilson should have co-written it, like he did with Rushmore and Royal Tennenbaums. His humor is broader and goofier than Anderson’s, and the perfect foil/augmentation to Anderson’s tendancy towards the precious. Noah Baumbauch didn’t have that, and the movie had too much unearned sentiment as a result.
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Y’all are going to hate me for this one, but I thought Bill Murray blew it. What could have elevated this film from “good” to “great” was an over-the-top performance by Murray. Instead, he seemed to be in some kind of Lost in Translation hangover. He should have had a more detached, ironic attitude toward the material, like Stripes or Ghostbusters. Yes, I just said that: the movie should have been more like Ghostbusters. Moments when Murray let loose with the schtick, like his wetsuit dance, were great. More of that! The contrast between full-bore Murray and the rest of the cast, who were underplaying in typical Anderson style, would have been really cool.
So basically, what I’m saying here is, if the movie had allowed itself to be goofier, the sentiment would have gone down easier, and the episodic structure would have worked better.
Oh, and one more thing: Robyn Cohen should have been topless the entire movie, even when she was leading the mutiny against Zissou and no one should have ever mentioned it or acknowledged it at all. That’s purely to enhance the comedic qualities of the movie, and I have no other motive in suggesting that whatsoever.
I saw it. I was surprised how many times I got bored. I am a big Wes Anderson fan, and a big Bill Murray fan, so I was surprised. I think part of the problem was that Owen Wilson was acting sort of over the top. I felt like there was no way he was related to the humans. I thought Cate Blanchet was cool, though. I could imagine most of them being real people but I can’t imagine a 30 year old guy with a moustache like that flying for air Kentucky, and so it was hard for me to feel involved. I think it’s one too many times Owen Wilson has expected me to respond to his weird cute little boy act.
It’s hard for me to say why I didn’t like it as much as Wes Anderson’s other movies. I think it was because there was too much action and shooting. Plus I felt a bit depressed when they were on the island. That was a bit distracting.
I also felt stupid because I kept expecting the whole “Steve shoots blanks” thing to be explained. It didn’t make much sense to me. I felt like I really missed something important. How could she know if he was Ned’s father if she didn’t get together with Steve til they were in their 30s? It just wasn’t clear to me. If she hadn’t have said that, I would have thought “we will never know if he was really Ned’s father.” But since she said that, I think I’m supposed to think, “he could not be Ned’s father,” but meanwhile, if she thought he was sterile from being under water, how would that mean he had been sterile since he was a teen?
I agree with Pokey. I just saw it and got bored a lot. For me, it was the pacing of the movie. It seemed very jerky, it zoomed through the interesting parts and slowed down for the filler.
brain shuts down
I had impossibly high hopes for this movie, and I still loved it. A lot. Not quite as much as Rushmore, but still one of my new favorite movies.
It also has the title for Movie That Can Most Quickly Make SolGrundy Cry, taking over from The Royal Tennenbaums and its “It’s been a rough year, Dad” line.
(UNBOXED SPOILERS FOLLOW)
It was annoying me at the beginning, because it just seemed too self-consciously quirky. It eventually started to gel with me, and I saw it as just a bunch of over-the-top oddball-but-shallow characters in a fascinating setting, doing weird stuff in a goofy way, and I figured it wasn’t going to be much more than “an interesting movie.” Zissou was interesting to watch, but not really a compelling or believable character. And all the other stuff didn’t ever move me, because none of the characters were real.
And then they all hop into the mini-sub, and we see the jaguar shark, and I think, “Oh I get it. It’s Moby Dick.” And almost at the exact same time I start to “get it,” Zissou says, “I wonder if he remembers me at all” and breaks up. It was as if I finally understood what Zissou was looking for at the same time he did. And I went from just fine and interested, to crying like a mafia widow in seconds. Not even a build-up.
See? I told you you’d freak out.
I’ve been giving this movie a lot of thought, which I guess proves it really is a good movie since it keeps eating up my (rapidly dimminishing) brain power a week after I saw it. It’s a good movie, and all of the elements are in place to be a great movie. I’m just trying to figure out why.
I really believe that Anderson’s style of directing actors, which served him so well in Tennebaums, worked against him here. Everybody was too flat and it stifled the mood. The one time that didn’t happen was in the flashback to the old Zissou documentary when they found the ice weasels.
My observation coincided with Roger Ebert’s on the Ebert & Roeper show: you heard a giggle here and a snicker there in the theatre, but no general outbursts of laughter (and certainly no gut-busting uproarious ROTFLOL moments). I don’t think I laughed out loud once through the whole thing.
Yeah, the cinematography was good, and the CGI fish were interesting - but I was there because this was supposed to be a comedy. If I had wanted pretty pictures, I would have gone to an IMAX travelogue. I came out of the theatre wishing I had gone to see something like Oceans 12 instead.