1. Criterion Confessions: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Writer Jamie S. Rich uses Matt Zoller Seitz's recent series on Wes Anderson's films as a jumping-off point for a defense of The Life Aquatic.
["That said, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou always seems to be the most maligned of these core films. Invariably, when talking about the movies with others, there is almost a knee-jerk need to claim that it is not as good as its siblings. It's a comment that is so predictable and automatic, it has become one I no longer trust, at least without some further qualification. More often than not, it's a movie that its detractors have seen once and never revisited, and whether they realize it or not, their main problem is an inability to forgive it for not being either Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums--which, of course, is absurd and also misses how amorphous the auteur really is. When you think about it, though one can draw a connector between those other films, that Rushmore is about the singular experience of the lone outcast and Tenenbaums is the collective experience of a family of outcasts (and one that Max Fischer might not have necessarily thrived in), they are also quite different. For as much as is made out of Anderson's signature style, the creator is not as singular as even his ardent fans make him out to be. Though his is a rarefied world, a kind of shared universe where any of these stories could exist side by side in terms of creating a larger whole, each movie is distinctly different. They may have variations on similar themes, the way that, say, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear all mine relatable veins of love both romantic and familial, but they distinguish themselves as separate entities; in tone and setting, the Wes Anderson oeuvre is as vast as those three Shakespeare plays."]
2. I think everyone's linked to this Roger Ebert smackdown of Bill O'Reilly, so we won't elaborate too much more except to say that Ebert makes a pretty amusing boner joke in the course of this piece. No, really.
["Your column ran in our paper while it was owned by the right-wing polemicists Conrad Black (Baron Black of Coldharbour) and David Radler. We dropped it to save a little money after they looted the paper of millions. Now you call for an advertising boycott. It is unusual to observe a journalist cheering for a newspaper to fail. At present the Sun-Times has no bank debt, but labors under the weight of millions of dollars in tax penalties incurred by Lord Black, who is serving an eight-year stretch for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. We also had to pay for his legal expenses."]
3. Terror, Thy Name Is Gooby. What is WITH all of the inexplicably strange and/or horrifying trailers surfacing this year? I Watch Stuff dissects the story of some sort of friendly man-bear voiced by Robbie Coltrane who hangs out with some little kid. Or just watch the trailer here.
["It's normal for kids to have irrational fears. Growing up, a lot of children, including myself, had Child's Play-esque nightmares of toys come to life. That's not unusual. But what is really fucking strange is that writer/producer/director Wilson Coneybeare has decided to forcibly impart his horrific vision of a giant, living Teddy Ruxpin onto a new generation by presenting his childhood nightmare under the guise of a family film. Clear your loved ones from the room and behold the trailer for Gooby:"]
4. So actress Felicia Day sends out a Twitter (I refuse to call them "tweets") that sends the Internet into an uproar about Dollhouse being canceled. Except it's not. Not really. And this turns into a long afternoon of TV writers trying to track down what's really going on. Maureen Ryan has a summary, as well as some advice for Joss Whedon.
["If the Dollhouse is closed, I would very much hope Whedon would not feel so scarred by another unpleasant Fox experience that he would stop making TV shows altogether. I want Whedon to keep making TV shows. He's very good at it. But I'd love for him to make a show with a cable network that believes in his vision and lets him do the things that he does well from the start. As it stands, Dollhouse didn't reach must-see status until recently (I wrote about its improvement here), mainly because Fox wanted more standalone episodes at the start of the season."]
5. April Showers: Miami Vice. Over at The Film Experience, Nathaniel is marking the month by dissecting a number of shower scenes (though he chickened out on Psycho!).
["The second shower scene is curious. We've spent several minutes watching Gong Li's Isabella and Colin Farrell's Sonny fall in love/lust (same thing in the movies on account of time is sped up). They've just realized that their relationship is a bad idea. Or maybe they've just decided it's a good idea to vocalize that obvious conclusion. The shower scene following this announcement begins oddly though it follows the same structure as the first shower scene. The man is lost in thought or zoning out, as one sometimes does when the hot water is drumming into one's skin. The woman enters and the intimacy begins. Only this time the music moves into ominous chords as we see Gong Li approaching the shower. She's all blurry like killers are as they approach shower curtains."]
Quote of the Day:
We move in and out of watching
Faces
Float around the hotel lobby like
Fishes
They're all blowing air
We know it must mean something
But we just stare."
—Fountains of Wayne
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): I'm actually more intrigued by the item BENEATH the circled one. (via Fail Blog)
Clip of the Day: Apparently, this scarred lots of kids. I still remember everyone talking about it the day after it aired in kindergarten. That slow zoom in on the refrigerator at the end of part one is uniquely horrifying.
"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to todd@vanderwerff.us.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Links for the Day (April 10th, 2009)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
13 comments:
Wow! Flashback!
On Punky: I suppose it's a good scar to have, but, yeah, I sure have it. I don't remember a thing about this series except the name of the star, the existence of the tree house and the fact that Punky lived with some old guy and a dog. But I remember the refrigerator moment. For sure.
Likewise, I was also scarred by some TV show I was too young for (Dallas or Dynasty, for all I know) in which a woman put a dry cleaning bag over her head to commit suicide. After that, I didn't want plastic bags anywhere near me.
The benefit of this latter childhood fear came recently, when I caught up with the first season of Mad Men on DVD and got to that great moment when the Draper daughter is scolded -- though not for the reasons we expect -- for running around with a dry cleaning bag over her head.
Where was I? Oh, one more scarred at youth moment: the beginning of Witness made me terrified of public restrooms.
#1: My problem with "The Life Aquatic" is very basic: Bill Murray is miscast. Fatally miscast. If ever there was a textbook case of miscasting undermining an entire movie, this is it.
I think Murray is wonderful in Anderson's other films: "Rushmore," of course; and even his smaller part in "Royal Tenenbaums." Murray specializes in recessive, melancholic characters who mix humor with rue. This, in my mind, makes him alarmingly wrong for the revenge-seeking, cult-of-personality-forming Steve Zissou, another of Anderson's go-getting protagonists that calls for an outsized ego, an aggressive Gene Hackman-type. Imagine how funny the line excerpted in Matt's video essay -- "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go on an overnight drunk, and in 10 days I'm going to set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it. Anyone who wants to tag along is more than welcome" -- would be coming from Hackman. Murray just flattens it. Being too much in synch with Anderson's style, rather than pushing against it, he pretty much flattens the entire movie.
If Jamie Rich or Matt or someone else wants to defend Murray's work here, I'd be happy to hear it. As it stands, I've tried a couple of times to get into this film, to no avail. (I have other issues with it too, Willem Dafoe really being the only performer who registers.) In the abstract, I understand and appreciate what Rich is getting at; but when the execution of a movie is so flat and deadening, I fail to see how any of its rich thematic details matter.
The Life Aquatic is $50M of production design without a script.
While I didn't care for The Life Aquatic, I liked it better than the Darjeeling Limited which I thought was nearly a complete failure.
I've been on Vicodin for the last 24 hours, so you may discount my testimony, but I stand by Life Aquatic as my favorite of his films, without shame.
When I read impassioned defenses of "The Life Aquatic" such as the one linked above, I often feel I appreciate the intent of the film's themes, but what's missing is the actual execution of them. I almost wonder if the movie read great on paper, but comes across as leaden on film.
My main problem with the movie is tone. I think the movie veers wildly from self-aware comedy to moments where Anderson is begging us to take the characters seriously after making a mockery of them. Never felt he did this in "Rushmore" or "Tenenbaums".
I still feel Anderson spent more time getting shots off (blocked and framed exquisitely, but never transcending a fetish for ultimately unrevealing detail) than perhaps dealing with the subtleties of performance and dialogue. Which is why the performances tip over into caricature and revelations are blurted out clumsily rather than making any sense dramatically.
I do think the flawed "Darjeeling" was a step in the right direction for Anderson. The flashback to the day of the father's funeral was one of the most mature sequences he's ever done.
He is an important filmmaker to discuss. Any director who has such a strong eye for visual storytelling should be. That said, I often wonder if the supporters of his films are fetishizing his filmmaking at the expense of viewing some of his shortcomings as a storyteller with a more critical eye.
I feel The Life Aquatic is Anderson's best film. As a funny, spiritual movie about carrying childhood dreams into adult life, it's one of the most original film conflations of reality and imagination. Anderson has never found his tone more naturally. The Royal Tenenbaums is pretty awful.
You know how, every once in awhile, a movie comes along that hits you right where you live, and inspires such intense affection that you find it difficult to respond to negative criticism about it in a rational way? This is one of those movies for me.
A lot of what I like about it is addressed in s somewhat sidelong way in the Anderson series; at some point I do intend to do an entire video essay concentrating solely on that film, since I do find myself defending it quite a bit to people who found it baffling, boring, cutesy or otherwise unsatisfactory.
I suppose I can see how one could claim Bill Murray is miscast -- he's such an odd performer that he rarely seems a natural fit in anything, and you just sort of have to wait and hope that he wins you over -- but I think Zissou is one of his richest parts and his most accomplished performances. It's totally Bill Murray in the energy and delivery, but there's a bitterness and darkness there, and a selfish myopia (in the early part of the film) and an intense, pure emotional release (in the final third) that's unlike anything else he's done. I disagree that Hackman would have been better; as written, Zissou is a bit of a pothead hippie flower child with a beer gut, a hairy man-child, and as such, Murray is the right age and has the right vibe for the part; I find the contrast between his dictatorial management style and his laid-back demeanor fascinating. I find him, and the film, tremendously moving -- more so each time I see it, and I've seen it eight times now. And every time I see it I love it more, and it affects me more profoundly; it's become what I call a waterworks movie, meaning a movie I put in when I want a good cry for whatever reason. His line in the sub, "I wonder if it remembers me," is as piercing to me as the final ten minutes of "The New World," in terms of its ability to make me look inward and plug right into my own basic emotions without (miraculusly) being taken out of the film.
"Aquatic" is not even remotely Anderson's most perfect film -- there are parts of it that drag, the whole narrative is episodic to a fault and somewhat choppy in places, the pirate action scene on the Belafonte is the only sequence in all of Anderson's filmography that I think is flat-out misjudged and kind of stupid and perfunctory, the rescue of the bond stooge goes on too long -- I could continue listing what's wrong with the film. But it all pales next to that purity of feeling, and Zissou's journey toward relinquishing control of his life (to a degree) and conceding that sometimes you just have to let go, to just live, and be -- and the key to living a satisfying, rich life isn't accomplishing particular tasks or achieving specific successes or hitting certain marks, but finding a way to appreciate the people who mean something to you while they're around to be appreciated, and enjoy the moment you're in while you're in it.
If I ever am in the same room with Wes Anderson again, the first thing I'm going to do is thank him for making "The Life Aquatic."
"The Life Aquatic is $50M of production design without a script."
I have to agree. It's a bunch of scrapped together in-jokes (omg, isn't it so hard being a filmmaker?! you have to sign autographs!), quirks as characters, and lazy, unfunny, shock-value "zingers." When I heard that Noah and Wes wrote it in an Italian restaurant...I thought "how perfect." That's what it feels like, two guys jacking each other off creatively while sipping wine and thinking about what cool pop songs they'd like to share with us.
its Owen's performance. thats the problem with the film. Its maybe a small problem, but a bigger problem than any of its siblings.
Let me second the love for The Life Aquatic. It's the kind of movie Max Fischer would have made 15 years after the events of Rushmore, having grown increasingly bitter and disillusioned, and recognizing the depression, violence, and self-centeredness that lurks behind the adorably melancholy antics of father-figure Bloom.
On the one hand, the day I agree with Jamie S. Rich on anything is the day I become a complete poseur. But I have to agree 100% on Life Aquatic.
Poseur!
Post a Comment