mean-spirited socialsomatic's den of unsophistication

I'm having the kind of day where I just can't seem to shake the fuzz out of my head. Take that into account as you read my first review of a movie I've actually seen, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

There are important facts about this experience recorded at the House o' Culture that I won't repeat here. Suffice it to say, seeing a movie with Tim is an inherently threatening situation, in a good way. He just seems to see more in a film than my plot-centric, negative affectively laden brain will allow. I sat through the whole thing missing much of Wes Anderson's visual cleverness, so this review should be considered suspect, at best.

Nevertheless, I found it to be a couple of hours of neutral affect, punctuated by rare bursts of disgust and admiration. The admiration, first, came from elements of the production design - the live action scenes had a clever and consistent retro feel. Some of the dialogue was clever. The best line of the film was, "I'm going to fight you," which was a nice piece of postmodern obviousness. Ominously, the second best line of the film was, "It bit him in the neck," referring to how a cat was killed by a snake. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was the only one in the theatre to laugh at that one (don't hate me, Billy). The one plot element I thought was great was a romance involving a pregnant single woman - I don't remember seeing that before. I felt like this could have subtly validated a lot of people. Single mothers are often seen as undesirable, and pregnant women as non-sexual figures. Secretly, though, many men are attracted to pregnant women. I learned this from teaching human sexuality and having a former sex worker as a speaker - pregnant sex workers are in high demand.

The disgust came from many sources. To the extent I noticed Anderson's tendency to have secondary action to offset the primary focus of the shot, I just didn't like it. For example, there was a running gag about a member of the boat crew who was topless. This, for me, was a perfect example of non-creative creativity. Sure, it's quirky to have something unexpected in the margins of the shot, but why does it have to be something that panders in such an obvious way? I just find this kind of boring, as it doesn't really make much of a statement other than, "Look over here at how clever I am!" rather than, "Look over here at something interesting." The same was true with the animation. They purposely made the animation at a level roughly equivalent to 1980s screensavers. It made for a strange blend with the other motifs of the film, and really sold out the ending where the emotional release was supposed to come from a confrontation with a "feared" Leopard Shark that looked more like RuPaul than a cold-blooded killer.

The script, except for those two lines, was also a let-down for me. I have a pet peeve about writing such that I cannot stand when a film uses dialogue to explain to you events or relations between characters directly. For example, early in the film Zissou's rival appears, and Zissou is heard to say, "He is charismatic." When I hear dialogue like that, I figure they might as well just have filmed the production meetings and shown us those for the first 10 minutes or so. It just seems lazy to me, and that kind of turned me off this film quickly. Let the characters develop, and I'll figure out for myself who I think is charismatic, and who is not.

I should note, by the way, that I am a mean person who holds grudges. This, too, should be taken into account when reading any movie reviews I write.

In the end, the film was trying to be clever without risking any discernible social message. To me, much of the cleverness backfired, so watching it was like eating bland cotton candy.

The night out was fun, though, and the pizza was great.