a review of 水中生活

#24: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Another revisit of an old favorite, which I literally haven't watched since its original theatrical release. Here's a shocking confession: I am currently four behind on seeing all of Wes Anderson's movies; For whatever reason, in spite of loving everything from Bottle Rocket up through Life Aquatic, I've basically skipped out on watching everything from Darjeeling Limited through Grand Budapest Hotel! There's no reason for this other than my being otherwise occupied with work/school/crushing poverty during the theatrical releases for all four films. And it got worse the longer it went, because I thought to myself that I needed to see each previous film before going to see the next one, which just put me in the hole further. My plan over the next year is to catch myself up on my missing Wes Andersons, and I wanted to start with the last one I saw, i.e. this one. In a lot of ways, I feel like this movie plays better to me now, being on the cusp of 40, than it did when I was a callow, directionless twentysomething. The essential sadness of Steve and all of Team Zissou really stands out in sharp relief to me now that I've actually gone through some real highs and lows in my life. The idea that Steve was basically faking it till he made it, and that Team Zissou and the Belafonte were sort of a floating Hotel California for misfits who don't belong anywhere else really came through to me on this viewing. It reminds me of my own career path over the past 10 years, and the similarly ad-hoc, not-quite-up-to-code organizations that I've worked with in that time. This time, I also noticed some very strong thematic similarities between TLAwSZ and another favorite of mine, The Venture Brothers. It looks like Anderson/Baumbach and Publick/Hammer had a stroke of genius around the same time, since both properties debuted within months of each otherbut the similarities are inescapable. The mid-century boys' adventure aesthetic, the eclectic choices made on the soundtrack and score, even the basic concept of having a failed, pseudo-fraudulent scientist as a protagonist all come from something that must have been in the air in the early 2000s. Both films definitely owe something to Buckaroo Banzai, so perhaps that's our missing link.