Over at the House Next Door, Simon Hsu takes a look at the depiction of Steve Zissou as a scientist.
5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): The sense of realness and pathos in Wes Anderson’s film is remarkable, despite the fantasy of the world surrounding its characters: Underwater sea labs, headlight-equipped research dolphins, island-hopping gun battles, etc. This feeling of reality is aided by an undeniable Brechtian self-consciousness, opening with shots of a stage presenting “The Life Aquatic Part 1” to an audience in the film’s world, and closing with the twist that we the real-world viewers have been watching “Part 2” all along. Other examples of this reflexivity exist throughout the film, including jump cuts (boxed up sneakers, cut to sneakers in Bill Murray’s hand, cut to Murray doing toe touch exercises in his new kicks), on-camera documentary filming (Owen Wilson, demonstrating inferior boom mic handling skills), and lateral pans of cross sections of the Belafonte curiously similar to those that Godard/Gorin employ in Tout Va Bien, another highly Brechtian film. All of these strategies heighten the awareness of the protagonist scientist’s mission, exemplifying the primary driving force behind the time, blood and sweat spent on doing what it is we do: The search for truth. Despite the film’s surrealist elements, Zissou faces the same challenges a modern scientist does. Brainstorm, Contact, and Hulk are all conscious of sources of scientific funding, the threat of being shut down and the criticism of scientific peers. But I love that, in Anderson’s film, these predicaments build upon the pathos we derive from the character’s relationships with one another. Zissou is driven to beg his estranged wife for money, more readily demonstrates the acceptance of Ned as his son after learning of Ned’s inheritance and prompts Captain Hennessey to reveal his sexuality. At the end of the film, an initially humorous tumble down a staircase turns sorrowful as Zissou admits he is a “washed up old man with no friends, feeling sorry for himself.” Before his poignant confession, he says to his documenting cameraman “We’ll give them the reality this time.” How many films do?
A San Diego-based cineaste, Simon Hsu does research on protein structure at the UCSD School of Medicine. He is published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and looks forward to an upcoming publication in Biochemistry.
The good people at /Film have posted another Bill Murray inspired piece of art, this time a t-shirt by artist Paul O’Sullivan called “Being Bill Murray.” This isn’t the first time Murray’s diverse career has inspired an artist.
The shirt includes three of the four characters Murray has played for Wes Anderson (from left to right): Raleigh St. Clair (The Royal Tenenbaums), Herman Blume (Rushmore), and Steve Zissou (The Life Aquatic with…). No spot for The Businessman from The Darjeeling Limited? What’s the deal?
You can click the picture below to see a bigger version and order one for yourself. (That is, if you’re either a small or an x-large. All other sizes are unfortunately out of stock.)
Murray can currently be seen in his third film with director Jim Jarmusch The Limits of Control which is in limited release and will be expanding throughout the month.
I would like to put side by side a checklist of what has happened in the Indian Ocean the past day and what has happened in The Life Aquatic. Mind you there are some differences, but ultimately the same…
REAL LIFE
1. Pirates board American flagged ship and hold crew hostage.
2. Things are taken from the ship as plunder.
3. Americans on board attack pirates and re-take ship.
4. Pirates are thwarted from ship with a hostage.
5. Americans gather up a rescue plan to save hostage.
Well, up until this point things were the same. The main difference here is that this guy still has yet to be rescued. I would also like to point out also that he is in the middle of the ocean because his dumbass capters ran out of gas. He also tried to escape but that failed. So hopefully like Life Aquatic, an awesome shootout ensues and he gets rescued.
THE LIFE AQUATIC
1. Pirates board the Belafonte taking the crew hostage
2. Things are taken from the ship as plunder
3. Zissou attacks pirates and re-takes ship
4. Pirates are thwarted from ship with a hostage.
5. Zissou and crew gather up a rescue plan to save hostage.
6. Zissou and crew come to island where hostage is held.
7. Amazing shootout ensues and Zissou saves the hostage.
Spurred on by Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essays “The Substance of Style,” Jamie Rich has written an eloquent defense of The Life Aquatic, the film in Wes’ oeuvre that has received perhaps the harshest criticism:
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 (read more).
A new site, titled “Tenenbaum FAIL,” recently popped up on the blogging site Tumbler. Slash Film reports:
Imagine if FAIL Blog was a hipster blood bath sponsored by the Criterion Collection. The nascent but incredibly popular tumblr, Tenenbaum FAIL, posts abhorred photos of people dressed up like the famously stylized, overly fetishized characters from Wes Anderson’s filmography.
Many of the photos were ripped off borrowed from our Halloween costume contests. Unlike the folks at FAIL, we think the costumes are fantastic! A few of our favorites after the break…
Selick’s new film Coraline debuts in December. He was scheduled to work with Wes on The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but scheduling conflicts with Coraline prevented a second collaboration.
Wes was mentioned in a recent article in The Guardian (U.K.):
Soundtracks and musical scores fit a specific purpose. However, what I find interesting are scores that go beyond their specific purpose and take on multiple lives.
Film soundtracks have always had the power to impact culturally. From the obvious: Ennio Morricone’s theme to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or dialogue from Scarface – to the less obvious: Wes Anderson reusing Sven Libaek’s Shark Theme in the Life Aquatic (a score that in turn found itself on a Volvo Advert).
Using a film sample or being under the influence of a score will almost always result in the adjective “cinematic” being used to describe a band’s sound. It’s a rich tradition in hip-hop, rock and dance, and I enjoy the approximation and interpolation of movies and music (link).
