Head on over to the chat now and watch the Life Aquatic with us!

Updated: Thanks to everyone who came and watched it with us, see you next time!

Please join us tonight for the second film in our summer Wes Anderson Film Festival.

What do you need to do to be a part of it? Simple, grab your DVD and at 11pm ET/8pm PT, head on over to the Chat Room, press play, and chat with us during the film.

You can view the Facebook invitation here.

More information about the film after the jump.

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Shoe customizer Ken has been working on the perfect Team Zissou sneakers and has put a finished batch up for sale on EBay. While the real Zissou sneakers used the now rare Adidas Rom, Ken has chosen to use the Adidas Italia. We think the finished product is quite good.

Ken’s Flickr Gallery

Ken’s EBay Store

Related items: Steve Zissou’s cool shoes prove tough to fill (USA Today) | How To Make Your Own Team Zissou Shoes (Instructables.com)

The real deal:

Update: more from Ken after the break…

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Wes fan Anant Prabhakar has created a great tribute video to Anderson called “Let Me Tell You About Wes: Part 1.” We’ll be sure to tell you about Part 2, or whatever it is, if it actually exists.

“Zissou Route” by the extremely talented Casey Weldon. Thanks to Sam for this.

(click for a larger version)

It is, of course, inspired by Miguel Calderón’s artwork from The Royal Tenenbaums.

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.

Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival Premiere of Apocalypse Now.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

“This is an Apocalypse…”

Coppola picture from link, via link.

Homage or rip-off?

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.

From The World Effect:

The World Effect travelogue video 12: Argentina (Patagonia) from The World Effect on Vimeo.