![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuuagoWatched Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic this evening.
The premise: An internationally famous oceanographer and his crew set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark that killed the oceanographer's partner during the documentary filming of their latest great adventure.
Wes Anderson's stuff is kind of hit and miss for me, sometimes both in the same film. Sometimes the humour falls very flat for me. However, his work is always, if nothing else, very stylish. I was overwhelmed when I saw The Darjeeling Limited in cinema in 2007; I'd never seen anything quite like it. But that was partly because my exposure at that time to, well, anything - was kind of limited. Regardless, Anderson's work is... distinct.
As for The Life Aquatic, it was middle-of-road for me. The general story and characters interested me well enough. The humour fell flat roughly half of the time (unlike The French Dispatch, where it was flat 90% of the time). Visually, it was gripping. And the ending worked very well for me.
I suppose I might say that for me, Anderson's work is comparable to those coffee table books that do have a decent amount of text, but are mostly visual. You can flip through them without going too deep into the rest, and in some cases, they're more enjoyable that way. ...Which sounds like damning with faint praise, and I guess it is, but I don't necessarily mean it in a bad way.
(Sidenote, I really could have done without the random homophobia in this film, but then again, par for the course for 2004.)
In my personal Anderson-specific ranking, of the films I've seen, I'd place it above The French Dispatch, but below Grand Budapest Hotel. The Darjeeling Limited is still at the top, but I haven't watched it in a decade.
The premise: An internationally famous oceanographer and his crew set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark that killed the oceanographer's partner during the documentary filming of their latest great adventure.
Wes Anderson's stuff is kind of hit and miss for me, sometimes both in the same film. Sometimes the humour falls very flat for me. However, his work is always, if nothing else, very stylish. I was overwhelmed when I saw The Darjeeling Limited in cinema in 2007; I'd never seen anything quite like it. But that was partly because my exposure at that time to, well, anything - was kind of limited. Regardless, Anderson's work is... distinct.
As for The Life Aquatic, it was middle-of-road for me. The general story and characters interested me well enough. The humour fell flat roughly half of the time (unlike The French Dispatch, where it was flat 90% of the time). Visually, it was gripping. And the ending worked very well for me.
I suppose I might say that for me, Anderson's work is comparable to those coffee table books that do have a decent amount of text, but are mostly visual. You can flip through them without going too deep into the rest, and in some cases, they're more enjoyable that way. ...Which sounds like damning with faint praise, and I guess it is, but I don't necessarily mean it in a bad way.
(Sidenote, I really could have done without the random homophobia in this film, but then again, par for the course for 2004.)
In my personal Anderson-specific ranking, of the films I've seen, I'd place it above The French Dispatch, but below Grand Budapest Hotel. The Darjeeling Limited is still at the top, but I haven't watched it in a decade.
Yuu. Fic writer & book lover. M/Canada.