HC Reviews

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou DVD

Bill Murray .... Steve Zissou
Owen Wilson .... Ned Plimpton
Cate Blanchett .... Jane Winslett-Richardson
Anjelica Huston .... Eleanor Zissou
Willem Dafoe .... Klaus Daimler
Jeff Goldblum .... Alistair Hennessey
Michael Gambon .... Oseary Drakoulias
Noah Taylor .... Vladimir Wolodarsky
Bud Cort .... Bill Ubell
Seu Jorge .... Pelé dos Santos
Robyn Cohen .... Anne-Marie Sakowitz
Waris Ahluwalia .... Vikram Ray
Niels Koizumi .... Bobby Ogata
Pawel Wdowczak .... Renzo Pietro

I hate when the trailers for movies make you think the movie is going to be one thing and then you watch it and find that it's completely the opposite.

This is what happened with this movie.

The trailers make you think this is going to be a comedy. Maybe not a Caddyshack type of funny, but certainly like a Groundhog Day type of funny.

This movie is neither.

What this movie is is boring. It's basically a bunch of kooky, mixed up, and dyfunctional characters all put together. And we, the viewing audience, get to watch them interact with each other and try to work out their idosynchrocies.

*yawn*

There are some good performances. Willem Dafoe cracked me up as Klaus, the German sidekick who starts to get that "Older Child" syndrome when his father figure gets a younger "son." Angelica Houston pretty much rocks the part of Steve Zissou's long suffering wife, even though she's not on screen much.

The DVD contains featurettes about the director (Wes Anderson) and some deleted/extended scenes (the one with Klaus on fire while running from the pirates cracked me up!). I think there's more stuff on the other disc but I don't have that one since I didn't bother to get it from Netflix.

The commentary sucked. Or I should say, the 15 minutes of it that I could handle. The co-writers and the director felt the need to record their commentary track at a coffee shop in which they spend most of their time while writing this movie. That's all fine and dandy but you could hear other people talking, dishes clanking, chairs scrapping, etc. It was way too noisy and it was hard to hear what the guys were saying. No way should a commentary be that difficult to listen to.

If you enjoyed Rushmore or The Royal Tennenbaums (all directed by Wes Anderson and all have the same feel as this movie), then you'll probably enjoy this movie. Unfortunately, I didn't.

Posted by xinh at May 29, 2005 11:19 PM