The Life Aquatic

My immediate family and I recently bought almost the entire inventory from Cleanflicks' liquidation sale and so my brother Gordon and I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on Saturday.

I love Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic retains the same terse colors and dry dialogue. It is raw and roughly poignant, and it had some interesting cultural tributes that I particularly appreciated.

My brother pointed out the Moby Dick / Captain Ahab references, but the one that kept coming to mind was the truly great Jacques Cousteau.

I have vivid memories of the oceanography unit we did in my ELP class in elementary school. (I wrote a report on starfish. One of our projects entailed landscaping an ocean in a shoe box and then mapping its depths. We rode a bus to San Diego to go to Sea World.)

While the movie doesn't directly remind me of these events, it's still a compelling sketch - told with all of the odd quirks of personality that make the viewer connect to the characters.

You can listen to a clip of my favorite song from the movie here and you can check out the full recording sessions of the David Bowie tributes here.