On 'The Life Aquatic'

to Frank Ahrens, 2/7/05:

Well, I like Wes Anderson's stuff. Though it's definitely sort of rarefied and precious and full of self-conscious geegaws that only a few people will enjoy. Nobody who saw "Rushmore" or "Tenenbaums" should be surprised that it had almost all the same high-artifice faults and pleasures. If the next one by Wes is different in style and tone, then I think those 3 will be thought of as a sort of trilogy. I can enjoy the obviously-fake submarine sets that seemed designed so that he could move the camera from room to room in an unbroken tilt shot, but I'm not sure who else does. To say his films "exist in snow-globes" is right on. The weakness of his style is that there's so much self-conscious artifice that the story becomes less immediate and immersive because you're constantly being taken out of it by his goofy style fluorishes, so I guess you have to enjoy them for what they are. The whole raid-on-the-kidnappers scene, with the guns that sounded like toy cap-guns going off... Wes Anderson just doesn't care about what looks "real," he wants it to look like some imagined world he has in his head -- an archaelogocal dig in Manhattan in "Tenenbaums"?! -- and that to me can be pretty entertaining, but some people might think it's just too much "Hey-look-at-my-model-train-set." I laughed many times. and I really loved the early Bowie tunes, which again are not really what you'd expect to hear in a movie, but they're in there because Anderson thought those early songs were cool. That ending scene when they're all walking along the dock fast and the different characters keep joining in the line while "Queen Bitch" is playing loud -- I just thought it was excellent. I was watching the credits roll, listening to the music, playing air guitar like a junior high schooler.