A Wes Anderson film is always a thing of inspired, calculated madness, so much like his other films that you'd think he made
them all in the same month. His previous movies, "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," established his template, and now "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" fills in the blanks again. I say this as a Wes Anderson fan, but one who is becoming slightly less enamored of Anderson's cinematic tricks as time goes on. "The Life Aquatic" is a delight, but it doesn't feel as fresh and surprising as, say, "Rushmore" did. Still, I'll take a filmmaker who keeps using the same interesting devices over one who doesn't even know any. The title character, played with typically understated aplomb by Bill Murray, is an oceanographer on the order of Jacques Cousteau, once a hailed documentarian but now in his waning years. His latest film, "The Life Aquatic Part 1," is greeted tepidly at a film festival, perhaps because audiences have grown out of ocean documentaries. Steve Zissou's work is pure '60s-style cheese, resembling the short films we used to watch in elementary school.
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