The Life Aquatic.

The first reviews of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou are coming in. In fact, they're piling up fast. Better siphon them off to their own little entry...

• Michael Koresky heads up the Reverse Shot collection of initial reactions at indieWIRE, with responses to his take by Karen Wilson and Michael Joshua Rowin. For Koresky, Aquatic "seems more like the work of a filmmaker who has begun to believe too much in his own cult status; almost as if in parodic response to the perceived threat of his increasingly hermeticized movie worlds, his latest candy-colored concoction of lost boys and broken homes moves inexorably toward an even more airless setting: a submarine."

• Armond White likes it. Writing in the New York Press, he explains why, for him, it beats recent works from fellow "American Eccentrics," Alexander Payne's Sideways and David O Russell's I ♥ Huckabees, points out that Anderson knows well to incorporate the privileged background of all "AE"'s, breaks to yelp "Billmurray! Billmurray!" and concludes: "Anderson's obsession has genuine, daffy substance."

• Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice: "[Y]ou get a taste of fin de siècle cheese tangy enough to inspire a hunger for a film that lets the antique beauty bloom. Anderson's new film doesn't, quite; it's a collage of half-measures."

• Jean Oppenheimer in Screen Daily: "[D]espite its numerous charms, The Life Aquatic can't match either the cockeyed winsomeness or the perfectly balanced blend of comedy and melancholy that made Rushmore Anderson’s most satisfying work."

Heather Havrilesky, who finds the film's got "enough of the standard Anderson charms to distract you from some of the movie's shortcomings," interviews Anderson, who confesses, "I would kill for a good review in the New York Times, just once, because I always get something pretty mixed. Or, in the case of The Royal Tenenbaums, terrible."

The Cinecultist has also interviewed Anderson - for the Gothamist: "It's definitely not something people say to my face. Or rather they say, 'He wants to be thought of as an auteur.' It's a way that I might be described if I'm not in the room."

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2004 11:45 AM