Wes Anderson And The Life Aquatic And Transperceneige

1)
A.O.Scott review of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/movies/10life.html

... In my ideal cinémathèque, "The Life Aquatic" would play on a permanent double bill with "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie." Mr. Anderson and Stephen Hillenburg, Mr. Squarepants's creator, share not only a taste for nautical nonsense, but also a willingness to carry the banner of unfettered imaginative silliness into battle against the tyranny of maturity...

2)
Transperceneige is rendered in English as Snowpiercer , which sort of ignores the full possibilities of the "Trans..." at the beginning: possibly just transpercer but also possibly a reference to a train, such as TransSiberian Express. I suppose people thought something like Snowpiercer Limited was too redolent of Gene Wilder and Silver Streak.
I referred Transperceneige as a film about "continuous transport", and thought of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, wherein once a shipload of owls were in a state of continuous transport, staying just ahead of rosy-fingered dawn across the face of the globe.

Upon reflection, there are many such tales in Science Fiction, where the interstellar vessels which journey hundreds of years between the stars are actually in a state of continuous transport; their arrival at some destination no longer sure nor guaranteed; the ship's hierarchy broken down into chaos and tribal factions.....

Or Spaceship Earth.

There was the conceit of a self-contained universe: The Orient Express, the Nostromo of Alien, Prospero's Island.
We add our own concept of ghastly infinitude: endless and pointless repetition of failure, our haunted Flying Dutchman.

--

The ATLANTROPA Project And Steve Zissou

The project was re-born at the Lake Simcoe Conference of 1968. The attendees were all followers of the German architect Herman Sörgel, who had died in 1952. The scale was diminished from the project envisaged by Sörgel down to a smaller scale version on Lake Simcoe to provide Hydro-electricity to Toronto.

From left to right:
(seated) Gil Gauvreau, P.T. Taylor, Harry Lehmann
(standing) Steve Zissou, Bob McKinzie Emil Blandings

(missing) Wolverine, the Dude.
(there was a photo of them swimming yesterday)

Early Poster for the Project

--

The Life Aquatic and Steve Zissou

May The Life Aquatic be within you!
--

pix:  http://armagansenol.tumblr.com/

Steve Zissou and the Life Interior: 3

 

Steve is just under the wheel house, to the right - or starboard. 

He is wearing the standard blue uniform and red knit toque hat of  Société Zissou.

--

pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allthegoodurlshavegone/2268378923/in/photostream/

Steve Zissou and the Life Interior: 2

Steve:

Anti-Steve:

'nuff said.

--

May the Steve Zissou be with You!

And the Steve is no other than Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic fame.
There is an unusual interleaving of life with all things Steve:
(1) Stephen Wolfram (a variant spelling); scientist, mathematician, and author of A New Kind of Science,
(2) Stevia, the universal sweetener.

Furthermore, there is the film itself, and it is a glorious mish-mosh of themes that are somehow how rolled together into one big pistachio baklava of Steve Zissou:
(1) his partner was killed by a mythic, possibly non-existent, shark - Moby Dick theme,
(2) his wife may be becoming close with her ex - must have been done with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne at some time,
(3) a young man comes on the scene claiming Steve is his father - Family Guy's My Black Son episode,
(4) Steve's recent films have not been well received and he is in an artisitic crisis - Fellini's 8 1/2 ,
and so on.

To be absolutely honest, this film is totally constellated around Bill Murray. If someone else had played Steve Zissou, this film would have gone down in flames. Consider the sitch (i.e., situation) where Nicholas Cage had played Zissou - ghastly. Or Brad Pitt - uni-dimensional. Denzel? No, but seriously... Bill Murray informs this film in the same way that the eternal ideals of Plato were to inform and cause the representations of the physical world. It is Murray. There is no other protean actor who acts on the quantum level where everything is possible.

In this many-faced, many-possible-outcome world, symbolized by the multi-national make-up of the crew, Steve Zissou is Everyman faced with an infinite universe whose complexity is tangible and mind-boggling.

The Steve be with you.


ps. For future historians, chronologically Steve Zissou and the Life Aquatic must predate Broken Flowers, because in Life, his friend Esteban has been shark-eaten, while in Flowers, the film starts with him talking to Esteban in a diner. Just sayin'.

Last Days and The Seventh Seal and Steve Zissou

I saw Gus van Zant's Last Days - purportedly about  Kurt Cobain's end of life - and saw again Bergman's The Seventh Seal recently. There is something fine and grand about seeing films on similar topics in such proximity; one remembers each and each gives understanding to the other.

I think I found them much interesting in conjunction than alone. I certainly had a deeper appreciation of Bergman's film this time around, not in contrast to van Zant's film, but in community with it. They pointed my understanding somewhere a bit further along the rough road of comprehension of symbols... which is not a simple thing at all, symbols being of many natures, not just one simple type we like to pretend they are.

Then I watched Steve Zissou: The Life Aquatic again. I cannot really tell you why this is a significant event in my life. All of Bill Murray's films seem to be fine sandpapers that smooth out some existential rough edges... of which I have many.
I have spoken of Broken Flowers of 2005 frequently, a film whose first 15 to 20 minutes I missed and found the experience without the introduction and setting the scene to be a much more engaging experience than I usually have with films. I sort of became unusually involved as I had to figure out what was the story line, and as it became clear, it was as if I were walking through the film next to Bill Murray.

Steve Zissou And The Life Interior

I tried to use my enclosure link to the website The Cunning Realist and made a mess of things. It has nothing to do with Steve Zissou ( and the life aquatic...), but that's the way I remember stuff: Bill Murray films as mnemonic devices.

(I watched Steve Zissou: The Life Aquatic again. I cannot really tell you why this is a significant event in my life. All of Bill Murray's films seem to be fine sandpapers that smooth out some existential rough edges... of which I have many.
I have spoken of Broken Flowers of 2005 frequently, a film whose first 15 to 20 minutes I missed and found the experience without the introduction and setting the scene to be a much more engaging experience than I usually have with films. I sort of became unusually involved as I had to figure out what was the story line, and as it became clear, it was as if I were walking through the film next to Bill Murray.)

So I hope all is back to normal, and here is the post: ( ...and may Steve be with you!)


http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-lull.html

Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The Great Lull

While Rod Dreher emphasized the "boredom" angle in his kind link to this post, I liked this observation by Haffner (my bolds):

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills -- accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.

What is the state of Americans' interior lives right now? The past fifteen years have featured the following in rapid succession: a stock market bubble and crash, a bitterly contested presidential election, 9/11, anthrax attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, war in Iraq, a housing bubble and national binge followed by economic collapse, and a historic presidential election. For a decade and a half there's been a series of national obsessions, an unprecedented, formative, near-constant stream of "raw material" from the "public sphere."

With the frenzy over the financial market collapse now fading, those deliveries, as Haffner put it, have suddenly ceased. Throw in a materialist culture and a consumer who can't afford toys anymore, and you've got a lot of people without an interior life to fall back on. Giddy chatter about revolution and fond memories of war and torture beat sitting quietly in a room wondering who you are.

To Bill

 Don Imus

Listening and watching Imus in the Morning. I began watching because it reminded me of my brother-in-law, Bill. He passed away in the fall of 2004 and September became the cruelest month.

He had listened to Imus forever. When my wife and sister-in-law and myself viewed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, we loved it. Our friends seemed to merely tolerate it. They thought the characters were over the top and not at all life-like; they had o.d.ed on The Royal Tenenbaums and were not receptive.

 Well, they had never spent any time with an individual like Bill, who forced Life to spread out in order to encompass his great zest for life. They believed people like Steve Zissou to be outrageous figments of the imagination. We had the good fortune to have known such a person. If Nikos Kazantzakis had known Bill, he would have written Zorba about him. God bless you, Billy.