Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: Counter-review.

[quote name="Senor Barborito"]I'll see if I get dragged back to it this weekend. Here is the main difference, I think, between the Life Aquatic you saw and the one I saw: you saw a funny, visually inspired, and surreal movie. I saw a moral wasteland revisiting the hipster failure to detach from one's parents and become an actual adult (instead of just older.) The deal with Shakes the Clown is, even though it opens with a kid pissing on Bobcat's head, it's a surprisingly moral movie, and there is nothing surreal about the motivations of the characters. You know that dry dry dry super dryly sarcastic guy that Life Aquatic is supposed to be that you're feeling, yo? I hate that guy's nihilism and cheap veneer of worldliness. I hate the way he does shit without any reason, because he thinks doing purposeless, incongruous shit is funny, instead of sad and hollow. Surrealism can reflect a warped world, or speak more clearly about difficult subjects using what are at first nonsensical props, but some surrealism - like the surrealism of Life Aquatic - seems to think that, noh-like, meaning will emerge from the nonsensical props themselves. For example: Shakes the Clown is a movie about stand-up comics using clowns as metaphor; Life Aquatic's oceanographers aren't a metaphor for anything. They're just oceanographers, pursuing nonsensical oceanographer business, reflecting no absurdity, symbolic of nothing whatsoever. That particular trick is getting to be kind of old. Like Huggy Bear's educated thugs in Starsky and Hutch, or Alice Cooper holding forth on American history and government in Wayne's World, having characters with uncharacteristic specialities that lend no depth or even breadth is a known device and yes, it even can be funny. By Huggy Thug time it was already played out, though for Alice Cooper I think it was the last time on camera that a celebrity was praised for knowing about anything. But Life Aquatic seems to be a whole movie based on that joke: what if two dudes from Rushmore devoted 20 years of their life to the study of oceanography and marine biology? Thumbs down. [/quote]