It's also boring, pointless, emotionally hollow, and so far up its own ass that we might as well be watching Wes Anderson's colonoscopy. Why should such an incessantly winking piece of shit be allowed to sully up the ol' Criterion Collection? It was bad enough when they adopted Chasing Amy. It's not enough anymore, if ever it was, to simply show us some cool-looking fake retro Adidas, or to, for no meaningful reason, load a soundtrack full of cool old Bowie tunes … sung in Potruguese! Playing hipster show-and-tell does not necessarily result in a good movie … a cool movie, assuredly, but to be frank, I'd rather be watching some shit like The Rock than be subject to Wes Anderson's progressively incorrect view of the world and/or the human condition. The disappointing pretentiousness of The Royal Tenenbaums pointed directly to the crashing failure of The Life Aquatic, in terms of degenerative cinematic enjoyment … Anderson's disappearance into the vacuum of his own carefully-weighed preciousness is so predictable you could probably write an effective SAT question around the idea ("Choose the title that would occur next in the series: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums …). I still want to root for the guy, but it will take one hell of an emotionally honest comeback to get me back on board. I simply don't care to wallow in wimpy whiteboy obsessiveness anymore, though at a particular juncture in my 20s, this kind of thing made sense. I'm increasingly afraid to revisit Rushmore, for fear it will reveal itself to be, viewed from a less impressionable "adult" perspective, as smug and unnecessary as Anderson's subsequent films. Watching The Life Aquatic is like being harangued by a cool friend with a great collection of obscure DVDs … fun for about 15 minutes, but increasingly insufferable. It's entirely possible that in 15 years I will love this movie, but the admiration will be no different from my current realization that I ought to just give up on having contempt for shit like the Presidents of the United State's of America. I'll get older, and this film will somehow seem nostalgic. Even so, there's still not much evidence that it's any good. It took Woody Allen at least 20 films to reach this level of self-parody; so what, exactly, is Wes Anderson's excuse?
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