Minimizing the credits on Disney+

It took me more than a quarter of a century to finally see Rushmore a second time ...

... and all I have to tell you about is a silly phenomenon regarding its end credits on Disney+.

Actually, I will get into Rushmore a bit. But I'm starting with the credits.

As the movie ended on Sunday night, I noticed, not for the first time, that Disney+ does not let you get back into the credits once it minimizes them. Disney+ isn't the only service to minimize the credits of the movie you're watching, of course -- I think they all do it at this point -- but it's the only one I've noticed that physically does not provide the option to maximize them again.

In what seemed like a particularly galling movie, Disney+ decided that if I liked Rushmore, I might want to watch Life With Mikey. That's right, a random lesser Michael J. Fox movie from 1993. I've never seen it. Maybe they're right.

But the point is, after maybe 15 seconds of the credits of Wes Anderson's film, they popped down into the lower right corner and ceded the majority of the screen to an ad for this movie, which, however good it may be, is probably not actually a correct fit for Rushmore. But that's not the point either.

The point is, my AppleTV remote would only allow me to toggle between two choices, one of which was to see details for Life With Mikey and one of which was to actually play Life With Mikey. I can't use a button, because then the remote just takes me out of the situation altogether and back to the previous menu.

This, of course, is not the fault of the AppleTV remote. It's Disney that presents that remote with the possible options. 

This is not only minimizing the credits in a literal sense. It's minimizing their importance. It's minimizing the work of all those artists who made that movie.

In our fast-paced, "give me the next thing" society, I think the option to skip ahead should exist for anyone who wants to avail themselves of it. It's the equivalent of choosing the moment you want to walk out of the movie theater. No one's talking about prying your eyes open, Alex DeLarge-style, and forcing you to take in the names of the second unit assistant director and the craft services company. 

But when you literally have no way to get back in to watch them full screen? That's something else.

When I first noticed this happening, sometime late last year, I really wanted to see something in the credits -- a song, I think it was. So I tried to exit the movie, start back over and forward it to the end. The same thing happened, and I was equally unable to get back into it.

I'm not sure why it's so difficult to get these things right.

Only a few weeks ago I had a similar problem with the credits of Killers of the Flower Moon on AppleTV+. Had I made the right moves quickly enough, I think I would have been able to get those credits back. But in this case, Apple was quick to push me onward to a trailer for Ted Lasso -- two seasons of which I've already seen, thank you very much. So much for the idea that the streaming service is supposed to know me, what my preferences are -- and what I've already seen. 

As for Rushmore, when Anderson's Asteroid City made its way into my top ten in 2023, it reminded me that this was the highest an Anderson film had finished in my rankings since Rushmore finished #4 in 1998. You know how you have a list of movies you're embarrassed to say you've never seen? Rushmore tops my list of movies I'm embarrassed to say I've seen only once -- especially considering that high finish more than 25 years ago.

The chance to correct this had been well within my grasp for ages, and I finally decided to grasp it. Had it not been available on any streaming service, I probably wouldn't have purchased a rental for a second straight night after Dual, which I wrote about yesterday. But at least Disney+ complied in that regard.

I've considered Rushmore my default favorite Anderson movie for those entire 25 years. Others have challenged it -- I have the most fondness for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I've seen three times, none of which were in the year it was released so I didn't rank it -- but I've always considered Rushmore to be in its own tier, based on that one indelible viewing that for some reason I did not see it fit to repeat.

Now that I've finally repeated it, I still love the same things about Rushmore that I loved in 1998, though I'd say the intensity of those feelings is a little muted by having seen all the Anderson movies that have come after, and not feeling quite as surprised by the aesthetic choices as I did then. 

It was interesting to note the origins of ideas he would return to later, which I'd say were not really present in his debut feature, Bottle Rocket, which also made my top ten of its year. One of these relates specifically to Steve Zissou, as it is a quote from Jacques Cousteau written into the margins of a library book that first leads Max Fischer to find Miss Cross. Then there are the things that are not particular to Anderson but that he employs a lot, like the fact that both of the characters from the previous sentence have a loved one who has died whom they miss terribly. 

I was also surprised at how many moments I remembered from the movie, even though some of the small details may have shifted in my memory. I think the kind of scene that allowed Rushmore, and indeed Anderson's whole perspective, to resonate with me is that one where a depressed and chain-smoking Bill Murray as Herman Blume is just randomly throwing golf balls into his swimming pool as he watches his wife flirt with another man. When a kid gets too close to him, he changes the angle of flight of one of the golf balls so it's like a mini attack on this kid -- though it's not an aggressive attack, as the ball follows the same harmless parabolic path toward the kid as it did toward the swimming pool.

Another thing I remember thinking about Rushmore at the time was that although Jason Schwartzman brings a particular energy to Max and I can't imagine anyone else playing him, I did wonder whether he was really talented enough to have this size role in the movie, or whether nepotism played a part in his casting, given that he's part of the Coppola family. Today, I see no nepotism, only Max Fischer played exactly as Anderson wanted him to be played. 

If I were ranking Anderson's films again -- a project I did nearly ten years ago, timed to the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel -- would I still rank Rushmore #1? *

It's hard to say, and I'd probably need a good excuse to actually do the project again, beyond Anderson having made three more movies since then. But let's at least say that this viewing wouldn't cause Rushmore to be ejected from that spot. 

A final thought about Anderson, about the interesting love-hate relationship I have with him. I have easily liked more of Anderson's movies than I haven't liked, which is especially the case given that my revisit of The Royal Tenenbaums tipped that movie from a mild dislike and even a mild disdain to a very strong like. Yet because he revisits the same well, aesthetically, over and over again, I think of myself as wary of him as an artist, and his failures -- as I see them -- take on a much larger role in my perception of him than his successes.

For example, after loathing The French Dispatch (is that too strong a word?), I felt like I might be ready to give up on him altogether -- to the extent that any person who calls himself a film critic could ever give up on an artist of Anderson's stature. Asteroid City and the shorts he made in 2023 changed the trajectory of my feelings toward him, of course, but those feelings were strong, on the backs of only two movies that really made me feel this way, the other being The Darjeeling Limited. Although I liked The Royal Tenenbaums significantly better than either of those movies, that made three until my last Tenenbaums viewing turned me all around on that subject.

Whenever an artist constantly verges on self-parody, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the man to finally be out of ideas, or to be out of slightly different ways of exploring the same idea. But Anderson's 2023 reminded me he's still got it, and the second film he ever made did nothing to dissuade me from that notion. 

* NOTE - Only several hours after posting this did I look back at my previous Anderson rankings and note that not only was Rushmore not #1, it wasn't even #2. Bottle Rocket and Steve Zissou both finished ahead of it. I guess I will just leave the error as is. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Christmas cards with Elvis

This is the final in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

We ordered our Christmas cards late this year, but they arrived early. I think it might be part of a ploy by Snapfish to create the impression of excellent customer service, to tell you your order is expected on Friday and then deliver it on Tuesday.

Having been out all day Wednesday at work followed by Ferrari and Saltburn, though, I couldn't start stuffing them in envelopes until Thursday after work, and because of my younger son's school holiday concert, couldn't actually start until that night. When I wanted to watch a movie.

I figured, what better accompaniment to the task than the last entry of Baz Jazz Hands, Baz Luhrmann being a filmmaker whose strengths (some would say weaknesses) come across through an overall impression of what he's doing, not a minute attention to every detail on screen? Especially if you've already seen the movie once?

If I actually wrote in my Christmas cards, it probably wouldn't have worked, but I gave that up ages ago. The only writing I do is the address and the return address on the envelope, and all I was really doing at this stage was writing my return address and the recipient's name on each envelope, kind of like a machine completing a task in parts. I'd look up their addresses later on when I wasn't watching a movie.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the opening scene of Elvis actually features Christmas cards. Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) is putting away a box of Christmas cards on a high shelf when he suffers the stroke that sent him to a hospital bed from which he would never emerge. I almost did a double take, my own Christmas cards right there in my lap. 

It's not the only Christmas element in this movie. In fact, there's a whole to do that feels like it takes up 20 minutes about whether Elvis will wear his Christmas sweater and sing "Here Comes Santa Claus" on a television broadcast designed specifically for those two purposes. (Spoiler alert: He does not.)

The salient facts about Parker's death seem mostly accurate -- he died on January 20, 1997, so indeed he could have been putting away Christmas cards, though Wikipedia does not say anything about that. He also did not die until the next morning, so in theory, his deathbed narration of this story, by the light of a night in Vegas, could have also occurred. 

That isn't, however, the impression one gets from the Christmas special episode, which bothered me more than it should. But more on that in the moment.

My ranking of Elvis as my #7 film of 2022 was, in part, the thing that inspired me to do this Baz Jazz Hands series. At that time I had seen only two of Luhrmann's six films more than once, and I thought this made a good excuse to revisit the others, to note how Luhrmann's style has developed and solidified over the years. Now that I've done this, I feel I can confidently say he is the only filmmaker -- or for sure, the only filmmaker who has made multiple films -- where I've seen his entire output more than once.

The first 45 minutes of Elvis were an absolute confirmation of the affection I'd felt for it the first time. The colors, the editing, the performance of Austin Butler as the green Elvis, the absolute joy emanating from anything and everything ... it was intoxicating. As Elvis is driving his pink Cadillac, I thought to myself that I had never seen the color pink look quite like that on screen, and I was enthralled by it.

An interesting thing about this film is to watch its color palette become more muted as Elvis sinks deeper into the drug and health problems that would ultimately claim him. You aren't supposed to have as much fun with the second half, or even the final two-thirds, of this film, and that doesn't lessen it as a film -- it just presents the reality of a man's life.

One thing did lessen it, though, and I'd say it probably came about the halfway mark.

I mentioned the whole donnybrook over whether Elvis would meekly accept his commitment of playing a family-friendly Christmas special. In order to draw further thematic resonance from this, Luhrmann chooses to group it together with an event that did not occur, that could not have occurred, at the same time, making it seem as though they were contemporaneous. Two events, actually.

The first in the narrative of these three total events is the assassination of Martin Luther King. We see Elvis receive the news and feel heartbroken. 

Not straight away in the narrative, but within maybe ten more minutes of screen time, we start to get into the Christmas special and whether Elvis will behave. Then as they are preparing the Christmas special and there is excessive discussion of Santa Claus coming or not coming to town, and whether he will be reaching town via the lane that bears his name, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed, creating yet more perspective in Elvis regarding what is and what is not important. 

Here's the thing: King was shot in April of 1968. Kennedy was shot in June of 1968. There was no Christmas season between those events, or especially at the time of either event.

I said in my review of Elvis (which you can read here if you like) that the movie has a strong sense of emotional truth, if not literal truth at every juncture. I was effectively granting Luhrmann license to take liberties with the truth as long as it was furthering the effective portrait of this man.

However, I do take issue with combining events that were so transparently not related to one another, where it is easily verifiable that they weren't. I first came to this by thinking "Wow, I didn't know Bobby Kennedy was assassinated right around Christmastime." Of course, he wasn't. Luhrmann thought that Elvis' commitment to the Christmas show made an effective metaphor for his selling out of his original persona, a slow-moving compromise that had been going on for some time at this point. And that the death of a political leader he admired would demonstrate just how vacuous were the others things he was doing.

If this were the desire -- and if the movie wants to grapple with Presley's uneasy relationship to Black culture and the debts he owes it -- why not have it be King's death he's struggling with at the same time as the Christmas show? Did Luhrmann just figure people would better remember the time of year King was killed than the time of year Kennedy was killed, so it would make his mild subterfuge less noticeable?

I can't say that this really impacted my enjoyment of the film the second time, but it ate away at me for the rest of the movie, so it obviously stuck in my craw. 

Overall, though, this Elvis viewing confirmed the thing I have been steadily realizing all year, or putting into words at least: Luhrmann is a maker of myths. If his characters lack in nuance, it's because he's giving us archetypes, not finely detailed and complicated human beings. If his biopic adheres to the standard components of a biopic, just exploded outward in his unique style, then that's because he wants to make the ultimate biopic, the biopic that might go in the dictionary next to the definition, not something that surprises us by only examining a small part of the subject's life, or examining him by having five different actors play him.

In short, the things Luhrmann does are things I appreciate. The scope of the big screen is strong with this one. He understands that movies are made on a large canvas and that the subject matter should match. 

In thinking about filmmakers with a signature style, I think Luhrmann is one as much as Wes Anderson is one. You know you're watching a Luhrmann movie when you're watching it. He comes back to the same sorts of shots, the same sorts of editing techniques, the same anachronistic use of music. There's one shot in Elvis where the casino owner is writing out the terms of Elvis' contract at the International Hotel -- or more specifically, the benefits Parker will get from this commitment -- and I swear there is another shot just like that, focusing ominously on the letters as they are being written, in another Luhrmann film. At this stage I can't remember which one it was. But the moment marked this as a Luhrmann film as much as anything else.

There are differences between a filmmaker like Luhrmann and one like Anderson, though. These differences don't make one better or worse than the other, but I do think they help explain why Anderson gets so much backlash from his haters while Luhrmann gets relatively little, even though he too has plenty of haters.

For one, Luhrmann has made about half the number of films as Anderson in the same period of time. His style has had less opportunity to grate on us for its repetitious nature, especially when he goes nine years between making films, as he did between The Great Gatsby and Elvis.

But I also think the "same style, different subject matter" approach they share befits the sorts of projects Luhrmann tackles better than the sorts of projects Anderson tackles. Again, no slight on Anderson as I really like two-thirds of his movies. But on the ones I don't like, I smack my forehead about how Anderson seems to be going back to the same well, again and again. 

With Luhrmann -- especially with the scarcity of movies he gives us -- I feel like this well will never run dry.

Thus concludes the series. I will conclude King Darren before the end of the month, which will make Darren Aronofsky the second director whose every film I have seen more than once, and which will bring all three of my 2023 bi-monthly series to a close.

Ranking Wes Anderson

One final cheat on my promise to review every new movie I've seen during the span of my Movie Diet, which ends tomorrow.

As it happens, I have already heard The Grand Budapest Hotel discussed extensively on not one, not two, but three different podcasts -- all before I actually saw it this past Monday. With these people's thoughts and words still bouncing around in my head, I'm not sure it will be possible to separate my own from theirs -- or that it will even be useful to you for me to do so. You've probably gotten your critical fill of Grand Budapest as well.

But I do want to talk about The Grand Budapest Hotel in a different way. Seeing this movie means that I have now seen all eight of Wes Anderson's feature films, and his eighth must have crossed an imaginary line in my head where I now want to rank the auteur's whole filmography. It's a filmography I have not always loved. But I now realize I have more love for it than I may have thought, considering how much I liked The Grand Budapest Hotel and where it ended up ranking among his films.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

There's a precedent for this kind of thing on my blog, if you go back a couple years. When Up came out I ranked all the Pixar films to date. My viewing of A Serious Man prompted me to consider the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. And my love for 127 Hours put the eclectic career of Danny Boyle under the microscope.

Considering that I haven't done one of these since the end of 2010, and I love ranking things, I thought it was about time for another one. Plus, comparing our rankings of things tends to invite more reader participation than a review, anyway.

Wes Anderson has a far less eclectic filmography than any of the people or entities listed above, but that's mostly in terms of his consistent aesthetic. The actual subject matter of his films is an area where Anderson never repeats himself, and he's managed to make all sorts of different genres distinctly his own.

Without any further ado:

1) Bottle Rocket (1996). Is Anderson's first really his best? After a very tough deliberation, I'm saying so. My top three Anderson films may all be interchangeable, in fact, in terms of my feelings toward them, but I'm going to make it simple by including the only two Anderson movies I've seen more than once as my #1 and #2. Bottle Rocket has relatively few of the trademark tics and camera setups we would come to identify with Anderson, but his oddball sensibilities and worldview are already in place. There isn't a single Anderson movie that doesn't have a healthy dose of melancholy, and that's true even in his least overtly melancholic film, about a trio of dimwitted would-be robbers (Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson and Robert Musgrave). The sweetness of this movie and its characters' intentions is what shines through, and I think the film benefits from not being burdened by the comparative fussiness (that's a big Anderson buzzword) of the aesthetic he would eventually develop. I also get a few big belly laughs from this movie, specifically anything and everything related to a clueless safecracker played by Kumar Pallana.

2) The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004). If Bottle Rocket was not a controversial enough #1 choice, I'm definitely thumbing my nose at convention by going with Steve Zissou at #2. Zissou came out at a time when I was becoming highly skeptical of Anderson, for reasons I will get into later when the relevant film comes up on this list, so I dismissed it outright, only eventually seeing it nearly four years after it came out. Simply put, I was overwhelmed by the strength of my emotional response to this film, which may be due in large part to that sublimely effective moment on the submersible near the end of the movie. I was digging this movie's quirks and world building long before then, though -- I think this is the first (though not last) time I have felt like I was living in a self-contained Anderson world that I actually loved. And I loved living in it even though its characters experience mostly sorrow and disappointment. That's the mark of strong filmmaking. (Oh, and I adore the set they constructed of the Belafonte, probably Anderson's crowning aesthetic achievement to date.)

3) Rushmore (1998). Given how much I loved Rushmore when it came out, how it filled me with a spine-tingling sense of anticipation over the arrival of an artist who had truly found his voice, I'm surprised to find it as low as #3 on this list. The reason it is that low? I can't ignore that I have yet to go back and watch Rushmore a second time, which is really saying something for a film that's been out for 16 years. I really do think it's just a random oversight, but I can't deny that I felt a little backlash against Rushmore when some of Anderson's later efforts began disappointing me. If I'd had a second viewing recently or even years ago, I'd probably feel more confident in whatever this ranking ended up being. As it is, though, I can't ignore the fact that I've seen Bottle Rocket three times and Steve Zissou twice, leaving this wonderful film about adolescence and the rebirth of Bill Murray only third among Anderson's films. I should probably also admit that I grew to consider nepotism the only reason that Jason Schwartzmann has a career, even though I did truly like him in this movie (and have softened my dislike for him in recent years, to the point that I may actually like him now).

4) Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) - Fox is the first Anderson movie I'm sure doesn't deserve consideration for my #1 spot, but I'm equally sure that it's better than the other ones I've seen. Curiously, I saw this movie one year to the day after seeing Steve Zissou, so had a whole new appreciation of Anderson that certainly fueled my unreserved embrace of this stop-motion delight about four-legged animals. I simply loved seeing Anderson's trademark dialogue choices and speech patterns, not to mention his inimitable tone, grafted on to what is essentially a children's movie. Rarely have characters in animated movies felt so world-weary and wise, and in a way it felt like Anderson's most ambitious movie yet. I don't have a lot more to say about it except that this is the one I am most conscious of wanting to see a second time -- perhaps even more than Rushmore.

5) The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) - At last we get to Grand Budapest, which feels like it may have required more effort than any other Anderson film -- even while taking the least amount of time to hit theaters after the previous one. Anderson is always building worlds, but in The Grand Budapest Hotel, he feels for the first time like he's creating a number of different sub-worlds inside this world. That's due to the largest number of different locales he's ever put on film, each of which have that delightful Anderson touch, each of which feels lived in according to his peculiar sensibilities. There isn't anything about this movie that I didn't like -- I liked the choice to effortlessly incorporate violence and profanity, I liked every casting choice, and I especially liked the art direction of things like the titular hotel and the bakery shop that keeps factoring into the plot. You might even say I loved most of these things. I just didn't feel that certain -- something -- as I was watching that would have allowed Budapest to overtake any of the others on this list. But it also has no competition for this spot from the films beneath it. (Favorite moments: Any time someone took that cute construction paper tram up to the hotel, the whole fast-motion skiing scene, and whenever Ralph Fiennes opened his mouth.)

6) Moonrise Kingdom (2012) - The last movie on this list that I truly like. And I do truly like Moonrise Kingdom -- in fact, I like it more the more I think about it, after an initial lukewarm reception. I saw Moonrise Kingdom as the second movie in a nighttime double feature with Beasts of the Southern Wild, so it suffered both in comparison to Beasts, and as a movie I started watching too late at night. I suppose I felt pretty emotionally disconnected from the characters in this film, a problem almost overcome by some of the sets Anderson builds (that scout camp being flooded was like a miniature fetishist's dream come true). Rushmore may be the movie I should see a second time the most, and Fox may be the movie I want to see a second time the most, but this is the movie I will most likely see a second time the soonest, since I own it -- a present from my sister a couple Christmases ago. I look forward to making a second assessment of a movie I think I didn't quite get, but probably would given another chance.

7) The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The movie that started to turn me against Anderson. While many people felt their enthusiasm for Anderson ramping up after their love affair began with Rushmore, I felt just the opposite upon leaving Royal Tenenbaums. Never has Anderson's aesthetic felt more claustrophobic than it feels here, and it caused me to frequently tell people that this movie left me feeling "offbeaten to death." (I'm still very proud of that phrase.) When I think of this movie I just think of a lot of moping by Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson, really frizzy hair for Ben Stiller and an unnecessary shoehorning in of a character for Owen Wilson. I'm sure it's not as disappointing as I have made it out to be over the past 13 years, and given the disparity between my feelings about this movie and the average person's feelings, this is probably the Anderson movie that most direly needs a second assessment by me, just to get my head straight about how good (or bad) it really is.

8) The Darjeeling Limited (2007). Anderson's worst, and I don't think a second viewing would tell me any different. However, I am curious how I would feel about this movie if I had seen it after Steve Zissou, rather than about ten months before. At the time I watched Darjeeling Limited -- again too late at night, in a hotel room, which certainly could have been a factor -- The Royal Tenenbaums was still the most recent Anderson movie I had seen, so I still had its negative flavor in my mouth (even six years later). The flavor curdled even further after this viewing. I think there are probably some nice Anderson aesthetic touches here, and I love a train as a setting for a movie, but all the plotting seemed either wrongheadedly slapstick or otherwise uninvolving. Two things about this movie stick out for me as I think about it: The idiotic scene where Jason Schwartzmann (at a low point of his popularity with me) maces his own brother, and the heavy-handed final scene where the characters throw away all their baggage (literal baggage as well as emotional baggage). The movie just doesn't work.

There we go -- a complete assessment of Anderson's feature career.

There's been a lot of talk about which movies I might/should watch again, but in truth, I'm convinced that Anderson is a vital enough artist that I actually want to watch all of these again.

And, I can't wait to see what will be waiting for us in 2016.

The right kind of quirkiness

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm watching movies I've seen exactly once, which other people seemed to enjoy a lot less than I did, to see if it was me who was wrong, or them.

I am not your typical Wes Anderson fan.

For starters, my favorite movie is his first, Bottle Rocket, which many Anderson fans haven't even seen. It's sweet and simple and doesn't try to do too much.

At the time I saw it, I thought I loved Rushmore, but have downgraded that to "liked a lot" over the years -- I've yet to actually watch it a second time, which I guess tells you something. I loved Bill Murray in it, but in retropsect, probably did not love Jason Schwartzmann, who I've since decided is one of Hollywood's greatest beneficiaries of nepotism. And I think the warning signs were there that Anderson could be too quirky for his own good.

Like in The Royal Tenenbaums. I'm sure I owe this movie another viewing, because it has just gotten worse and worse in my mind over the years as I've offered various people my take on it. Which is: It left me feeling offbeaten to death. (I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with that line, but I'd never heard it before and felt kind of proud of it.) It was a thumbs up for me, but just barely.

Let's skip The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou for the moment, because it looked to me like The Royal Tenenbaums times ten. I didn't see it until after seeing ...

... The Darjeeling Limited. I probably owe this movie another viewing as well, because I started it at nearly midnight in a hotel room, and may have snoozed through as much as five to ten minutes of it, even though at the time I thought I saw the whole thing. Anyway, I hated this movie. What I disliked about it was summarized in a scene involving the aforementioned Mr. Schwartzmann, as he maces his brothers (Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson) while they're wrestling on a train. Ridiculous. Also thumbs way down to the scene at the end where they throw away all their luggage (baggage). It's as bad a metaphor as the rat running along the railing in The Departed.

I liked The Fantastic Mr. Fox about the same as most people, if not slightly more.

It was my thoughts on Tenenbaums and Darjeeling that I thought brought me out of sync with other Anderson fans ... and threatened to make me not an Anderson fan at all. They seemed to love the quirks of those movies, while I hated them. But I wanted to be an Anderson completist, so I finally circled back to The Life Aquatic, about eight months after seeing Darjeeling.

And was blown away by how much I loved it.

This was troubling. In any discussion I'd had with people about Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic was their choice for the chink in his armor. They were willing to accept the spirit of my criticisms of Tenenbaums and Darjeeling, but always applied them to a different film -- "That's how I felt about The Life Aquatic," they said.

Not me. I didn't feel that way, not a bit. Let me give you some of the reasons I didn't:

1) The music. Here's a good sign of how effective I found the music: Nearly two years after first seeing it, I remembered the exact song that plays over the DVD menu. It's part of the goofy synthesizer score, with its throwback parallel-dimension 1980s sound -- and now that I look it up, the composer, Sven Libaek, originally wrote the music for a 1974 underwater television series called Inner Space. Then there's the consistently enjoyable decision to have Seu Jorge, playing one of Zissou's crew, sing David Bowie songs in Portuguese throughout the movie, while strumming his guitar. But what really blew me away was the use of the spine-tingling Sigur Ros song "Staralfur" during the film's emotional climax. It got me.

2) The marine life, CGI and otherwise. I loved the moment, after Zissou's disastrous opening for the first part of his most recent film, when Klaus' son presents Zissou with a colorful seahorse in a bag of water. (When the bag springs a leak during a brouhaha, Zissou transfers the creature to an empty champagne flute.) It's the film's first digital effect, and it prepares you for the way modern technology will inform this story, with its antiquated gadgets and out-of-time production design. The CGI creatures, of which there are maybe a half-dozen throughout the film, never call special attention to themselves -- they function as a throwaway detail, and are all the more pleasant for that fact. Also loved the live tracker dolphins who swim alongside the boat. And speaking of the boat ...

3) The boat. The Belafonte, Zissou's boat, is a masterpiece of old-school set design. Anderson built a massive boat set that's open on one side, as though it had been sliced in half lengthwise from bow to stern, so he could film the characters from the side as they walk between rooms, sometimes climbing between levels on ladders. It's an effect we saw in an ad campaign for (I believe) a cell phone company that Anderson shot around that same time, and it really works. Not only is it excellent to see the craftsmanship that went into this, and enables some great uninterrupted takes in which the characters move between rooms that are full of ongoing activity as they do the scene, but the rooms themselves are a triumph of understated quirkiness.

4) The antiquated equipment. As mentioned briefly earlier, I dig all the old computers, rotary phones, and other ancient gadgets that fill the Belafonte.

5) The locations. I love where Anderson chose to shoot. There's the Zissou complex on a tiny island, and the Hennessey complex on a huge island. One of the reasons I love the section where they visit the Ping Islands, torn apart and left uninhabited by a hurricane, is that they serve as a great metaphor for the Zissou we know now. As a young newlywed, Zissou visited this island on his honeymoon, its five-star hotel resplendent and shimmering. The moldering grandeur of that hotel is like Zissou in his current state of disrepair.

6) Bill Murray as Steve Zissou. I was expecting a super-ironic, eyeball-rolling, detached performance from Murray. But what I got was emotional engagement in a way that creeps up on you. Sure, there are some absurd set pieces here, most notably the one where Zissou grabs a gun and single-handedly saves most of his crew from pirates, killing several of them. But his character's emotions are always honest. I felt Zissou becoming a real person as he grapples with the reality that his best days are behind him, and that he had a son he didn't meet until the boy was in his mid- to late-20s. Anderson creates a goofy tone so that all this emotional processing can be light and funny, but that doesn't make it any less true, nor make the moments of real introspection feel any less introspective.

7) The tone. As hinted at in the previous paragraph, Anderson creates a tone that I like to think of as "melancholic jauntiness." Certainly, there is a sadness that permeates this film -- Steve Zissou is close to being washed up, he's already lost a friend to the possibly mythological jaguar shark, and his current mission is a flimsy contraption ready to take on water at any minute. But never once is The Life Aquatic depressing. It tells the story of a man who was once truly great -- he wasn't just a laughingstock, as some films would have had him be. A lesser film would have just made him a self-involved boob with no redeeming qualities, but there's a basic goodness to Steve Zissou, at his core, and he eventually displays a perceptive understanding of every situation, just when you think he might be wandering dangerously close to self-involved boobdom. He's clearly sailing into the sunset, but enough of the things he's done right in his life prevent him from being a total shambles -- and this little bit of lightness and optimism, along with some truly screwball set pieces, keeps the film humming along quite nicely.

8) The cast. There are plenty of familiar players from other Anderson movies -- Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, and of course Murray himself. But they are assembled here in a way that makes good, quirky sense. I can imagine an international oceanographic film crew being made up of all types -- an Indian cameraman, a German second-in-command, a pilot bastard son from Kentucky, an aloof ex-wife, a pregnant reporter, a half-dozen green interns, a bond company stooge who in his younger years was Harold in Harold & Maude. (The sight of Bud Cort was quite welcome.) The Belafonte is the perfect location for this motley crew to come together as some kind of oddball family unit ... one that's a lot less over-the-top than you'd think.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: I'm happy not being your typical Wes Anderson fan, if it means getting to have a special place in my heart for this film.