The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Where would cult films be without Bill Murray?
Wes Anderson isn't the easiest cult comedy film-maker to love - his earlier The Royal Tennenbaums had a mixed press, with many people finding it hard to sift some laughs out of the deliberate eccentricity.
His targets in The Life Aquatic are easier to compute, at least if you can remember all those hokey under water documentaries the lean and leathery Jacques Cousteau produced and narrated viz a vvveri stronge akcent.
Bill Murray plays a similar seagoing oceanographic eccentric, the forlorn and failing Steve Zissou, filming his search for the elusive Jaguar shark, whch killed his partner on their previous cinematographic expedition. Anderson throws in the usual mix of oddities - with Owen Wilson playing the son, Cate Blanchett tagging along as a journalist, and Anjelica Huston doing a cameo as Zissou's ex. Willem Dafoe joins the crew, while B grade regulars like Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Noah Taylor and Bud Cort also bob up as the expedition runs into rivals and a series of disasters.
But it's Murray that provides a calm, laidback core while all around him is chaos - less obvious than in Wild Things (check out his value by trying to watch Wild Things 2 and 3) and more amusing than in Lost in Translation, where he's just a foil for the spoilt princess fantasies of Sophia Coppola.
It's a reflection on the way the show was a gentle bomb that it grossed A$1.28 million at the Australian box office - worthy of an Australian comedy.
It certainly won't be to everybody's taste, but if you like Wes Anderson's weird, almost naif kind of film-making (a bit like Napoleon Dynamite for adults in terms of stylised and mannered devices) then you can hunt it out in the rental bins for only a few bucks.
I picked up a copy for $7-95 at the local rental store this week, after having seen the show courtesy of a Chinese pirate copy a friend sampled in the shops of Beijing. Something went wrong with that copy in terms of colour, sharpness and picture stability (the interweb must have been acting funny the day the pirates downloaded it for burning), so when I saw it marked down to the price of a couple of Saturday papers, I couldn't resist. Still weird, still only half way working, but at least Bill had shifted from lobster red to salmon pink.
The comedy remained obscure, but it was watchable because of Bill Murray, who can take the praise and the blame for making Anderson worth a second look. Whether there's that many people willing to fork over a few bucks for a two and a half star effort is a bigger question, so it's likely to be around in the bargain bins for the next month or two.
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