Feaverish

L and I saw Wes Anderson’s new film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou yesterday, and it was great. After reading a few lukewarm reviews I was ready to be disappointed, but L and I both thought the movie was funny and touching.

As in The Royal Tenenbaums, there are some directorial choices made in Life Aquatic that would be considered bad moviemaking in any other film, but in a Wes Anderson film they just have to be accepted as the realities of his universe. All the usual Anderson themes are there: the sympathetic dreamer, the fucked–up father figure, two men fighting over one woman, etc. (L pointed these out to my ignorant ass, by the way).

In case you’ve been living in the Batcave for the last year (and I want to know about it if you have), Anderson co–wrote the movie with Noah Baumbach. Noah wrote and directed one of my favorite movies ever, Kicking and Screaming, as well as my favorite Shouts & Murmurs, The Zagat History of My Last Relationship.

L and I saw Rushmore on what amounted to our first date. When I asked her out I wasn’t even thinking about the whole older–woman / younger–man theme, but there must have been some serious subliminal action going on. Also, like Olivia Williams, L is smokin’–hot. And like Jason Schwartzman, I am not. But Jason and I do both have bad hair.

Anyway, there’s a pretty good interview with Noah Baumbach at Filter’s website (via Kottke). (A lot of my links are “via Kottke,” by the way. And pretty much all my links are via someone besides me. I assume everybody’s links are from someone else, right? I mean, it’s not like there’s some eight–armed Ganesha–Hipster out there discovering all this stuff, right? [And before you give me any crap about Ganesha only having four or six arms, the Agamic scriptures recognize 32 forms of Lord Ganesha, and some of them have eight arms.(via The Hindu Encyclopedia)])

And about this website, I’ve started ironing out the bugs. The “book” image should stretch now if the post is really long, and the words shouldn’t go off the left side of the screen anymore. That “should” in the above sentence assumes you’re not using Internet Explorer. Seriously, folks, it’s time to switch to something a little less craptacular. If you’re not switching because you don’t want to lose all your precious My Little Pony bookmarks or whatever, don’t worry about it. You can import bookmarks from IE if you need to. Or you can switch to an online bookmark manager like del.icio.us.

Obviously I have a long way to go—I can’t stand that crappy default sidebar on the right, plus the links don’t look good, plus, like, there’s no margins—but I’m making progress.