Boys & Men

Steenblogen's got another top-notch rant up this week, one well worth checking out if you haven't already. "WARNING:" is a great rant: vitriolic, insightful and justified with a quotable last line. Perfect...

* * *

... and allows me to segue neatly into point #2 for the day: we saw The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou a while back. Less character- and more plot-driven than his previous films, Wes Anderson's latest has all the standard charms I've come to expect from him: quirky details, odd juxtapositions, bucketloads of serendipity, an oddly sincere romanticism and a fixation on men and male relationships--especially between fathers and sons.

After Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, it's clear that Anderson has a need to explore these particular dynamics. Whether it's the brothers in Bottle Rocket or the mentor-student/rivals in Rushmore, male-male relationships form the core of his movies. While he's good at what he does, I'm getting a little tired of the subject matter.

Anderson has a great eye for detail and an ability to tease out the threads of the fantastical in everyday life, but the fulcrum of his movies is always this collection of vaguely pathetic men quixotically careening through their "adult" lives. The women around them are usually just ancillary MacGuffins, cardboard cutouts watching their husbands/lovers/sons be... well, quirky and charmingly incompetent.

I dunno, am I being cynical?