fine whine

It has come to my attention that the phrase "Suffice it to say," has become the new "Actually..."*.

Well, I actually just made that up. But I am seeing that phrase all over the place, and I don't recall encountering it so much in the recent past.

One movie in which I do not recall hearing the phrase is the intelligently written and enjoyable Life aquatic with Steve Zissou. I just watched it and rather liked it, I'd say.

I'd been looking forward to seeing it, despite not knowing much about it (and having missed it in the theaters altogether, I believe). My ignorance was somewhat self-imposed, as I wanted to have as fresh an experience of watching this as possible. I skipped over all but the most vague of reviews and ignored specifics from the few people who told me they'd seen it. The plot somehow still was revealed to me: There's this oceanographer, and this shark who eats his partner. It's a revenge story... but that's a rather broad outline, into which Wes Anderson added his laid-back story, set it in an imagined world where oceanographers are superstars, and populated it with his standard players (and a few notable additions). The production design merits a special mention, at least for the (half) ship with its obviously fake set construction and 'tricky camera moves'. The fact that these people inhabit such a fake environment somehow makes it all the more real, in a way I cannot explain. It's not the Max Fischer Players Do Cousteau, but I could see that used as a catchy pull quote or pitch line.

The reviews I read (about) were rather mixed. Some writers felt that Anderson had lost his edge, that intimate quirkiness that emanates through Bottle rocket through the Royal Tenenbaums, and that by embracing action sequences, albeit in an artificially static fashion, he was selling out or cashing in or falling prey to some other cliché that so easily pours forth from the reviewer's scornful pen.

Others thought it was too deep for a mainstream film (two water puns!), Anderson notwithstanding, and the artificiality and extreme characterization would be too imaginative and off-kilter for audiences to handle, since they'd undoubtedly be seeking shallower fare (three!).

This being a revenge picture, more or less, one can but wonder how one of Hollywood's staple action heroes might approach it. Charles Bronson, naturally, would be my first choice.

But this isn't an action movie. It's a character piece that just happens to have explosions and gunfights and other bits of excitement. Zissou isn't a man of action, he's just some guy who is still playing at his childhood ambitions after many a decade, but slowly realizing maybe he's just going through the motions.

It's ambitious and whimsical, neither at the expense of the other. The little touches (snappy dialogue, imaginative stop-motion sea-life) don't distract from the bigger picture. It's all worth seeing, and I look forward to watching it again.

* However I doubt that I will fall prey to this as I did to "Actually", since "Suffice it to say" is at the same time cumbersome and stuffy. It's the sort of think I think people throw in to sound more sophisticated, or to cover for a lack of proper transitions or background information. This is not to say that I don't succumb to those sorts of things; I'm just not going to use that phrase. Er, anymore.**** Of course I always omitted the "it" anyway. Silly me.