Capital Celluloid - Day 201: Friday July 22

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004): Nomad Pop-Up Cinema, Brockwell Lido, 8pm

Going to the cinema does not have to entail driving to the out-of-town multiplex or even to any sort of picture house at all these days. There are plenty of pubs and clubs putting on films while the pop-up cinema phenomenon is becoming far more prevalent in the movie listings.

The Nomad Cinema, run by the people at the excellent Lexi Cinema in Kensal Green, is the most adventurous of the pop-up brigade and the screening of Wes Anderson's hilarious send-up of the underwater explore Jacques Cousteau at a lido is an inspired idea. This film may puzzle at first but stick with it - it's a grower and, in the end, both amusing and in parts moving. The soundtrack is first rate.

Time Out review:

'Despite its typically painstaking attentions to elaborate set dressings and assignations of quirk, The Life Aquatic meanders and stalls in its journeys with ocean explorer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), a down-at-heel Cousteau-manqué pursuing a filmed revenge mission against the jaguar shark who devoured his best friend.

Suffused with lush yet faded primary colours like a 30-year-old Kodak snap and spiced with Henry Selick’s stop-motion animations and a starry (if often idle) cast of supporting players, ‘The Life Aquatic’ is a beautifully appointed but airless dollhouse-by-the-sea, populated by wistful figurines in their matching little red caps and Team Zissou Adidas, and scored to Seu Jorge’s deckside acoustic renditions of Bowie songs in Portuguese. The movie pokes along in a manner at once listless and affable, like a series of semi-improvised outtakes that didn’t quite gel. And yet the director magically conjures emotional dividends in the film’s invigorating last moments, which wordlessly celebrate an underrated and truly Andersonian virtue: solidarity.' Jessica Winter


Here is the trailer.

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