The Life Neurotic
Whoo hoo. After a bit of a break from this sort of thing, I played at North Light open mic again last night. I ran through the Magnetic Fields’ “Come Back From San Fransisco” and Track Star’s “Feet First”, with reasonable levels of success on both. Go me. I was thinking of doing Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (prominently featured on the soundtrack for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but that song really doesn’t work on guitar alone. It really needs the stomping grandeur of the huge piano chords and sweeping string section to really make it work. Well, it needs something beyond a sparse acoustic guitar/vocal arrangement at least. Ah well….
Speaking of The Life Aquatic…what an odd movie. I enjoyed it. Immensely. It was not Wes Anderson’s finest hour though. In many ways, it was a mess, a cacophonous sprawling thing that overreached and spread thin, revisiting areas that have been played to perfection in his previous films. In other ways, it was spot-on perfect in small ways, small moments. Massively entertaining and also somewhat frustrating.
I’ve read a little bit of the critical response to the film (which has been somewhat lukewarm), and I’m surprised nobody mentions how…meta it gets in places. It’s essentially a film about a filmmaker, transposed into an exaggerated oceanographic setting. From the opening film festival scene onward, Murray’s character seems to work as a stand-in for Anderson in some ways. Was this intentional, light-hearted self-deprecation, or some unintended, subconciously revealed side-effect?
The scene the really drives this point home to me is the scene that takes place in the cutaway-view set of the Team Zissou vessel, the Belafonte. This set is introduced early in the movie, for a brief fourth-wall breaking scene describing the contents of the ship, but the set is used again briefly later on in the film, for a scene following several of the characters through the ship during a conversation. The dollhouse-nature of the set is exaggerated and pointed out repeatedly, to great comic effect, and in high contrast to the rest of the ship-bound scenes, which are filmed on and inside the actual vessel. The culmination of the scene is a pulled-back shot, with several cutaway-rooms in the frame, and characters looking over and around the cutaway walls as Bill Murray’s character proclaims “But this is a documentary! This is really happening!” The dissonance of Murray’s claims to veracity against the obviously fantastic set piece was one of my favorite moments of the film. And, coming from a filmmaker who has been criticized before for his obliquely absurd and stage-like production design, this scene can easily be read as a jab at his critics laments of lacking realism.
Anyhow. That was longer than I thought it would be. But at least it pushes my drunken motivational speech down the page a bit….
Still working on my EP…the mixing process is going to take a bit longer than I’d thought, although I’m definitely making some progress there. Joey just picked up some new speakers that I’m gonna do a little mixing on. Mixing on headphones isn’t exactly ideal but it’s been the best I could do until recently. And it’d be nice to have as accurate and widely listenable mix as possible before I send it off for mastering. I’m somewhat stalled on the artwork, as I decide which of 3 directions to take for the cover…
More later. Blah de blah…
