Movies: A Dive into Divine Comedy

Review: The Life Aquatic

It's hard to think of anyone or anything less urgently in need of parody than Jacques Cousteau, the saintly French oceanographer whose underseas documentaries, from the '50s through the '80s, did so much to make the world aware of the beauty and fragility of our watery ecosystem. But the sheer audacity of this basic joke--its awesome satiric irrelevance--is the crucial thing about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. If you go with it, you'll love the film. If you don't, you'll just sit there wondering how (and why) Wes Anderson, the director and a co-writer (with Noah Baumbach), thought this thing...

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