#sudden enlightment

[linusbenjamin]

andrew was the one who’s confused here actually

[carlsensei]

A slideshow from Slate charting the rise of Anderson imitators.

I like The Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited because they don’t entirely work. Life Aquatic is about how fathers and sons have trouble communicating with each other and dealing with failures. The movie itself has trouble communicating and sort of fails. In that sense, it’s a big success.

In Darjeeling, India is used as a kind of Orientalist backdrop but with self-conscious irony. At the end of the movie, the boys leave their baggage behind (symbolically becoming enlightened), and you wonder, “What? Why didn’t they just do that at the beginning?” Which is, of course, the question for our own lives as well.