Under the Sea and Over the Top.

In the trailer bin, Bill Murray dives into Cousteau for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (I’m looking forward to the Henry Selick stop-motion stuff, which unfortunately isn’t in this preview), Jude Law gets increasingly overexposed in David Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (Can’t say I think much of this trailer, for some reason, nor of the “existential comedy” billing) and Chris Cooper channels Dubya for John Sayles’s political caper Silver City (Looks solid, but Richard Dreyfuss strikes warning bells…he can get real hammy when doing satire.)

Catching Up.

Speaking of cinema, making my top 20 films list the other day has encouraged me to get back in the habit of renting (the lousy weather the past four days has helped.) Over the past few days, I’ve perused Bill Paxton’s Frailty (Interesting, but I think The Rapture does this better), Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (I quite liked it, although the Spanish Civil War allegory gets a bit heavy), Wes Andersons’ The Royal Tenenbaums (I liked this as well. It’s a bit too self-consciously quirky, perhaps, but Gene Hackman is great, and there are sight gags aplenty. Far better than anything by the other Anderson.) and David Fincher’s Panic Room (Disappointing and strangely dull. The floating camera shots, which worked so well when used sparingly in Fight Club, seem unnecessary and distracting here. And Jared Leto seems out of his depth.) K-19: The Widowmaker will be this evening’s presentation, and if it ever comes back in I’d like to see Donnie Darko sometime this weekend as well.