By Tim Sanders

Have you ever walked into a video store, looked around, and said to yourself, "Hey, they don’t have any tile grout or three-quarter-inch plywood here!"? Well, I am a serious professional journalist whose mind is often preoccupied with deep, philosophical questions like, "If a horse can be trained to count to ten, can a team of ten accountants be trained to pull a beer wagon?" Those kinds of things tend to make guys like me forget where we are at times; but if you aren’t a professional journalist, you wouldn’t know that.

I’ll bet, though, that more than once you’ve walked into a video store, looked around, and said to yourself, "I certainly wish some normal guy just like me would review these videos, so that I don’t pick up another stinkeroo like that thing I got last weekend!"

Well, I’m "normal," more or less–at least I’m not a professional movie critic. So here is a review of an exceptionally bad movie you should avoid renting unless you suffer from insomnia and can’t afford Ambien. The movie is "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," and I will review what little of it I forced myself to watch, and then make some uninformed generalizations.

When my wife and I spotted "The Life Aquatic" and saw that it starred Bill Murray, we agreed that it would probably be a funny movie. Bill Murray is funny, and the jacket even quoted a critic who assured us that it certainly was. We rented the DVD and took it home, eager to relax, pop some corn, and watch good old Bill do what he does best–make us laugh.

Well, after I went through my normal ritual of pushing several wrong buttons on the remote, and after I located the list our son had written for me–the list of things I needed to do to activate our DVD player–we settled down for a little hilarity.
After about thirty minutes of munching our popcorn, waiting for something really funny–or at least mildly interesting–to happen, Marilyn and I both looked at each other. We’d reached that critical point where we had to ask ourselves whether there was the slightest possibility the movie was going to get any better, or whether it would just be best to cut our losses.

"You wanna watch this anymore?" I asked.

She didn’t.

Here are some things I learned from my " Life Aquatic" experience:

If the critics loved the movie, that is always a bad sign. They also loved "Howard’s End" and "Sideways," two movies which could make even your average latte-sipping, wine-tasting metrosexual–if he has a molecule of testosterone coursing through his veins–want to slit his wrists.

It is also no longer a given that you can decide which movie you’ll like by the cast. Especially if you like comic actors. Comic actors all seem to go through a very annoying phase where they believe that they are sensitive, creative artists. Until they get over that nonsense, they’re stuck making really lousy movies.

I like Bill Murray, and enjoyed "Ghostbusters," "Groundhog Day," and "What About Bob?". Of course he also made a movie a couple of years ago called "Lost in Translation," which, since the critics loved it and the fat guy gave it one chubby thumb up, and since Bill was nominated for something or other for it, turned out to be a real dog of a movie; but I figured that was just a fluke. As it turns out, after watching several agonizing minutes of "The Life Aquatic," it wasn’t just a fluke. It apparently signaled that Bill was going through his annoying, sensitive, creative artist period. I sincerely hope he’ll get over it.

"The Life Aquatic" contained several lines of dialogue in Italian, accompanied by English subtitles. Subtitles: Is this what a major studio with millions of dollars to spend on a movie thinks Americans want? I hate to break the news to these folks, but there’s a reason why silent movies were replaced by talkies. People got tired of reading movie dialogue. It seems a little silly for some movie director somewhere to decide that if we don’t have Italians speaking actual Italian, then we–the moronic movie audience–might catch on that this is A MOVIE! I’ve seen some really good movies almost ruined by subtitles. Indians do not have to speak Lakota Souix in Westerns, Nazis do not have to speak actual German in war movies, and Jesus does not have to speak Aramaic in Biblical epics. If we can buy the premise that there is a symphonic orchestra hiding behind the bushes on the set, and that there are actors who aren’t in the least bit intimidated by dozens of cameramen and makeup people watching them making love, then by gum we can buy the conceit that Italians, Indians, Germans, and Israelites can all speak English. If the director of "The Life Aquatic" had worked for Warner Brothers in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Porky Pig would have simply grunted and squealed, with English subtitles.

"The Life Aquatic" comes to DVD in widescreen format. C’mon, widescreen doesn’t make your TV screen any wider, it only makes it short and squatty. They should call it squatscreen.

Also, you should be advised that much of what you read about any particular movie, and most of the trailers you see on TV, will be awfully misleading. "The Life Aquatic" was advertised as a movie about an oceanographer who sets out to kill a huge "jaguar shark" that ate all the important portions of his partner, and that this oceanographer is accompanied by, among others, "a beautiful female reporter." It certainly leads you to believe there will be a lot of action, a lot of water, plenty of blood and gore, and, more importantly, several gratuitous shots of this "beautiful female reporter" in a very revealing wet swimsuit, which is what beautiful female reporters on oceanographic expeditions are supposed to wear.

The ads failed to tell us that during the first thirty minutes the audience would be forced to watch Bill Murray and his crew speak in a variety of foreign languages, wear not very humorous little red knitted caps, and do absolutely nothing anywhere near the water. If you were envisioning "Jaws" here, forget it. Oh yeah, and the beautiful female reporter who goes along on this very dry aquatic epic is a) not beautiful, b) pregnant, and c) therefore not likely to be seen in any provocative swimsuit shots, which is what your normal guy wants, regardless of what he may tell his wife.

Now granted, there remains at least an hour’s worth of "The Life Aquatic" that I didn’t see, but I don’t have to eat a whole plateful of boiled goat eyeballs to decide that there’s a strong probability that I won’t acquire a taste for the stuff as the meal goes on. Maybe the widescreen format was discarded halfway through the movie, maybe all of a sudden it got hysterically funny, maybe the action picked up and there was a riveting life-and-death struggle with an actual "jaguar shark" the size of the Goodyear Blimp. And just maybe some other sexy, beautiful reporter who wasn’t pregnant wandered onto Bill’s boat wearing a skimpy little thong bikini, but I doubt it.

If you want to watch something funny, save your money and rent an old Laurel and Hardy video. The critics may not have liked ‘em as much as they liked Charlie Chaplin, but that’s a plus as far as I’m concerned. They were a hoot; in full screen, without subtitles.