Last night, Becky and I had planned to see ***In Good Company|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385267/*** using the $5.50 Loews movie vouchers I can get at work. Everything was looking great until I got to the counter and found out that I couldn’t use them. Why? Apparently, I had been duped by the Loews website. They indicated that the release date was December 31, 2004, well beyond the 10-days-old requirement for using the vouchers. However, this was the limited release date, and the movie had, in fact, been released nationwide just a few days ago. Drat.

So, we instead went to see another movie we’d been wanting to see for a while, ***The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362270/***. This fabulous, hilarious film starred Bill Murray as the revenge-driven sea explorer Steve Zissou, searching for a mythical jaguar shark that killed his friend, Esteban. From Jeff Goldblum’s performance as the eccentric millionaire sea explorer Alistair Hennessey, to Willem Dafoe’s pouty German underling Klaus Daimler, the movie was a riot. Becky and I were cracking up in almost every scene at the absurdity of the movie’s plot and characters, from the “research dolphins” which apparently can neither hear nor understand the crew’s commands, to the eight unpaid research interns from the “University of North Alaska”… simply a great film.

For those who are familiar with ***Buckaroo Banzai|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/***, there are a few significant links between the movies, one of which is the presence of Jeff Goldblum as an eccentric outsider. The other one I’ll let you discover for yourself… it’s a real treat. 🙂 I don’t know of any other direct links, but in general I couldn’t help but think about how similar (and wonderful) the two movies were. I already own B.B. on DVD, and L.A. will certainly be going on my wishlist as well.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou gets four flippers up from The Woods!