watch "The Life Aquatic" on Christmas Day with someone

Xmas is always better with a great movie, such as The Life Aquatic. I did it this year. Twas fantastic.

Great movie!

We’re all fuzzy because we were so excited about the movie. Wes Anderson delivers again with The Life Aquatic… like The Royal Tennenbaums it’s a movie that I think I could watch 1,000 times and not get sick of. This is due, in part, to the fact that the plot is a second-thought, that his movie is as much about tiny little moments and interesting character portraits as it is about the themes you might extract. Plots are for suckers. Also, the soundtrack is simply brilliant.

Alyssa and Angela took me up on the un-Christmas offer and we started off Christmas morning by finding parking spots in the rainy International District (of Seattle), and running to the House of Hong. It was packed as always with like-minded people (ie. people who want to eat even though it’s a holiday), and the dim sum was delicious. My favorite was the Chinese broccoli, but the slimy white shrimp things were excellent as well.

When we got to the theater we found that the tickets to TLA had just sold out. Boo! The next show wasn’t until 3:40 (1.5 hours later) and no other theaters in the city were playing it any sooner than that. I cursed myself (as they do in the commercial) for not using Fandango. After scoping out the layout of the theater (very inconspicuously, of course), we found that Limony Snicket was playing on the same floor and was starting within 10 minutes of our show. We bought tickets to that, loitered listlessly around the coffee stand until they started letting people in to TLA, and then went handed the ticket Nazis our tickets and faked left while going right into the theater with the other Life Aquatic movie-goers. My heart was racing like it hadn’t since I snuck into Colors as a kid and got kicked out because it was rated R. If this had been Pacific Place it wouldn’t have been a problem… Meridian’s layout made me feel like George Clooney in Ocean’s Twelve. I suggested taking bad seats to help balance our bad karma, but we decided to tempt fate and take the best seats instead. After two hours of completely unrelated commercials and previews, the movie began and my un-Christmas Day was made complete.

Good times.

Well, I don’t see The Life Aquatic every year, but I do go to a movie. It’s one long standing tradition my family will never miss out on.

As long as I’ve been away from home and anti-holiday, on Christmas Day I’ve enjoyed going to dimsum for breakfast (the only places reliably open) and watching a silly movie that usually comes out on that day. The last few years it was Royal Tennenbaums, something I forgot, and then one of the Hobbit movies… Royal Tennenbaums being one of my favorite movies of all time. Well, this Christmas Day Wes Anderson’s new movie is coming out and I just have to see it. Unfortunately, the people I usually see it with have moved far away and I need someone new to see it with. Presumably also far from family and non-naustalgic about the holidays. Should be okay with drinking early. Must be a Wes Anderson fan. And needs to be within traveling distance of the Egyptian Theater in Seattle. Anyone?