Life Aquatic was a treat for me in the dry surrealist humor and the subtle eyecandy.
The humor took some perception of details, like the conversation about the cats on the island, not knowing what sort of cat it was (and saying the wrong breed entirely) when it was made obvious all through the rest of the film that all the cats visible were nearly identical. That's nearly literary, the sort of thing Tom Stoppard would write.
And visually, the retro look to all the technology, even 1960's film splicers and the Cousteau-special yellow letters titling on films...and the old Bell bubble-canopy helicopter and woodpaneled (!) submarine. That, and the "let me tell you about my boat" scene, that was a play on stage, there. The pan around the cutaway of the boat with all the vignettes of life on the boat going on in the different cabins, then the fade-out to silhouette, that was sheer stagecraft.
I loved it.
BTW, Fistful, the song you mean is Iggy and the Stooges' "Search and Destroy". A lot of the rest of the soundtrack was Bowie songs sung in Portuguese, which was surreal in itself.
Also, if you watch the whole thing, the entire end credits scene is a tribute to the ending of "Buckaroo Bonzai".
I need to see "Darjeeling Limited" yet, which is another Anderson film. Soundtrack is apparently composed of mostly the Stones, The Kinks, and classic Bollywood movie themes. Guy knows how to choose eclectic soundtracks. It also breaks the rule I usually see, where sucky movies have awesome soundtracks (Red Planet, Blood & Chocolate), in that both the movie and the soundtrack are things I want to keep.
