This is one you chose. You're a huge Wes Anderson fan. We've never talked about Wes Anderson on this particular podcast before. Why this movie?

Well, I don't think it's strictly true. We haven't talked about Wes Anderson before because I think we did talk about him a little bit when the French dispatch came out. And there was a bit of a constructive, I think, disagreement between the two of us about it, which I'm not sure if that

will run through this discussion as well. But I have wanted to do a full episode on Wes Anderson at

some point because I think that, you know, in his own way, he really does fit into the broader

project of Michael and us, which is a kind of revisiting of, you know, things that may have informative,

things that, you know, we may have once loved when we were getting interested in our,

you know, respective areas of interest or just when we were growing up and to kind of see how

they hold up. And I have had a trajectory on Wes Anderson that I think, you know, I suspect a lot of people share,

which is that, you know, when you first discover Wes Anderson movies and you're in your late

teens or your early 20s, you kind of think this is the be all end all of cinema, right?

Because you don't have a lot of, you don't have a lot of other reference points.

You haven't seen, at least I hadn't seen, nearly as many films as I'd seen now. So, you know, in many cases, you haven't really seen

the, the source material that he is kind of riffing on. You're not, you're not familiar with the

kind of constituent parts of what he's weaving together in his movies. And so you're just, you know,

blown away by their charm and by a kind of torrent of references,

even if you don't get the references. And then at a certain point, you know, five or six years

later, you kind of decide that you're too old for this. You've grown out of it. Wes Anderson is an

amusing trifle. And, well, if I can interject, I think our age is crucial here because I remember seeing Rushmore on video and Royal Tenen bombs also on video very close to when they came out.

And then when the life aquatic came out, which was the first one I saw in a theater, I was of course very excited for it.

And I think when I saw it in a theater, I had that kind of reaction that you often do, where it's something you really want to like, but you don't really like a lot, where you're saying like, oh, this is good, right?

This is good, right?

But that was a movie that definitely felt like him imitating himself, or it was verging into self-parody. And then by the time Darjeeling

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