Cate Blanchett is great in The Aviator, though, even if her Katherine Hepburn is more of a riff than a real performance. She's also great in The Life Aquatic, and the sexiest she's ever been. Wow.

I'm notoriously bad at judging the long-term impact of movies: earlier this year, I predicted that Dogville might be the only movie from 2004 that I'd remember in ten years. I barely remember it after ten months. Still, I have a hunch that The Life Aquatic might be one of those movies that stays with me. A few months ago, I had a dream about going to see The Life Aquatic, and actually managed to conjure up a fairly plausible twenty-minute version of it before I woke up. The funny thing is, the actual movie isn't all that different. I can't really compare it to anything else I've ever seen, except maybe the elaborate daydreams I used to spin into movie-length fantasies when I was eight years old, where The Voyage of the Mimi collided with The Swiss Family Robinson and much thought was given to the uniforms my friends and I would wear and the guns we would carry, and most of a sheet of poster paper was devoted to a cutaway diagram of the cabins and the library and the engine room.

There probably isn't a lot of Life Aquatic fanfic out there, but there should be. I'd read it.