Lately, I've been buying used, coverless DVDs for $3 each. They're Blockbuster's extras, discards, and rejects. I watch them, and intend to give them away or lend them out (depending on quality), allowing others to watch them for free. I figure this gets the per-viewing cost down to something near about $1/$1.50 each.

The Royal Tenenbaums was once such DVD.

I'm only writing about this because I watched it this morning, and took a nap, and still dreamed about it. Yet it's not that good (nor bad) a DVD. But I guess that's what makes it interesting.

The IMDB user reviews have a very large standard deviation: The reviewers were all nines and tens, except for all the ones and twos (about half).

(Oh, and, as usual, this contains spoilers. But since I'm not recommending it, I don't view myself as "spoiling" it either.)

On one hand, Tenenbaums has quite the all-star cast, as you can see for yourself.

On the other hand, who cares?

The format is one I've typically given to like: Simple prose allegedly read directly from a story. Like Princess Bride minus Fred Savage and with no asides from Peter Falk. On the other hand, it drags on a bit, and it is less believable, even, than Princess Bride. I like surrealism. But it has to be believable, if only in it's own context.

The characters are all stuck in the 70s, and even wear the same 70s clothing throughout the movie. But that's no excuse for mistakes like a closet full of games which has two copies of several games. (There were only three kids.) And the least believable hospital I've ever seen.

The kids are all supposed to be "geniuses". Yawn. So what? Geniuses aren't nearly as rare or interesting as the movie implies. Nor do you have to be a "genius" to be good at tennis, as implied. (Probably a liability, even.)

And why are the kids supposed to be so interesting? The girl is a playwright -- and an admittedly bad one at that. One son builds a business on spotted mice? (What's the per-unit profit there?) And why can't the tennis star's yacht, the Cote D'Ivory, which has allegedly been to the poles, take him also to New York?

Okay, so it's fantasy.

And there are some cute things to like: The father, Royal (for which the film is named) admires an epitaph on a tombstone early in the movie. At the end, even though it's not true, the kids write something similar on his own grave. The father goes from being a bad, totally egotistical jerk to something closer to a normal, or even nice, human being. The family is drawn closer.

I'm a sap, and moved by stories of redemption, so these elements worked for me. But, that said, they worked a whole lot better in Groundhog Day, which I'd strongly recommend instead, having a similarly surreal feel, but more sympathy for the characters in the film (even characters from the midwest!).

Good music. Anything which borrows liberally from A Charlie Brown Christmas can't be all bad.

Many reviewers said the movie dragged. I could see that. It really didn't make great use of the time it was given. Mostly, the time was spent establishing how odd or quirky the family was supposed to be: "Look! Another quirky element! The tennis star sleeps in a tent in the playroom! Look! Another quirky element: Incest."

Oh, yes, the incest. I'm so tired of Hollywood having to defy at least one social taboo in each "important" film. Call me weird, but I find incest, even when one child is adopted, yucky. I suspect -- and this seems to true even for high-order mammals, like dogs and cats -- that there's a good reason normal individuals aren't sexually attracted to one's childhood siblings. Yet the incestous attraction is absolutely central, and is depicted as one of the truest, best things in the film.

I'm surely retrograde.

There was much ugliness in this film. Incessant smoking, portrayed as cool. (Characters are converted to smoking.) Stiches. Ugly, dented cabs. A kid whose idea of fun is psychological experimentation -- the only form of play he knows. Cute dogs being run over. Frequent blood spatters. The producer and writer, Wes Anderson, seems to have contempt for everything.

Especially families. ("Family isn't a word. It's a sentence.")

The adopted daughter is depicted as being descended from backwoods hicks -- who live in (gasp) Indiana. (Indiana! How primitive!) The father wears an obviously-fake Amish style beard and talks in some contrived Amish-like religious-sounding parlance. (Surely, the view from the lofty heights of The New York Times.) He and his daughter are surrounded by a gaggle of other offspring. (So why was this one adopted out?) He asks her to hold a piece of firewood to chop (which is obviously too small to need chopping -- as if Anderson had no understanding of even this) and takes off her finger. As though a backwoods hick would never have chopped firewood before. (Projected incompetence?)

Finally, speaking of ugliness, I must mention the paintings which were prominently featured in the film. You can see them here (the first two, some nudity in another, may not be work-safe). In a way, their falseness is fitting: They're attributed to Miguel Calderon. According to the movie's trivia notes, they were simply photos he took, and hired an (unnamed) portrait painter to render on canvas. And displayed them in a honestly-/disarmingly-named exhibit: "Aggressively Mediocre/Mentally Challenged/Fantasy Island (circle one)". According to the caption, they sold for about $12,000 each.

So that's the new gig: Take a photo, hire someone else to paint it, claim it's all fake anyway, and walk away with the attribution, some high-exposure Hollywood pimping, and a wad of cash. Seems to match up with the last decade of self-conciously ironic films from Hollywood, where nobody has any conviction in the parts they play, or the film, so actors and directors frequently play it both ways, mocking the fact they're in a movie: "Well, you know this is fake anyway. And this might be panned by critics. So there's no reason for us to have any convictions about all this."

Speaking of which: Tenenbaums, meaning writer Wes Anderson, does suffer from paper-thin characters, as some negative reviews maintain. Proof? Both Huston and Hackman refused their roles until each of them had Anderson add material making their character more believable. So, sadly, the depth of these two characters is apparently more attributable to writing contributions by the actors than the writers!

That's not saying much for the writing, is it.

Sadly, the three kids apparently go without.

So it's a mixed bag. A few cute/clever bits. Good music. A lot of muddle and ugliness. I didn't come away from the film feeling better about life.

Perhaps I should rethink this whole watching-DVDs thing. I'm grateful to have a few really wonderful, high-quality friends, so there's no need for me to go "slumming" with the company I keep like this.