BOTTLE ROCKET (59)

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Starring: Owen C. Wilson, Luke Wilson, Robert Musgrave

The Pitch: A loony young loser embroils his two friends in his deluded schemes for a career in crime.

Theo Sez: Definitely a strange one. It plays like the archetypal slacker comedy (with that archetypal underpopulated indie look), except that its characters don't just sit around talking and getting stoned, but actually get involved in crime - even though their dreaminess and well-brought-up mien make them the most unlikely criminals imaginable. In fact, the whole thing is pretty unlikely, with some non sequiturs and puzzling undertones (the early scenes seem to have deliberate echoes of "The Catcher in the Rye" - but nothing comes of it) ; it has the self-indulgence of middle-class kids playing at Tough Guys, especially when you know the star is also the co-writer. Point is, the film is in on the joke, quietly sending up its characters - not in the complicit, aggressively charming style of SWINGERS but in a way that's more detached and, oddly, more tender : a recurring joke has violence going on in the background, seen through a closed window, while characters have earnest emotional conversations in the foreground - a sweetly muffled reminder of how absurd these self-absorbed slackers' criminal aspirations are, seen from a distance. It stakes out a kind of middle ground between dead-end urban comedy and the arch, pixillated airiness of Gus van Sant or MY NEW GUN, with a bit of the Tarantino-wannabes thrown in ; it's surprisingly hard to think of another film with quite the same texture. There's not much to it, but it's refreshing.