Movie Log: Bottle Rocket

Bottle Rocket is the movie that introduced the world to director Wes Anderson and to the acting brothers of Luke and Owen Wilson. I never bothered to see it until last night, because I missed a whole lot of movies in the mid-to-late '90s.

Remember all of those caper movies that came out after Reservoir Dogs? (Another movie I've never seen, and one I don't plan to, either.) This looked to the untrained eye like one of those, but it really was more like the current independent-movie scene, mostly about characters trying to figure out what the hell is going on with their lives (cf. Sideways, Garden State, Lost in Translation, etc.). Anthony (Luke Wilson) has just been released from a mental hospital, and his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson) tries to recruit him into a life of crime.

The crime thing doesn't work out all that well, but not in the mid-90s caper-movie ways you'd expect; things fall apart in small ways, mostly, and nothing goes quite according to plan. But Anthony does find love, in what seems to be a digression but turns into the real backbone of the movie.

It was a pleasant, meandering movie, and it actually made me like Owen Wilson (who always looks like a smirking jerk, so I've generally avoided movies with him in them). But it was most interesting -- to me, at least -- as the great indy-film link between Pulp Fiction and Ghost World.