The Bottle Rocket

File under Set the Bar Low (and barely exceed the bar)

Yesterday a friend reminded me how much I love the movie Bottle Rocket. For those of you who don't know, it is Wes Anderson's first full length movie, and it features Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson in their first movie as well.  In fact, I like this movie so much I named one of my dogs after the main character, Dignan (on the right below).

But the story of how I first saw the movie is the simplest form of setting the bar low.


When I was stationed in Hawaii I had to serve as staff duty officer one night at the unit.  It can be pretty boring most nights while you wait there in case something happens  This night was no exception.   I spent each hour watching random VHS movies that people had left there.  One of which happened to be Bottle Rocket. I had never seen, nor heard of the movie prior to that night, and by the end of the night i had watched it twice.

Source

It was like finding a diamond in a pile of crap.  I had zero expectations of this movie even being watchable.  But the well-written characters, the quotable lines, the main character's misguided optimism, and the message of belonging, all added up to have an incredible impact on me.  Probably more so because I thought it wouldn't be good. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in his book The Black Swan that the effectiveness of an outcome is inversely proportional to the expectations we have of that outcome.   Case in point - Avatar.  I refuse to watch it because of all of the great things I have heard about it. 

Bottle Rocket certainly isn't the greatest movie of all time, but it blew my expectations out of the water and the memory of that adds to its likeability.  So if you're planning on watching it some time, it's average.  You might like it, you might not.

I'm going to start a new feature to make all of this theoretical junk a little more practical and i'll call it "The Daily Antidote."

 The Daily Antidote

"Don't let anyone tell you about a movie you may go see, other than 'See it', or 'Don't see it'."


The Song of the Day
 In honor of Wes Anderson's musical tastes and a great song perfectly placed in this movie, the song of the day is Love's "Alone again or".