Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made. Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. It serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou whimsy." The film has a 62/100 weighted average score on Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Anthony Lane, a film reviewer for "The New Yorker", agreed with the conventional criticism of Anderson's deadpan style: that the underreaction of Anderson's characters used to be "hip" but has now become "frozen into a mannerism." He said that "some stretches of action" in the film are being "lightly held within quotation marks," with an "unmistakable air of playacting" in even the most violent scenes. He also criticized the film's deliberately "weird" set ups, which leave the viewer with "the impression of having nearly drowned