I love Bill Murray, maybe more than any other actor. Comedians who act, and how they act, is one of my obsessions.

I fulfilled a bucket list dream last month, when I saw Bill Murray's live show at the Royal Festival Hall in London, in which he read some Mark Twain, conducted a singalong with the audience of such classics as "It ain't necessarily so" and danced like a little girl around the stage, singing "I feel pretty."

Murray throws his audience off balance, by coming on aggressive, unsmiling and unfunny, challenging us to complain, then he suddenly gets wild and crazy, singing for and with us, joking around.

Murray's layered unstable deadpan unpredictability is why, I think, Wes Anderson has cast him in his last 8 films. Because Anderson never seeks to tell a dramatic story, or even to make us laugh out loud, but rather wants to keep us off balance, mournfully chuckling at life's absurdities.

Anderson is like a scientist looking at humanity as ants under a microscope. He makes us aware we are being told a story, refusing to let us feel the story, because he wants us to see we are pawns of fate, who, like Esteban, at the beginning of the movie, can suddenly die, and that the quests of our lives, such as seeking revenge against a shark, are all precarious and absurd.

I'm sure Jacques Cousteau himself would never have dreamed a filmmaker would one day treat the real death, of his son in an airplane accident, with such absurd deadpan lightness, and at such an emotional distance.

Every frame is flat, like the pages of a storybook, primary colors make scenes resemble painted comic book story panels, and nobody ever registers a real emotion.

Except, beneath those wild unpredictable glazed Bill Murray eyes, you occasionally get a glimpse of the human tragedy Wes Anderson is witnessing: this man with no son, living an absurd life, following absurd quests, desperately seeks human connection and affection in a phony father-son bond, that periodically suddenly becomes heartfelt ,somewhere behind those deadpan eyes.

That Anderson disguises real emotion, behind endless absurdity and unfunny cartoonish comedy, that is his secret weapon. If and when you suddenly see that real emotion, that is when you feel Anderson's movies are worthwhile.

But Anderson is such a mannered, acquired taste of a filmmaker, that not one of his films has grossed more than $60 million domestic. And I doubt they ever will.

But as long as Bill Murray sticks with Anderson, so will I. :)