jemaine clement

Eagle vs Shark car­ries a great bur­den of expect­a­tion: Taika Waititi’s Oscar nom­in­a­tion, invit­a­tions to Sundance, inter­na­tion­al Miramax sup­port, point­less com­par­is­ons with Napoleon Dynamite. A film with less heart than this one could eas­ily col­lapse under all that weight but this Eagle soars.

Loren Horsley is Lily, a hope­less romantic with her heart set on Jarrod (Jemaine Clement) from the video game shop a few doors down. Unfortunately, Jarrod’s a dick but she sees some­thing in him and, over the course of a lovely and sad little film, teases it out des­pite all good sense telling her to run a mile. EVS is full of great (mostly small) com­ic moments and obser­va­tions and on the rare occa­sions when some­thing does­n’t quite work it’s easy to ride with it. A won­der­ful, unusu­al, soundtrack from The Phoenix Foundation, too.

Also not-to-be-missed is Ten Canoes, the first genu­inely indi­gen­ous film ever to come out of Australia. The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in Northern Territory col­lab­or­ated with Rolf de Heer (The Tracker) to tell one of their own stor­ies – and tell it their own way – and the res­ult is beau­ti­ful and human and scata­logic­ally funny. A remind­er of what cinema can achieve when it is set free.

After a 12 year lay­off Bruce Willis finally returns to the role that cata­pul­ted him to super­star­dom (and off the top of sev­er­al explod­ing build­ings) in Die Hard 4.0 (also known as Live Free or Die Hard in coun­tries that still care about free­dom). The technology-terrorism premise might as well be flower-arranging for all the sense it makes, but it gets us to the meat which is John McClane being an ass, tak­ing a beat­ing and blow­ing stuff up. It pushes most of the right Die Hard but­tons, but in the end that’s all it man­ages to do – push buttons.

Michael Moore has been get­ting a hard time recently for all sorts of reas­ons (not mak­ing “prop­er” bal­anced doc­u­ment­ar­ies, not front­ing up to those who would turn his tac­tics back on him) but the cri­ti­cism is mis­guided. Moore isn’t really a doc­u­ment­ari­an – he’s a polemi­cist. In his eyes he’s fight­ing a war for the ordin­ary cit­izen against an entrenched and cor­rupt cap­it­al­ist super-state. Why should he ever have to fight fair? There is enorm­ous wicked­ness and injustice in this world and if it takes Moore and a few low-blows to help turn that around then I’m all for it. As it turns out, Sicko is the best of his films to date with few­er of the cheap stunts that arm his crit­ics and a finale in Cuba with some 9/11 res­cue work­ers that I found quite moving.

Of course, there are no great­er her­oes in our mod­ern age than New York fire-fighters which is why it was a smart move by Adam Sandler’s team to set their (ahem) sens­it­ive plea for tol­er­ance, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, among them. Larry (Kevin James) is a wid­ower and the City bur­eau­cracy won’t let him make his kids bene­fi­ciar­ies of his insur­ance. But if he goes to Canada and mar­ries his best friend Chuck (Sandler) he can some­how sort it all out. This is, of course, fraud and when they are invest­ig­ated the duo learn a lot about intol­er­ance as well as the gay, er, life­style choice. My favour­ite moment in a movie sprinkled with a hand­ful was the cameo appear­ance by closeted gay icon (and the first Jason Bourne) Richard Chamberlain as the judge at the hearing.

Finally, Te Radar is a micro-budget (and micro-scale) Michael Moore in Destiny in Motion, a thin doc­u­ment­ary about the birth of the Destiny New Zealand polit­ic­al party and the con­nec­tions (fairly obvi­ous) with Bishop Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church. The irony of this exposé of pente­cost­al polit­ic­al manip­u­la­tion play­ing at the Paramount (a ven­ue that now turns into a happy-clappy Church every Sunday) was not lost on me.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday, 15 August, 2007.

Full dis­clos­ure: Like many people in Wellington, and the motion pic­ture industry, I count Loren and Taika as mates; I used to co-own the Paramount; Ten Canoes is dis­trib­uted by Richard Dalton at Palace/Fresh Films who is also a mate.